What the quarter-zip craze tells us about Blackness and respectability

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2026

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

What does the humble, boring quarter-zip sweater have to do with respectability politics and Blackness? Apparently, a lot! When two young Black men on TikTok brought the quarter-zip into vogue for young folks, they unknowingly waded into some very long-lived discourse on Black fashion and looking "respectable." Today on the pod, we chop it up with Jonathan Square, professor of Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design, about Black fashion, and what's happening more broadly to make this pretty plain sweater the "it" garment.

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0:00.0	Happy New Year!
0:01.7	Want to set goals that you'll actually stick to in 2026?
0:05.4	You want to accept yourself in the situation you're in, but you also want to expect more from yourself and say, what are the ways that I can grow?
0:12.4	This week, how to design and plan your year on the Life Kit podcast.
0:17.5	Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:24.2	What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Gene Demby.
0:29.1	We all know that fashion is cyclical and ephemeral, right?
0:32.8	Especially among younger people who are always trying to define themselves in contrast to old hits.
0:39.1	Like, Gen Xers were looking to get away from the angular styles of the 1980s, and so they
0:43.0	embraced bell bottoms in the 1990s. Hip-hop's explosion into the mainstream in the 1990s saw
0:48.4	clothes get wild baggy, but then everything went streamlined and tailored and elegant in the aughts in 2010s.
0:55.5	And now the fashion for Youngs are wearing baggy clothes all over again because that slim shit,
1:01.5	that's just so millennial, right?
1:04.0	And so the Youngs are confounding the old with super wide silhouettes and boatneck tops and
1:09.6	quarter-zips? What? Quarter-zips? Yes, one of the most talked about sartorial
1:15.6	selections of the last few months has been the humble quarter zip. The sort of sweater,
1:21.4	sort of sweatshirt thing that is the preferred attire of the middle age suburban dad taking his
1:27.4	kids on a tour of a liberal arts
1:28.7	college, right? The quarter-zip is having a moment among a certain segment of zoomers, and
1:35.0	we can actually kind of pinpoint what sparked it all.
1:38.0	We don't do Nike Tyke. We don't do coffee. There's straight quarters of some matches around here.
1:46.6	It was this TikTok video posted by a username Rich the Fifth.
	...

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