The Vintage Outdoor Look has Gone Mainstream

[Mike K.]

Good example of the difference between style and fashion!

 

[nobodyspecial]

Local article about the same trend referencing local brands.
http://www.twincities.com/ci_162939...ncities.com-www.twincities.com&nclick_check=1

This fashion trend has been building steam for several years, I've seen bits and pieces of this on various blogs for some time. For whatever reason the trend is huge in Japan. Many US companies are making products specifically for the Japanese market and are not available here. Sierra Designs makes a beautiful 60/40 mountain parka with a Pendleton wool lining, but you have to fly to Japan to get one. Danner makes a pair of boots right out of the 1970's but you can't get them here and Danner only makes them in small sizes. Kelty and Jansport and others are making retro backpacks, although I think you can buy them in the US. 1970's era, leather bottomed rucksacks seem to sell quite well on ebay, my guess is most go to Japan.

In some ways this trend reminds me of the same fashion trend from the 1970's when everyone wanted to look like a backpacker with heavy leather boots, mountain parkas, flannel shirts and down jackets. These trends come and go like everything else.

Fashion models are fashion models, whether male or female. On cold weather canoe trips my pants get tucked into my knee high Bean boots and my feet thank me.

Can you say poseur? This whole thing just gags me. Any "guy" who goes for this kinda thing should be handed one match and a pocket knife and dropped off in the middle of nowhere British Columbia and told to hang out for a month. Those who survive get to wear plaid jockeys if they want. Of course, none of them would. Survive that is. Then the rest of us could just get quietly on with it.

Very few people could survive the above, I certainly could not and I have a great deal of wilderness experience.

 

[Rick Blaine]

i think my grandfather's 50+/- year old Filson mackinaw hunting coat is just heavy enough to beat the model to death with.

as to the trend, give it six months and we'll be able to pick up some nice basic items on closeout.

I think your G'fathers Filson is heavier than the model,himself, eh?

 

[Richard Warren]

But, I think ya'll are missing the point of the annual NY, Paris, Milan shows. They're not a place where the designers show off the stuff that goes to retail. It's the haute couture culture where over-the-top-flamboyant is what it's all about. (Check out The Sartorialist, for example to see photos from the spring shows.)

All of your favorite outdoor brands are alive and well. The trends you're making fun of will permit Bean, Filson, Barbour, Red Wing, Pendleton, Woolrich, Levis, etc. to make and (hopefully) sell a broader range of clothes. This is a good thing, and as others have pointed out, will trickle down into the discount/secondary channels within which many of us shop.

Fred H.

Or maybe it will cause them to over-expand into a market that disappears overnight, leaving them with an unsupportable load of debt.

 

[ideaguy]

All the good brands are still alive, granted, but are made in other places-or so it seems; the average Joe who's trying to keep up with fashion-Vintage in particular-
won't be headed to the mall, or even shopping through the catalogs; he'll cruise through eBay, of course. And if you do the same, you'll find an unsettling amount of real, good to super condition Vintage hunting jackets/coats, to pick just one
category, and the prices that these pre-1960 goods DON'T get are amazing. I've
been holding about 10-12 Vintage coats myself, with the thought of selling some this Autumn. If a perfectly fine Woorich or Pendleton hunting coat in heavy wool in a size 44R can't make a $19.99 beginning bid...I wonder where the fashionistas are
going to get their vintage fix?
Looks like I'll be wearing the "in thing" for the Winter, and tucking my pants into the top of my vintage boots-got 6 of them, too...

 

[ideaguy]

And if all this isn't enough, look at today's edition of "ETSY". "The Woodsman". Not around my neck of the woods...

 

[celtic]

I was prompted to look for this thread (thanks, ideaguy ) and I'll concur with him. I have loved the old sportsman's "fashion" since I was a kid. And after reading the thread, a few of you have hit on exactly what I have been thinking:

It's fantastic that I'll be able to stock up on these things I love when they again become unfashionable. But like ideaguy said: I can't seem to sell the REAL THING for peanuts, because the hipsters only want the high dollar inferior products.

It ain't easy being plaid.

 

[JohnnyLoco]

If you can remember, Gap, Ralph Lauren and similar stores/designers have a long standing tradition of using vintage outdoor apparel as guides for their current fashion designs. The only difference between what they did in the 80s and early 90s and what is happening now is that you could find pieces from that time that were almost on par in quality with the vintage pieces they were attempting to fashionably and nostalgically reproduce and were usually American made. The crap that comes out now is almost always made of cheap synthetic materials, almost never handmade, and always made in China or somewhere in the far east. This also goes back to my theory that in the world of fashion, as well as popular entertainment, you have a period of time in the pop cultural era, from the 1920s to the 1960s, where styles were more or less new and innovative, and more importantly, authentic (meaning produced with a real sense of purpose, not a conscious attempt to assimilate and reinvent older forms for weak aesthetic appeal). The rest of the pop cultural era (1970s to early 2000s) has been a lame and inauthentic perpetual cycle of recycling, reinventing, and assimilating older styles from the era previously mentioned. Look at punk and the use of motorcycle jackets, grunge and the use of flannel, and hipsters and the use of anything and everything.