Austin Babbitt Is Selling Clothes That Do Not Exist Yet, and People Are Buying Them Anyway

Test of Patience 2 asks buyers to pay now for a garment that will keep changing for two full years before it ships.

A shopper who lands on test-of-patience.asspizza.com today is greeted by a banner that reads, in full capitals, ORDERS SHIP IN 730 DAYS, JULY 2028. Under that sits a grid of five garments: two t-shirts, a hoodie, a longsleeve, and a variant labeled “revived.” None of them will arrive in a box anytime soon. Every product page carries the same disclosure, word for word: the garment shown in the photos is only a starting point, and new layers, prints, and details get added to it across the full two year window between checkout and delivery. Buyers are told plainly that by placing an order, they are agreeing to an evolving design and a shipping date that sits nearly two years out.

That is the premise of Test of Patience 2, the second installment of a slow fashion project from the designer known as Asspizza, the working alias of Austin Babbitt. The storefront is a standalone domain, separate from his main site at asspizza.com, and it functions less like a typical drop page and more like a subscription to a process. Five items are currently listed: the TEST OF PATIENCE 2 REVIVED SHIRT at $25, the FRESH BLANK SHIRT at $48, the REVIVED HOODIE at $55, the FRESH BLANK HOODIE at $96, and the FRESH BLANK LONGSLEEVE at $72.

 

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The naming convention splits the collection into two lanes. “Fresh Blank” pieces start life as plain, unprinted garments, true to size according to the product listings, and they will accumulate whatever imagery, screen printing, or embellishment Babbitt decides to add during the 730 day cycle. “Revived” pieces are the opposite instinct: they begin as garments that already carry some history, and the listing warns that revived tees can vary in size, advising buyers to size up if they fall between two sizes. In effect, one line is a blank canvas and the other is a reclaimed object, and both get treated to the same slow, undocumented buildup of detail before they ship.

The site’s own copy is unusually candid about the uncertainty involved. Each product description ends with a version of the same line: the piece will not exist in its finished form until the project itself ends. There are no mockups of a final garment, no promised print or colorway. The purchase is, functionally, a bet on a process rather than a product. Address changes during the two year wait period are handled manually, through a dedicated email address printed directly on every listing, which underlines how much of this operation still runs on direct, artist to buyer correspondence rather than a conventional fulfillment pipeline.

Early access to the collection runs through the 730 app, available on the App Store and on Google Play, which Babbitt has built out as the primary channel for drops, discounts, and shipping updates tied to his labels. The web storefront itself notes that shoppers can find the Test of Patience listings inside the app under a secondary stores menu, a structure that keeps his most active buyers inside owned channels rather than routing all traffic through a single Shopify front.

The artist stands beside a hand-painted BMW inside a gallery filled with colorful star-shaped works.

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Babbitt’s path to running a two year presale on unfinished clothing did not start with a business plan. Born in 1998 and raised in Queens, he began posting drawings and hand painted shirts online as a teenager, a period well documented on his Wikipedia page and corroborated by multiple streetwear retrospectives. His early work found an audience through customization rather than original garments: he became known for painting over pieces from Supreme and reworking merchandise tied to Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” era, at one point selling his bootlegged versions outside the line for an official Kanye pop up shop until staff invited him inside to sell alongside the licensed product.

That period brought cosigns from figures including Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston, and by 2015 Babbitt had become part of the Spaghetti Boys, a Soho based collective that also included Kerwin Frost and future convincers who went on to shape their own corners of streetwear and music. Babbitt released his first formal collection under the Asspizza name in 2017, titled “Stop Pretending FGNF 730,” and the number 730 has followed the brand through nearly every project since, showing up now as the name of his app and as the exact day count buyers are being asked to wait for Test of Patience 2.

He announced what he described as his final Asspizza drop in July 2021, a run of one of one custom denim pieces, before continuing to build the brand in the years since under an expanded structure that now spans the main storefront, the 730 app, and satellite projects like the Test of Patience domain. A recent Instagram post from his verified account, @asspizza, referenced a pop up event called Therapy Session running from July 3 through July 30 at a Broome Street address in Manhattan, a sign that the physical, in person side of his practice remains active alongside the slow burn online drop.

A floor-to-ceiling display showcases one-of-one streetwear pieces layered into a colorful collage of graffiti, hand-painted graphics, and reworked garments.

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The number is not incidental. Multiple accounts of Babbitt’s early career trace it to NYPD radio code 730, historically used when officers respond to calls involving people in psychiatric distress, a detail that has circulated across streetwear commentary for years without direct confirmation from Babbitt himself. Whatever its origin, he has since built an entire operational identity around it: the 730 app, past 730 branded hoodies and tote bags, a shipping status page at status.asspizza.com that promises what the main site calls the world’s fastest shipping for in stock items, and now a two year slow release model that takes the opposite approach entirely.

That contrast, instant shipping on one storefront and a 730 day wait on another, captures something specific about how Babbitt has always worked. He built his name doing pieces live, customizing garments in real time in front of an audience, whether that audience was a handful of friends in Soho or, more recently, viewers on his Twitch channel. Test of Patience simply stretches that same live, evolving process across two years instead of two hours, and asks the buyer to trust the outcome without seeing it.

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Babbitt has spent over a decade positioning himself against the polish of mainstream fashion, favoring hand drawn logos, screen printing, and a DIY aesthetic that reads as unfinished by design. Test of Patience 2 is arguably the clearest expression yet of that philosophy: a collection that is, quite literally, unfinished at the moment of sale, with the incompleteness itself framed as the product.

It also lands at a moment when a number of independent labels have experimented with slower, more transparent production timelines as a counterweight to instant drop culture, though few have gone as far as committing to a fixed two year window with public shipping dates baked directly into the checkout flow. The first Test of Patience run, which surfaced in 2024 according to social posts from the period, established the format. This second edition keeps the same structure while widening the size range up to 4XL on several pieces and adding color options on the Fresh Blank Shirt, available in black or white.

The timing also overlaps with a broader shift in how independent designers use direct to consumer apps rather than third party marketplaces to control both distribution and narrative. The 730 app functions as more than a discount channel. It is where Babbitt has consolidated years of drops, from early customized denim to tote bags and hoodies, into a single owned ecosystem, and Test of Patience effectively becomes the slowest, most deliberate product living inside that faster moving app. Buyers who want early access to future drops are pointed back toward the app rather than a mailing list or a resale platform, which keeps the entire relationship, and the eventual reveal of each garment, inside channels Babbitt controls directly.

None of this guarantees the second Test of Patience run will land the way the first one did. A two year promise leaves considerable room for delay, for changed plans, or for a designer’s creative direction to shift entirely between now and July 2028. The shipping status page exists precisely because that kind of long horizon commerce needs a public record buyers can check against, something closer to a flight tracker than a typical order confirmation email. For now, the five listings sit live on the storefront, priced, sized, and sold as promises rather than finished garments.

For a designer whose entire career started with painting over other brands’ garments in Soho, asking people to prepay for two years of gradual, undocumented transformation is less a gimmick than a continuation of the same instinct: garments as an ongoing record of a process, sold before anyone, including the designer, knows exactly how they will end up.