I bought the most confusing jacket in America. Ali Cherkis for The Atlantic Nothing about the Palantir chore coat makes any sense. Mine is a size small, though it’s so oversize that I look like a teen wearing a hand-me-down. Then there’s the color: a piercing blue that’s nearing the shade of an iMessage bubble. The jacket is also the most comfortable and practical garment I own. It’s buttery soft and as heavy as a blanket, with three massive patch pockets that each can hold a paperback book. The coat’s plastic buttons—swirls of black and blue—are unlike any I have ever seen.
The Palantir chore coat is made by the same Palantir named in homage to Lord of the Rings, the same Palantir that has developed a reputation as ruthlessly committed to any number of national-security imperatives, and, yes, the same Palantir that builds AI tools for the military and tracks migrants for ICE. The mysterious tech giant now also wants to sell you outerwear. Only a tiny Palantir logo is embroidered into the coat’s left breast pocket, but flip the coat inside out and you’ll find a message from Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, sewn into the lining. Ask yourself constantly, Am I winning? If the answer is yes, nothing else matters. Chaos is tolerable; pain is tolerable. The only thing that matters is to win.
When the chore coat was announced in April, it became an instant grail for Palantir’s many devotees, who are drawn to the hard-core ethos of the CEO, Alex Karp (or “Daddy Karp,” as he’s sometimes known online). Palantir is proudly America First—Karp has said that his goal is “making America more lethal”—and sure enough, the company’s marketing emphasizes that the jacket is made in America with 100 percent American-grown cotton. The jacket also has been easy to mock. Here is a foray into fashion from a nearly $300 billion company that is automating warfare. People have dubbed the coat “the worst clothing release this year” and darkly wondered, “Is this the uniform that will be issued after we are all put in labor camps?” In a ranking of despicability, New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix” placed the Palantir chore coat near flesh-eating bacteria.
In the name of journalism, I decided to buy one. What would it be like to drape myself in the sartorial expression of one of the most polarizing companies in the United States? The minute that pre-orders went live, I refreshed Palantir’s website, frantically typed out my credit-card number, and paid $252, including shipping and tax. Within hours, all of the coats had sold out. Mine arrived two weeks later in a giant box labeled SOFT WEAR COLLECTION. The package included a placard signed by Sankar, a SOFTWARE DOMINATION sticker, a postcard urging me to CHEW THE GLASS, and a luxurious cedar hangar embossed with Palantir’s name and logo. A plastic card certified that this was a genuine Palantir chore coat, No. 191 of 200.
Over the past month, I’ve worn the chore coat essentially everywhere. It has accompanied me on subway rides and walks around my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I’ve worn it while perusing a gourmet gift shop stocked with elderberry kombucha, to a dive bar hosting a Friday-night drag show, and on a weekend trip to Woodstock, New York, surrounded by yoga studios and aging hippies. On a few occasions, strangers spotted the Palantir logo and did a double take. One dad scowled at me while he rolled a stroller down the sidewalk.
But for the most part, people just saw a blue coat. The logo is small and generic enough to pass notice, and the coat’s internet infamy, it turns out, extends only so far into the real world. I received far more passing compliments than shocks of recognition. “Wow, love the color!” one colleague told me unprompted. I even wore the coat to a shift at my local food co-op (I know, I know), which felt akin to showing up to a PETA meeting with a bucket of KFC. In the store, I ran into an acquaintance who praised the buttons. When I told him who’d made the coat, he didn’t know what to say.
The quality of the coat seemed genuinely high, at least to my untrained eye, so I showed it to Andrew Chen, a co-owner of 3sixteen, a menswear brand that makes its own chore coat. “It’s not easy to make something like this in America,” he told me as I modeled it for him outside a Manhattan coffee shop. (Even a 94-degree day was not going to stop me and my coat.) Chen described the fit as “a little funny,” but told me that the “construction looks solid” and that “fabric-wise, it’s a really nice blue.”
According to Eliano Younes, Palantir’s head of strategic engagement, the exact shade of blue was personally picked out by Karp. “This is actually called ‘Karp blue,’” he told me. Functionally, Younes, who is 37 years old, is Palantir’s in-house fashion guy and meme lord. He spoke about the chore coat like a proud parent. I heard about the “American bull denim” made of cotton that’s grown in Texas and North Carolina, the many weeks spent on getting the pockets just right, and the orders that have rushed in from countries around the world. (This includes France, where chore coats were first made for laborers in the 19th century; their famous blue color is where blue collar comes from. The irony was not lost on me as I wore the coat at my desk and typed away at my laptop.)
When we spoke on Zoom last week, Younes was decked out in full Palantir-branded apparel: black shorts, black shirt, black bucket hat. Palantir has started to push all kinds of merch. Its offerings include a T-shirt that says DOMINATE beneath a watercolor illustration of Karp in sunglasses ($75, plus tax and shipping); an off-white sweatshirt printed with SILICON VALLEY DROPOUTS on the back (a reference to the company’s decision to move its headquarters out of the Bay Area); and a nylon tote bag that can accommodate up to a 17-inch laptop. Last month, when Palantir held an event in Tokyo to launch the bucket hat, people waited up to two hours in line to buy one. The hat comes with a poster that is printed with a full analysis of Karp’s body composition (age: 58 years old; weight: 77.2 kilograms; body fat: 8 percent).
Younes is far from the first person in Silicon Valley who’s thought of turning software into soft wear. Tech companies have long doled out corporate merch. In addition to the classics—branded T-shirts, water bottles, Patagonia vests, Google’s propeller hat—tech companies sometimes hand out much weirder products to their clients and staff. Reddit has made moka pots branded with its logo. OpenAI’s employee-only store has, at various points, stocked a rice cooker, a basketball, and, yes, a chore coat.
Essentially, none of this swag is actually sold to the public. Palantir, meanwhile, is explicitly trying to become a lifestyle brand. As Younes has put it on X: “Palantir is THE lifestyle brand. The most pro-west, meritocratic, winning obsessed, and based brand on the face of the earth.” (On social media, he has called Palantir a “lifestyle brand” no fewer than 14 times.) To some degree, it is working. “Oh shit, that’s the Palantir chore coat!” a young guy in a white T-shirt and a gold chain yelled at me as I walked down a street in Lower Manhattan. A Palantir fan who refused to give me his name, he had heard about the coat and wanted one for himself.
Palantir’s strategy is familiar: The company makes a new product in limited quantities, hypes it up before a pre-announced release, and then proceeds to quickly sell out of it. (On eBay, Palantir coats are going for $600.) The same trick of juicing artificial scarcity is everywhere. In November, when Starbucks dropped special-edition teddy-bear coffee cups, police officers had to break up fights between adults trying to scoop them up. Earlier this month, when Zohran Mamdani announced New York City–branded World Cup jerseys, people started lining up at 1 a.m to buy one. The point is not only to make money (though it’s also that) but to get attention.
Palantir needs neither. The company is so notoriously opaque and does such sensitive government work that even its own employees can’t always describe what it does. Palantir’s software can feel incomprehensible and intangible, if not dystopian. But therein lies the appeal of a well-made coat. By selling merch, Palantir comes off as a smaller and more human operation. (Younes, who said he’s one of two employees focused on the company’s store, told me with apparent earnestness: “I feel like I’m running a small family-owned-and-operated business.”) Perhaps it’s no wonder that other tech companies have recently started doing the same, if in more strained ways than Palantir. Anduril has collaborated on a custom video-game console made from the metal it uses in its attack drones. Late last year, NVIDIA posted a job listing for a director of “gear and merchandise” with a salary of roughly $200,000; in March, the company dropped a green knit sweater printed with an avatar of NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang.
Palantir has little to lose in this game. If American-made chore coats and water-repellant bucket hats endear people to Palantir, the company wins. If the merch serves only to provoke Palantir’s detractors, then, well, perhaps the company still wins. Online, Younes has not always taken kindly to people who have poked fun at his creations. Could the coats “be operated remotely? detonated?” one X user posted. “Here for the shitposting but I need to see better from you,” Younes replied. “This is unoriginal and not funny.” Younes told me that he is tuning out the “negative noise,” yet he seems to recognize that soliciting reactions is partly the point. The chore coats were a success not just because they sold out but also because of the “chatter,” Younes said. Palantir fans were eager to buy one, “and so they’re sharing and talking about it,” he said. “And then you have people who are also criticizing it because they might not like the company. That creates sort of this viral reaction.” If nothing else, the Palantir chore coat is an elaborate troll.
In that sense, the jacket is perfect. No other product better encapsulates how exhausting and predictable it is to be online right now. The merch-industrial complex has come so far from KFC-branded clogs and Panera’s baguette purse that even a company like Palantir is hawking swag for the likes and lolz. Next month, Palantir plans to release a tennis skirt and, to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, boxing gloves. One day, Younes said, he wants to drop a Palantir espresso machine. Sure, why not? It’s more than a bit sad. But so is the alternative, in which Palantir disappears entirely into the shadows. At least online, Palantir is just like everyone else.
