The Quarter-Zip “Trend” Is Old Money 6-7 Slop
The other day, two of my much younger colleagues said “quarter-zips” in front of me, then started snickering and high-fiving like a couple of third graders saying “6-7” around their parents. Something was happening, to paraphrase the great Bob Dylan, and I didn’t know what it was.
But actually I did. Quarter-zips, I was quick to correct them, were popping last year. It was the year of the Rier fleece. Remember?
That’s when I realized we were talking about two completely different things. There are fashion trends, and there are internet trends. Rarely shall the two become one. Occasionally a fashion trend goes viral, and occasionally an internet trend involves fashion, but they have almost nothing to do with each other.
Fashion trends come and go in response to all kinds of sociopolitical factors. Some are explainable: Much ink has been spilled, for example, about why “quiet luxury” became so prominent in the Kendall Roy era, or why the Fear of God Essentials, LAX-casual, Covid-fugue aesthetic dominated the first part of this decade.
But internet trends, on the other hand, often come and go with no explanation at all. In fact, the less they make sense, the more powerful they become. 6-7 is part of a song lyric, but nobody knows that, and nobody cares — certainly not any of the third graders who can’t stop shouting it at me. Internet trends are a constantly changing series of passcodes, used then quickly abused as shorthand for entry into clubs that are constantly shuttering and then reopening under new management. What’s the club? One day it’s an ice bucket dumped on your head to raise awareness for a disease that you can’t pronounce. The next it’s a sweatshirt with a collar and just a little bit of zipper.
Over the last few days, my feed has become dominated by quarter-zips. There’s Tremaine Emory sharing quarter-zip clips from his army of Denim Tears fans, there’s T-Pain in Louis Vuitton talking about “401k and a quarter zip,” and as of this morning, the coup de grâce for any emergent trend: a The New York Times Styles story declaring that “the classic quarter-zip signifies an aesthetic pivot toward the expectations of the professional world.” The Times references a quarter-zip meetup where “Many attendees were also carrying matcha drinks to round out the look.”
The matcha thing came from this viral Tiktok post that might have kicked off the whole quarter-zip movement: “We don't do Nike Tech, we don't do coffee. It's straight quarter-zips and matchas around here." While that may be nonsense—if anything, coffee is more business casual than matcha, no?—it is undeniably funny. It’s also a battle cry for a vibe shift: away from reckless youth and boundless energy, towards patriarchal sophistication and peaceful focus.
The New York Times chose to understand this trend as an earnest representation of how some young men are transitioning from their rowdy youth to a socially-acceptable version of adulthood. I choose to understand it as a meme come to life, one that plays on all kinds of class and race stereotypes while establishing a new kind of club. The quarter-zip and a 401k club.
Still, there’s something else happening here that is more interesting than what the quarter-zip itself represents. There’s a dissonance to how surprising and unexpected it is to see a clothing trend pop in haughty fashion circles and on the mass internet at the same time. The internet, and mass culture in general, tends to disdain fashion. And fashion, really, likes to sit out of reach of the masses (desperate as it may be for their attention). The existence of both trendy quarter-zips and the quarter-zip “trend” requires a serendipitous convergence of two unrelated occurrences.
That’s why it felt so strange, as I was trying to understand the quarter-zip chatter that started on TikTok, to discover that, coincidentally, one of my favorite designers had also just dropped a new quarter-zip that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. Evan Kinori is probably the last designer on earth to follow a viral trend—and certainly the last person I expect in fashion to have heard the phrase, “It's straight quarter-zips and matchas around here.”
That’s what’s so weird about this moment. It’s a rare and unusual alignment of the viral and the IYKYK. That Rier fleece likely ushered in the first fashion wave, and a.PRESSE followed not long after with their vintage Americana version. Today, you can go to your favorite menswear shop anywhere in the world and find a quarter-zip, likely because at the end of the day, it’s a very ordinary and common piece of clothing.
Meanwhile, there’s even a third — perhaps the most loyal and trend-resistent — contingent on the quarter-zip wave: the actually-business casual army of golfers and bankers who layer them over blue shirts and under fleece vests every single day. Will they “catch on” and start drinking matcha instead of oat lattes and IPAs, or will they continue living their lives, unaware of how their LinkedIn “aesthetic” has permeated through to the both fashion sphere and viral world of signifiers. After all, they started quarter-zipping first, didn’t they?
As with so many viral fads that happen to involve clothes (“mob wife,” “coastal grandma,” “cottagecore,” and more recently, the “performative male”), sartorial signifiers that emerged from specific geographic or cultural context have now been sliced and diced into randomized packages for the algorithm. The type of guy who wears quarter-zips vs. the type who drinks matcha and and the type who enjoys reading John Didion in public have not only become respective internet archetypes unto themselves, but even these categories are being collapsed into one big Labubu-Dubai-chocolate mutant word salad that basically just means you’re really online. It’s just one big password now.
Sure, if you squint, you might just spot a guy in the Marais wearing that Reir fleece, sipping a matcha, smoking a rollie, and reading a novel upside down. He’s not the guy TikTok thinks he is, but a version of him does exist. And perhaps this is our new reality, online-IRL singularity. Where it’s all happening all at once, whether you’re at Dreamin Man, or just dreamin’, you get what you deserve.
