Clothes make the tech bro

OpenAI now wants to sell you hoodies. Last week, the company behind ChatGPT unveiled a new clothing line with a carefully staged photoshoot under the disarmingly modest name Supply Co. Against a matcha-green backdrop, models display a restrained but varied collection. Those so inclined can buy a branded tote bag, blue socks embroidered with OpenAI’s blossom logo, or a zip-neck sweatshirt bearing the word Research in elegant cursive.

It is fitting that the collection mirrors the logic of AI-generated output. Stylistically, the clothes are derivative, muted and faintly out of date. They are safe, reheated versions of the premium streetwear that flourished around a decade ago with brands such as Supreme, Off-White, Aimé Leon Dore and Kith. The black hoodie with its raised collar excels in mediocrity – “bringing a quiet edge to a closet essential”, as the equally generic marketing copy puts it.

But why would a technology company launch a fashion label? Revenue can hardly be the point. OpenAI does not expect to become profitable until 2030 and continues to attract billions in investment. The merchandise is an attempt to convert a fraction of that economic capital into cultural capital. Or, put more simply: the tech industry does not merely want the economic and political power to reshape our daily lives. It wants to be cool as well.

That probably doomed ambition has been under way for some time. Around 2024, we watched the once robotic Mark Zuckerberg reinvent himself as a fashion-conscious tech bro, while Elon Musk tried to become funny on the platform he had rebranded as X. In January this year, Jeff Bezos appeared in the front row at Paris Haute Couture Week; by March he was courting celebrity approval as honorary chair of the Met Gala. Palantir, the controversial data analytics company that works with ICE and the Israeli military, released a bright blue French work jacket for $239. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, handed out free caps at a pop-up café in New York, while AI start-up Perplexity now runs a coffee shop in southern Seoul.

Flesh and blood

ChatGPT socks are merely the latest example of what The New Yorker has called Silicon Valley’s “tastewashing”. By presenting themselves as tasteful and culturally literate, AI companies attempt to make the future they represent – still unsettling for many – easier to swallow. The tech world is trying not only to compensate for its long-standing lack of aesthetic credibility, but also to soften the reputational damage that continues to shadow it despite the popularity of its products.

In OpenAI’s case, the strategy goes a step further. It amounts to what might be called humanwashing. By producing tangible garments, promoted through old-fashioned photographs of real people – not AI-generated ones – in what appears to be a physical studio, the company seems to be saying: Don't worry. We, too, have bodies of flesh and blood. We, too, still need to cover those bodies with fabric every day. And we, too, express our uniquely human identities through our personal taste in clothing.

What stands out most about the collection is the extent to which OpenAI’s idea of good taste is steeped in nostalgia. It repeatedly gestures towards an analogue world that predates generative AI. A black tote bag features a retro humanoid robot straight from the 1980s. Two other accessories – a basketball and a water bottle – evoke fresh air, parks and life outdoors.

One T-shirt is even artificially aged, complete with fabricated signs of wear and sun-bleached fabric. Several garments bear the slogan “Building things” – not “Developing things” or “Generating things” – as though typing prompts were a form of patient craftsmanship. Most striking of all is another T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Good research takes time.” Yet that is precisely the principle ChatGPT has done so much to undermine, with profound consequences already visible in academic publishing, as recent reporting by De Groene Amsterdammer has shown.

Unease

What values is OpenAI trying to project here? This is, after all, the company that claims to have ushered in a new technological revolution, and that aims to make as much human labour as possible obsolete, as quickly as possible. Yet the values it now chooses to advertise are slowness, craftsmanship, embodied experience and independent thought. Is this merely cynical branding? Marketing?

I think it also betrays a deeper unease within the AI vanguard about the disruption it is unleashing. The class that is most economically and technologically disruptive often proves to be culturally conservative. By the end of the nineteenth century, the new aristocrats of the Industrial Revolution – factory owners, bankers and merchants – were buying up England's country houses in order to celebrate the unspoilt English countryside.

With all the depth of a slogan printed on a T-shirt, the AI elite is already retreating into a vague humanism, like a murderer who, still clutching the bloodied knife, recoils from the crime they have committed and begins extolling the humanity of their victim.