My New Life With the Palantir Chore Coat - The Atlantic

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Ali Cherkis for The Atlantic<br>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.<br>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.”<br>Ali Cherkis for The Atlantic<br>A photographer joined me in SoHo, one of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods.

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...