In late April, Palantir — the software company that, in recent years, has perhaps become best known for its defense industry contracts and work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — announced that it would be adding new products to its merch store. The latest offering was a cotton chore coat.
At $239 and in bright blue and black options, the jacket looks like a standard offering that has, by way of photographer Bill Cunningham, trickled down into mainstream menswear for years. This jacket is a pastiche of 19th century French workwear that was worn by people actually doing physical labor; the only noticeable difference is that a dainty Palantir logo appears on the breast pocket.
The jacket ruffled feathers, to put it lightly. One TikTok described it as “Evil boring French workwear for evil boring guys.” The more sartorially inclined questioned why Palantir, as a cheerleader of US military might, wouldn’t make something inspired by American workwear. Still, by the end of its on-sale day, the 420 units Palantir produced had sold out. (Palantir declined to comment for this story.)
For over a year, along with its merch, Palantir has been trying to sell the idea that it is, actually, a lifestyle brand. In a credulous interview with GQ leading up to the release of the jackets, a Palantir employee told the magazine that the company “exists to ensure that the institutions that power the United States and its allies have the best software capabilities on Earth,” and that wearing Palantir-branded clothing was a way for other people to hitch their wagon to this ideology. As for what wearing Palantir merchandise would represent, there are mentions of “supporting our warfighters,” “strengthening Western institutions,” and being apolitical. Most of the garments do not obviously signal these things — there’s no stars and stripes iconography or STAND FOR THE FLAG, KNEEL FOR THE FALLEN-type slogans. Instead, it is Palantir talking to itself and its supporters; chore coat wearers might earnestly believe in these values, but their clothing, at least, is a marketing exercise for the company itself.
“It makes sense to me. I think it’s actually really smart of Palantir to want this, to want to be on T-shirts and to want to be something that people wear, even ironically,” says Avery Trufelman, a fashion journalist and host of Articles of Interest, a podcast that last year detailed the outdoor industry and its long-running ties to the military. “It’s kind of a bad move to say you want to be cool — that’s not cool. But the initial aspiration is really, really smart.”
As Articles of Interest documented, fashion and the military have a deeply entangled history — from bomber jackets and combat boots to field jackets and khakis, our contemporary wardrobes are littered with clothing that has origins in military use. Some household name brands like Patagonia have also contracted with the military in addition to selling fleece jackets to crunchy outdoor types.
Palantir’s merch is a new way for the laptop class to signal brand alignment
It’s also not so unusual that a defense contractor would wind up making products for the consumer market, Trufelman says: synthetic insulation by PrimaLoft was initially developed for the US military but now lines jackets sold at REI and bedding at L.L. Bean. Camouflage prints intended for elite soldiers are now also part of the uniform of fashionable civilians. The difference, of course, is that Palantir doesn’t really make clothes: It makes powerful (and sometimes poorly understood) software that even some of its own employees are increasingly concerned about. Palantir’s merch serves no tactical purpose for “warfighters,” but is a new way for the laptop class to signal brand alignment.
“Palantir doing their version of it is sensible, because who are the people that are buying their clothes? They’re often urban knowledge workers, people that send email all day,” says Derek Guy, a menswear writer. (You may know him as “The Menswear Guy” on social media.) “It’s just a very fashionable garment at the moment for that kind of class.”
Palantir has something of a cult following already, in part because it has made some investors very rich. It has an engaged, committed base of retail investors and fans who debate what to do about Palantir’s “PR problems” and track company goings-on obsessively. Palantir itself also communicates directly with individual investors or fan communities. (Palantir appears to have previously even hired a moderator from the company’s Subreddit into a communications role.) A line of merchandise beyond the usual tote bag is a way for Palantir to turn these fans and investors into walking billboards.
Connor, a Palantir fan and merch customer who describes himself as “quite bullish” on the company, also owns tech merch from Tesla, Google, OpenAI, and Apple. “It’s fun to wear these items, and they’re a nod towards technology and brands I like or am associated with because that’s a part of my personality,” Connor said in a message to The Verge.
Alex, another Palantir fan, has collected several merch items from the company dating back to the early 2000s that he acquired secondhand like a zip-up sweatshirt issued to employees, as well as more recent releases. (Despite their support for Palantir, both Connor and Alex asked that The Verge not use their full names: Connor, because he limits his online presence, and Alex, due to the “uptick in attention” that the company has gotten over their merch. Alex acknowledged that Palantir is part of his investment portfolio.) Alex says he sees Palantir as a foil to other parts of the tech industry that have “parasitically” extracted users’ data, information, and personal thoughts.
“I see Palantir as being the antithesis of that, where they’re trying to get the brightest minds together to create technology that will better serve us as opposed to just use us for ad revenue,” Alex says. (Palantir’s technology is also used in advertising, including a platform announced in 2025 touted by a partner as “the holy grail of marketing brought to life.”)
Alex says he wears Palantir merchandise as a “conversation piece” hoping to discuss misconceptions about the company — but there have been few takers. Mostly, he says people might say something under their breath about the merch; he has also found posts on X by strangers referencing a “dude in a Palantir shirt” that he believes are about him. A barista once asked him his thoughts on Palantir technology being used to kill Palestinians, he says (Palantir has said Israel uses its technology for “war-related missions”).
“Every other time I’ve worn [Palantir] stuff … people will tweet about it, but they’ll never actually confront me about it, which is bizarre,” Alex says.
Palantir is clearly putting in more effort to its merchandise than simply drop-shipping cheap T-shirts featuring its logo — the company told GQ it will introduce a tennis collection in June. But even with slightly elevated products, the output shows the limits of a technology company trying to signal taste or refinement when it comes to art and culture. An item previously for sale in the Palantir shop is a white crewneck sweatshirt with bold red lettering reading “SILICON VALLEY DROPOUTS.” Many people immediately noted the similarities between the Palantir crewneck and Off-White, the brand founded by the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh. The crewneck seemed to be referencing Abloh’s designs, like T-shirts with scattered, minimal typography in a style that was particularly trendy a decade ago.
“I don’t know what [Palantir is] trying to achieve, but you can’t design your way into coolness like that. It takes a much larger effort. It takes a different kind of cultural positioning,” says Guy, the menswear writer. “It requires a lot more than just designing merch. I mean, if it was that easy to rebrand yourself, then everybody would do it.”
Alex, who has a creative background, skipped the Off-White-style sweatshirt. “That piece in particular totally screamed, like, a rich dude that shops at Bloomingdale’s that wants to dress like a dude in his mid-20s,” he says. “I saw the piece for what it was and it was distasteful.”
The tech guys the products cater to live in a bubble, where taste — a recent buzzword — and style are fed to them, Alex says.
“The stuff they’re buying … is already so downstream from the people that it originated from that by the time they get to it, or it’s fed to them by their algorithm or their stylist, it’s already out of vogue,” Alex says.
Anything with a Palantir logo or name on it is inseparable from the company’s business: Supporters will rep it as a way to signal their alignment (or their financial ties), and anyone morally, ethically, or intellectually opposed to the company will see the logo as a marker of something truly rotten. The Palantir merchandising effort is a way for the company to get attention on social media and hype up a base of people already on board with its mission (or to expand its base to sympathetic audiences). But it’s another, harder task to create cultural cache around a brand marred in criticism — no amount of company merch a decade behind the cutting edge will change that.
The sold-out Palantir chore coat reminded me of another tech firm’s adventures in merchandising: OpenAI’s employees-only (but publicly viewable) archive of company swag, which includes a Dreamsicle-colored basketball and a T-shirt with a handwritten script that looks like it could be from a neighborhood natural wine bar. Buried among the listings was OpenAI’s own version of a chore coat, apparently from 2024, in the same bright blue, faux vintage wash, with a little logo dotting the breast pocket. Despite coming only a couple years before Palantir’s, there is no GQ article about it.
Palantir’s efforts to speak directly to its base of fans also brought to mind a more quaint branding stunt: an Anthropic pop-up last October, hosted in the West Village in New York City. Marketed as an anti-AI slop gathering, attendees lined up down the block for a cup of coffee and a free baseball cap embroidered with the word “thinking.”
Fans described it as “culturally coherent” and that “the aesthetic screams craft/authenticity,” clearly drawing a line between Anthropic’s tools and those of its competitors more concerned with scale. If Palantir is the lifestyle brand for a group unapologetically hyped on Western military power, Claude is the chatbot for the creatives, the dreamers, and the thinkers — at least, that’s what the merch is trying to say.
I kept scrolling through the many cloying products in the OpenAI shop until I hit the first item listed at the bottom of the page: a baseball cap from September 2024, a full year before Anthropic’s “thinking” coffee shop pop-up. “Still thinking” is embroidered on it.