Last week, the US spy tech and data firm Palantir launched its latest “merch drop”, including a denim chore coat. “Rugged utility, enduring style” reads the website’s description of the $239 (£175) jacket, which is branded with the company’s logo on the chest pocket and comes in blue or black.
Eliano Younes, the head of strategic engagement at Palantir, told the New York Times that it was part of the company’s commitment to “re-industrializing America” – the jacket is made in Montana and recalls workwear of a previous era. “It’s not political,” he added. “It’s about people who love Palantir and are aligned with our mission.”
Never mind that this “mission” includes aiding the Trump administration’s deportation drive and Israel’s devastating assault in Gaza, not to mention publishing a creepy militaristic manifesto: the 420 jackets for sale were gone within a matter of hours. There’s no accounting for taste, it seems.
Once niche, the durable, versatile French worker’s jacket – and other variations known loosely as chore coats – has become almost ubiquitous over the past two decades. Made from cotton twill or moleskin, it emerged in France after the first world war, when rapid industrialisation meant the growing number of labourers needed durable coats that were practical in the workplace.
Given that chore coats have been embraced by fashion brands across the price spectrum and worn by celebrities including Monty Don and Harry Styles, they have long since gone beyond their utilitarian underpinning. Indeed, they have become perhaps the defining signifier of a casually alternative taste, which makes them an appealing proxy for tech firms keen to be seen as cool, fun and tasteful. As one style commentator said of Palantir’s jackets, “they need cultural capital to be perceived as acceptable in the zeitgeist”.
Palantir is not alone. The AI company Anthropic collaborated last year with Air Mail, a high-end digital newsletter, to host pop-ups at Air Mail’s newsstands in New York and London: “Pop by for ‘thinking’ caps, a proper cup of coffee, and some surprises.” Then there’s OpenAI, which sells gen-Z-adjacent long-sleeved T-shirts on an online shop designed to look like a website from the 90s. This seems to be an attempt to capitalise on the tongue-in-cheek design trend harking back to a less corporate, more democratic iteration of the web.
Of course, none of this is new. Technocapitalists have been hoovering up everything in front of them, Pac-Man-style, for decades: book stores and music, hotels and homes, taxis and food delivery, even water. On Tuesday, five of the largest book publishers in the US sued Meta, alleging that it pirated millions of their works to train LLMs. OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft have been involved in similar copyright suits.
At the Met Gala on Monday, the Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, bought their way to the top table via a $10m donation. The grand shindig, which is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, this year brought in a record-breaking $42m. Also in attendance were Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and senior executives from TikTok, Instagram, Snap and Slack. OpenAI, Meta and Snap bought tables this year for at least $350,000.
The fashion industry has always had a complicated relationship with the super-rich; tastefulness and refinement can often be tempered by cold, hard cash. But as this year’s Met Gala proved, taste has become a buzzword in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has gone through a protracted public effort to cultivate personal style, wearing Bode shirts instead of hoodies. Months before the Met Gala, he took his place in the front row of Prada’s show – the most tasteful of all – at Milan fashion week.
What does it mean that tech bros, once proudly unstylish, have turned their attention to fashion? According to Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker, they are trying to give themselves a veneer of the artisanal, as if personal taste can give your company an edge. “We might call what’s going on now ‘taste-washing,’ an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism,” Chakya writes. Much of this is self-serving: tech and finance prognosticators talk up the importance of their finely honed human instincts yet are happy to have everything around them automated into oblivion.
A greater interest in such things is not necessarily bad. Why should Jeremy Allen White or Fergus Henderson or customers of The Row be the only people entitled to wear a chore jacket? There is a world in which the desire to prioritise human discernment in the face of overwhelming automation is positive. But when it comes to tech behemoths, we have a hunch where this leads: hoarding and optimising for their financial benefit.
Tech’s drive for taste could be fleeting; witness how quickly the industry ditched notions of social justice once it no longer suited it. And when it moves on to the next fad, matters of style and cool will continue in ineffable ways that can’t be optimised or defined only by wealth. And, lest we forget, we don’t have to buy what they’re selling.
Bill Cunningham, the fashion and street style photographer who died in 2016, was a lifelong wearer of the classic blue chore coat. In the lovely 2010 documentary Bill Cunningham: New York, he demurred on the merits of his own style, but clearly he had an eye for what looked interesting. He also explained why he gravitated towards the jackets, which he discovered in Paris, where he saw street-sweepers wearing them: they were cheap, washable and functional, with three big pockets. “And I thought the colour was nice.”
