The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Why Are Kids Wearing Quarter Zips?

Something strange is happening this week: The hottest trend among young people is acting mature.

Maybe it's in response to our nation's financial and political leaders abdicating maturity, but Gen Z is adopting business casual attire as a cultural identifier and using a pick-up line in online dating that seems like something out of the 1950s. Even the brain-rot generation is considering moving away from meaninglessness and dropping six-seeeven in favor of memes people can understand.

What is a “quarter zip” and what does it mean to wear one?

A quarter zip is exactly what it sounds like: a pullover sweater with a zipper that goes a quarter way down the chest, and it's becoming the go-to look for young men, especially Black men. Wearing a quarter zip isn't exactly "dressed up," but it's more sophisticated than rocking athleisure wear. More importantly, the quarter zip is often a signifier of status and intention. Like flannel shirts in previous generations, the quarter zip is marks one as belonging to an in-group, being a “quarter zip man," and the even being part of the “quarter zip movement.”

The trend began earlier this month with this video from TikToker Jason Gyamfi:

"We don't do Nike tech and coffee no more," Gyamfi says, "it's straight matchas and quarter zips around here." (Matcha is a kind of Japanese green tea. It's also a marker of "performative males.") Another part of the quarter zip movement are chunky black glasses, which I personally endorse because chunky black frames are the only glasses that matter.

My white ass is not culturally qualified to talk about what the quarter zip means in terms the Black experience (dig into the hashtag if you'd like to go down that path) but I find it fascinating in terms of the younger generation taking a step into adulthood. It's not a great time for the concept of being a grown-up, with the most powerful people on earth trading schoolyard barbs and flame wars on social media regularly, so I see the quarter zip thing as a small countervailing force, as if younger people are saying, "You want to vacate maturity? We'll take it up."

How “may I meet you?” is becoming Gen Z’s go-to pick-up line

Speaking of maturity making a surprise comeback: Gen Z is adopting an unexpectedly formal greeting as a romantic opener.

We have Bill Ackman to thank for it. The unlikely dating influencer isn't a roided-out weirdo Andrew-Tate type; he's a 59-year-old married hedge fund manager known for his philanthropy and his billion dollars built on long-shot bets. Ackman has summed up his investment strategy like this: “Make a bold call that nobody believes in,” and so he did in a recent tweet aimed at our nation’s young men trapped in the male loneliness epidemic, posting:

“I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask:  “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. 

The tweet was viewed over 38 million times. It was at first met with skepticism, tweets like:

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and memes like this:

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But the phrase is actually catching on. People are using it on dating apps, sometimes ironically, sometimes not, but always with the subtext: "I understand this reference, therefore I am online enough for you." The phrase functions as both a shared joke and a surprisingly straightforward expression of interest. The politeness of it suggests "I'm not going to make this all weird," too.

Whether young men are picking up the subtext of Ackman’s advice (i.e., “Just be a normal person—and it doesn’t hurt to have a couple billion dollars") is unclear, but the phrase has definitely embedded itself in online courtship.

Generation Alpha's great meme reset

Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I'm even seeing maturity creeping into the collective unconscious of Generation Alpha.

As a longtime decoder of youth culture, I've watched Gen Z and Gen A's main form of self-expression—internet memes—going from generally relatable jokes and observations to messages with so many inside jokes that they're only understandable to the terminally online, to brain-rot memes that are incomprehensible to everyone, even their own creators, because they literally don't mean anything. But TikTokers are proposing a "Great Meme Reset" to begin in 2026, and promising a return to comprehensibility.

The reset was first proposed (ironically, of course) in this video, posted during the supposed "meme drought" back in March.

The idea that memes are dead has been much discussed online, with videos like this envisioning what the great sweeping away of memes might look like and solidifying the date it's coming:

What comes next, though, is a harder thing to envision. Creators are basically proposing "going back to when memes meant something," and they generally land on 2016 as the "golden age." As TikToker NoahGlennCarter puts it in this video:

"We're going to go back to the originals, things like nyan cat, Ugandan Knuckles, and the dancing banana are all going to be coming back as memes..."

I'm in favor of the idea of bringing coherence back to meme-dom, but I'm sure you can see the problem here too: Nyan Cat, Ugandan Knuckles and company didn't mean anything in 2016 to anyone who wasn't terminally online. A reset is only possible if people share a baseline cultural reference point, and that’s hard to come by.

Another problem: Self-conscious attempts to orchestrate cultural expression basically never work. You can’t will a renaissance into being; you can’t just make fetch happen.

Viral video of the week: mishandled meat

I usually link to viral videos that are funny and/or awesome, but this week's highlights a different viral subgenre: disgusting food-handling videos.

TikToker @sergiogarcia9100 was apparently just hanging out on a roof (like you do) when he caught this scene of a restaurant employee's less-than-sanitary handling of some frozen ribs:

The video was viewed over five million times in its first three days online. The original poster didn't provide much detail about where the video beyond saying it was "near San Jose." But internet detectives are good, and despite the seeming lack of identifying information in the video, a geoguesser on Reddit identified the restaurant as PhoLove in Milpitas, California. The county health department was notified, and the restaurant shut down temporarily while they address health code violations. All of which should remind us that the internet is terrifyingly good at CSI work, and, if you must mishandle meat, watch for video snipers on the roof.

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