Picture this: You work in tech or some vaguely defined creative field and take the train into SoHo, on the hunt for, say, a very on-trend quarter-zip sweater. You could queue up outside Stüssy, swing by Aimé Leon Dore, or even dip into Supreme. If you’re feeling particularly motivated, you could head north and wander through Dover Street Market—or just pull up a chair in Rose Bakery, all the while toggling between Grailed, Slack, and Instagram.
But it’s not 2020 anymore, and you’ve got new options at your fingertips—like, say, a black, 100% cotton fleece, pretty nondescript save for the word “Research” embroidered in cursive on the chest. No, it’s not from some buzzy streetwear upstart or even one of the aforementioned established players. It’s from the artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s new line of merch, a garment that very much exists and, not only that, will set you back $175.
Welcome to the new age of tech merch—branded Silicon Valley gear thinly veiled as post-streetwear and sold by buzzy companies like OpenAI, Figma, Palantir, Anthropic, and Stripe. Tech companies are hoping these wares, once a freebie given out at corporate conferences to employees who then mostly wore them to the gym or bed, will help put them in direct conversation with cooler corners of the zeitgeist, namely fashion.
The shirts and sweatshirts are made from heavyweight cotton, they feature understated, minimalist logos embroidered on the chest, and they could seamlessly fit into the wardrobes of those who once built their Saturdays around Supreme drops and loitering on Mulberry Street. It’s the visual language of a certain slice of contemporary menswear—call it Off-White-lite. Even the language around them is streetwear-inflected: “Look effortlessly fitted while you lock in or cozy up,” reads OpenAI’s descriptor for one garment sold on its consumer-facing e-commerce site, Supply Co. store. Companies that were once lurked behind-the-scenes now want in on lifestyle.
“Supply Co. began as a small line of merch for employees and almost immediately blew up. OpenAI-ers developed concerningly strong, excited opinions about collectible cards, blue folding chairs, and graphic hoodies as emerging currency,” reads Supply Co.’s About page. “Somewhere along our timeline, these objects evolved from being just ‘merch’ into material embodiments of company culture. The next phase of Supply Co. is much bigger than seasonal drops: it’s collaborations, experiments, and physical expressions of research energy.” This includes apparel, a “Bloop” tote, water bottles, socks, and an already out-of-stock basketball.
It is interesting that now is the time these once-cloaked titans of tech are seeking to telegraph taste and cultural relevancy through promotional garments. It’s a strategy, as much as their playbooks for political influence and claims on what the future looks like. Merch has served as a way to make power feel desirable, familiar, wearable. No shares, but how about a hoodie? Yet for companies supposedly engineering tomorrow, their aesthetic lexicon is surprisingly familiar: streetwear, workwear, old-school Americana.
“The color choices remind me massively of the early Outdoor Voices colour scheme. The whole get outside, ‘Doing Things’ aesthetic,” says Louis Cheslaw, editor and writer of the style Substack Wardrobe, “which tracks with how all the AI companies’s commercials are about people using the software while doing IRL activities. It’s a nice idea, but the awkward Meta AI glasses rollout shows how far there is to go there.”
“I’d laugh if the amount of ugly new product being put into the world wasn’t so wasteful,” Cheslaw adds.
“It’s ALD-coded [Aimé Leon Dore-coded] because that style of lookbook was widely adopted by brands at every price point,” says Chris Black, co-host of How Long Gone and founder of consultancy Done to Death Projects; he’s worked with brands from Thom Browne to New Balance and J.Crew. “The AI guys were getting rich and discovering fashion, so they think this is what it should look like. It’s easy to understand and easy to execute.” It’s all a reflection of how streetwear has much less to do with the “street” now than what’s percolating on Sand Hill Road, at the Sweetgreens around FiDi, and in LinkedIn comments.
Indeed, today’s tech bro uniform is part of a longer corporate lineage. Tony Wang, founder of Office of Applied Strategy (a hybrid consulting firm, think tank, and venture fund), has spent years researching corporate aesthetics, tracing how companies use objects—from jackets to tote bags, and desk accessories—to project a worldview beyond the confines of a simple brand, and what merch ventures like this could say about the wider market.
For Wang, the idea that corporate merchandise should aspire to be desirable isn’t new. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Wall Street’s biggest players produced an entire ecosystem of lifestyle goods for their employees: Goldman Sachs-branded L.L.Bean totes, desk clocks, picnic sets, and country-club-ready accessories. The merchandise reflected the life the industry imagined for itself. “Merch by finance firms catered to the finance class,” Wang explains. “Objects reflected their lifestyle aspirations—lunch meetings at the club, yachting.”
As Wang highlights, in the 2000s Silicon Valley’s branded merchandise was largely functional, or light-hearted and even a bit self-deprecating, like whimsically branded conference T-shirts, stickers, and Google’s now-famous propeller “Noogler” caps. Communicating taste was not a priority; what was was an active participation in a technological future that was presumed to be universally beneficial—an era of “‘techno-utopianism,’” says Wang.
Among the first of the contemporary corp drops was V.C. firm Bain Capital’s Carhartt Detroit jacket, in early 2025. Data analyst megacorp Palantir—yes, that which aids U.S. state surveillance, military combat in Gaza and Iran, and ICE—released a merch line earlier this year that the head of strategic engagement told the New York Times they hoped “wasn’t a bland corporate polo or vest.” Its blue chore coat caught the most attention. With its origins in the 19th century as outerwear traditionally worn by railway workers and farmers—and today, by Jeremy Allen White and Harry Styles—the bleu de travail is in its Big Bad era.
Today, the tech and finance firms swinging towards the cool, clean visual language of contemporary fashion are part of a wider aspiration toward cultural credibility—but as Wang notes, there are distinct aesthetic universes within them: “Palantir’s aesthetics co-opts more from Virgil Abloh’s design language—which in turn was inspired by mid-century modernism and readymades, and thus presents more avant-garde, whereas OpenAI is leaning more into a Aimé Leon Dore, borrowing new American streetwear design language, and thus presents more retro. One offers merch that implies a radical vision of the future, and the other offers the comforts of nostalgia made modern. It suits the respective strategies of Palantir (making American dynamism cool) vs. OpenAI (making AI feel relatable and cool).” Palantir in particular is doubling down on merch that grabs the moment, releasing a limited-edition tennis-inspired apparel capsule last week.
Palantir’s blue chore jacket—swapping surveilling for tailoring.
Palantir’s tennis-inspired apparel, dropped July 2026 amid the summer of sport.
The clothes are intentional shorthand for ideology, but whether those symbols resonate beyond the brainstorming Slack channel is another question. “The cultural credibility of an aesthetic doesn’t come purely from its visual output,” Wang says. “It comes from the world-building underlying that aesthetic—from creative research to design codes to community building and sustained fandom.”
“This is partly why so many tech companies are moving into experiential and event programming,” Wang adds. (Think OpenAI’s “founder-oriented run club,” and Palantir’s pop-up merch store in Seoul.) “I wouldn’t say that my critique is lost upon the industry, they’re just trying to reverse-engineer the outcome and are working backwards from the conclusion.”
What would ever make corporate merchandise distinct enough to escape company-swag status? When one can’t command stocks at Google or Anthropic, is a cap just plain, old Silicon cosplay? There is a market for it: a cursory scroll of eBay throws up stores selling current OpenAI merch tees for around $250, and “rare”-tagged shirts for Meta employees, Facebook’s London office, and Google LA. As one eBay seller told Forbes: it’s “geek chic,” and the “vintage concert rock shirts of tomorrow.” For Wang, though, desirable corporate merch needs an “authentic brand expression in service of real fandom—think A24 merch—and community—think Trader Joe’s tote bags—[that] makes it worth wearing.”
Will you be copping visionless merch from the companies meant to be staring down the barrel of tomorrow’s world?
