I was swiping through Instagram Stories last week when I was served an eBay ad for a very familiar sweatshirt.
Of all the accoutrements of the life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a 2005 image showing him wearing a navy monogrammed quarter zip and a slight, characteristic smirk has acquired an endless digital footprint and a discomfiting resonance. With the Epstein story approaching the 10-year mark as a global preoccupation, this nth phase of the intrigue, largely prompted by fallout from the Department of Justice’s July proclamation that there were no further criminal charges in the works, has spawned a potent cottage industry. One can now purchase an Epstein quarter zip, as it’s invariably described, from an array of Etsy entrepreneurs, the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes’s web store ($69.99), or epsteinquarterzip.com ($49.00), which promotes its wares to its 129,000 Instagram followers with AI-generated images of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton sporting the titular apparel.
“Iconic merch” is how leading right-leaning gaming streamer Asmongold recently described it. When Fuentes wore his riff on the sweatshirt, with “USA” replacing “JEE”—the American flag on the sleeve is true to the original—for a third week running, one of the X accounts that faithfully tracks his commentary said the choice represented “pure aura.” The quarter zip, in this conception of Epstein’s much-scrutinized persona, amounts to a signifier of ease and insouciance—the late financier wore rumpled sweatshirts around the global elite presumably because he could. In April 2019, a few months before his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, Epstein arrived at the artist Andres Serrano’s Greenwich Village home to have his portrait taken. “He acted the way he always acted,” Serrano told me in 2022. “Like a guy who didn’t have a care in the world.”
If there is any stylistic throughline in the immense tranche of emails released in the latest round of Epstein documents, it is that Epstein was similarly unbothered in his personal communications. He wrote to executives and public officials with little concern for spelling or syntax, and capitalization seemed anathema to him. The Epstein files, long held up in the public imagination as a kind of Rosetta stone for the sins of the wealthy and connected, included documents showing how the FBI had found little evidence to conclude that Epstein was running a sex trafficking ring for other powerful men; they also fed the bottomless appetite for glimpses into Epstein’s eccentricities and the corruption of the ruling class. Even if few of the wildest conspiracies found material support, his cultural imprint grew only larger.
The quarter zip took on a life of its own in September, when Restricted, a Miami luxury reseller that primarily stocks Chrome Hearts and accepts cryptocurrency as payment, claimed to be selling the genuine article. “Straight from Mar A Lago,” the shop wrote on Instagram. “This piece is very controversial and iconic.” A rumor spread that it was purchased by Ian Connor, the stylist affiliated with the artist formerly known as Kanye West and A$AP Rocky in the 2010s, and whose career was soon overshadowed by a series of sexual assault allegations that he has denied. (Connor had commented on the post with a moneybag emoji and indicated that he wanted to discuss the matter over direct message.) The shop’s owner told the Miami New Times that, after fielding more than 5,000 inquiries, he sold it to a different, unnamed client whom he described as famous. He was certain that the sweatshirt, which he purchased for $5,000 from another client and sold for $11,000, was authentic. (The client who sold him the sweater, he added, was from the Palm Beach area where Epstein had a home, and “also showed me, like, some mail he had, and medicine prescription bottles.”)
