The first etiquette book I ever read was Peter Post's Essential Manners for Men (2003). Peter was the husband of Emily Post, who for years was the country’s foremost writer and expert on all things etiquette, founding The Emily Post Institute in 1946. I bought the book then because, around that time, I was in a period of intense self-improvement. I’d probably just graduated college and felt an urge to refresh my knowledge of masculine social manners. “Looking the part” wasn’t only about dress, but also behavior. They had to complement each other, to me, and still do. That was seven or so years ago. Yet here we are in 2025 and I’ve just purchased two similar books: The Young Man’s Guide and The Modern Gentleman, each written over a century apart. But this time around, I’m paying more attention to what those books reveal about the era in which they were written.
It’s uncertain if men today are interested in that kind of guidance. Except there’s a new male archetype cropping up in our culture that suggests they might: The Young Gentleman. These aren’t necessarily the men heeding the maxims in G. Bruce Boyer’s menswear bible, True Style—that “active sportswear makes many people look less athletic than practically anything else they could otherwise wear,” for example. Or that “fashion writes in bold italics, while style whispers between the lines.” (At least not yet.) It’s more likely that they’ve taken a cue or two or more from the “manosphere.” And they’re the purveyors of the “Quarter Zip Movement.”
The trend was spearheaded about three weeks ago by a viral TikTok video of two young Black men, bespectacled and sporting navy blue quarter-zip pullovers. With an iced matcha in hand, one of the men, Jason Gyamfi, proclaims, “We don’t do Nike Tech, we don’t do coffee, it’s straight quarter zips and matchas around here. We upgraded in life; we wear glasses now.” Gyafami goes on to mention that his friend wanted to wear Nike Tech before heading outside for the day’s activities, and that he discouraged him from doing so because they ‘had upgraded’ from those clothes. In response, the other man says, “Yesterday I was in the hood, today I’m wearing this sweater, I’m in Blank Street, change your life gang, put the Tech down, bruh.” A host of other men followed suit, virtually and IRL.
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In theory, swapping their casual Nike Tech gear for a business casual sweater that zips to the chest marks a graduation in their maturity. Like Jay-Z’s 2006 song, “30-Something.” That was an invitation into “the maturation of Jay-Zeezy,” a man who forewent baggy pants in favor of tuxedos. The effort he and stylist June Ambrose made to advance his image altogether as he progressed in his career, from artist to artist-mogul. Quarter zips, then, clothe an identity shift—from young men to young gentlemen—for its new fanatics. Call it B.Q.Z. (“Before the Quarter Zip,” as coined by Gyamfi) to A.Q.Z. (After the Quarter Zip?)—the point is for these guys to simply “rock it well” and treat themselves to that matcha, even if they were wearing Nike Tech and drinking AriZona, say, a week prior.
All movements are, to some degree, political. This one, dressed as a finance bro, arrives smack dab in the middle of the purported crisis of masculinity; loneliness, directionlessness, perceived powerlessness, physical and mental health issues, and a decline in college enrollment rates are all pieces of that puzzle. Add to it the women who—at least on social media—claim to be fed up with “performative males” and put off by our increasingly expressive sense of style. As one woman recently put it on TikTok, “I hate me a fashionista. Like, them boys that be wearing the bell bottoms, with the crop top, and the purse…if you lookin’ real…Soho, it’s not for me.” This is hardly a new notion. Two years ago, the wellness influencer Natalya Toryanski announced on the app that she’d rather “have a man who can’t dress to save his life, who can’t put an outfit together if his life depended on it, rather than a fashion dude” who wears pearl necklaces and Maison Margiela Tabi boots. Yes, for a man to dress too fashionably, to be so fluent in fashionspeak that he can correctly pronounce Loewe and Jacquemus is to diminish his romantic prospects, apparently.
Enter the quarter zip: a masculine, nondescript garment that projects its wearer to be clean and productive, culturally unassuming, and economically secure—in other words, marriage material. Safe. Indeed, due to the current social climate, it was at first tempting for me not to see this viral trend as anything other than cookie-cutter conservatism propped up as elegance. Or, more inaccurately, as dandyism. But outright dismissing it feels rather cynical. The change worked for Hov, and it could for these new Young Gentlemen, too, even if for their own aesthetic pleasure. And men collectively attempting to “elevate” their appearance is no doubt a good thing. Especially if we’re supposedly lonely.
Over the last couple weeks, the media have attempted to find the deeper meaning in the quarter-zip trend. Early to report on the topic, The Root heralded the phenomenon as a sign that “Gen-Z Black men on TikTok are growing up, showing up and glowing up by changing their looks in a most beautiful way.” Last week, meanwhile, the New York Times conceded that “teenagers have looked for ways to signal to society that they had grown up,” and that “the time has come for Gen Z to lean into business casual, and the often ribbed, always square quarter-zip sweater seems to be their garment of choice.” Highsnobiety framed it as “as a meme come to life, one that plays on all kinds of class and race stereotypes while establishing a new kind of club. The quarter-zip and a 401k club.” On that last point, Slate’s Nadira Goffe pointed out that when a meme like this gets so popular as to reach a wide enough audience, the reactions it can elicit can perpetuate racist stereotypes of Black men. “Unfortunately, the joke has broken containment, and I don’t want folks who don’t understand the nuances to celebrate this as a wholly positive shift,” Goffe wrote.
But for Gyamfi, quarter zips are an alternative to what Black men might otherwise wear. Similarly, replacing coffee with its chilled-out cousin, matcha, is another way to switch things up. “There’s people out here who just don’t really know how to switch it up because all they know is Nike Tech,” Gyamfi told me over Zoom last week. “All they know is streetwear because of where we come from. Like, I had to learn all this stuff [through] trial and error.”
A Ghanaian-American, Gyamfi was the first in his family to finish college, having earned his degree in computer science from Allegheny College back in May. As is the case for many young men preparing for and entering the workforce, adapting to professional culture has required patience and personal initiative, starting with what to wear. That meant “going on YouTube, whether it’s the best outfit to wear for this time of year,” or other style advice dispensed by the platform’s menswear community, he says. At 21, Gyamfi is also the oldest of his siblings, “so I didn’t really have that [guidance that said] like, ‘Oh, this is what you wear now.’ I have to teach myself these things,” he said.
Whether the movement makes good on its promises in the long term is perhaps secondary to the fact that it’s encouraging men to bring their A-game right now, in real time. In fact, not long ago, Gyamfi noticed at an event that its quarter-zipped attendees carried themselves with outstanding dignity; shaking his hand, man to man, with the facility and confidence we lads expect of each other. They’re even broadening their sartorial horizons to suits, trench coats. To be sure, it isn’t that these new Young Gentlemen are storing away their puffer coats and Nike Techs indefinitely. (That said, streetwear’s obituary won’t be written anytime soon, if ever.) Rather, those staples are just on ice at the moment.
Had you told Gyamfi he’d reach so many people at some point in life, you’d have merely been reminding him. “Because of the person I am, I’ve always been a leader, I’ve always been an influencer. But now this is the internet seeing it for the first time,” he told me. But he’d have laughed if you said he’d go viral so soon and over so much as a shirt. In July, when he first began his journey as a content creator, he had 300 followers on TikTok. Now he’s at over 150,000, and several thousand on Instagram. What started as a satirical video informed by his personal journey sparked a whole dress-for-success trend and, in turn, landed him a feature on ABC News Live, among other opportunities. Gyamfi’s ascension echoes an idea which, ostensibly, would afford the movement its efficacy: “it starts with quarter zips, but it doesn’t end with quarter zips.”