Young men swapping Nike Tech fleeces for quarter-zips are all over TikTok, as well as staging IRL meetups worldwide. What’s behind the growing movement centring a once unremarkable garment?
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s I’m wearing a quarter-zip jumper and sipping on an iced matcha, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my last day of term before the school holidays. The giveaway is it’s a Saturday in London’s Soho, and I’m surrounded by 20 or so young men between the ages of 13 and 21 who are all here for London’s first ever “quarter-zip meetup”.
Organised, rather bizarrely, by sibling rappers OKay the Duo, the meetup is the latest manifestation of a growing tongue-in-cheek trend for quarter-zips and matcha that has taken over TikTok globally. Previous meetups have taken place in Houston and Rotterdam.
The trend started when Jason Gyamfi, a computer science graduate, posted a video on TikTok of him and his friend Richard Minor showing off their quarter-zips. In his video, Gyamfi, the self-proclaimed “founder of the quarter-zip movement”, says: “We don’t do Nike Tech. We don’t do coffee. It’s straight quarter-zips and matchas around here.”
