Polly Vernon has her say
This pandemic fashion trend is official
IT WAS WHEN I found myself deep-googling ‘really very warm fleeces’, less than 24 hours after I’d deep-googled ‘best hiking boots for yomps’ (which led me to a charming website called CotswoldOutdoor.com for the first time in my shopping life, quite a change from Net-a-porter, let me tell you), which in itself was less than 24 hours after I’d truly understood the point of a double-zip padded jacket (sometimes, you really do need the top half of your torso cosily encased against a forceful wind, while the waist remains open to ventilation!), around about the time I advance-texted a friend to warn her she’d deffers need a midweight beanie for our walk (though probably only wrist-warmers, as opposed to the full glove) that I understood I had, quite unconsciously, embarked upon a brave new fashion journey. This one entirely dictated by our current woeful circs, based on an aesthetic I’d previously not considered ‘fashion’ at all, but rather a fashion vacuum – but which, it transpired, I liked! Very much!
It is Outdoorsy-core™ – a style forged in the mud-slicked tramps across parklands and heath, along puddle-strewn canal sides and through perpetual p*ssing rain, which now qualify as the highlight of our social calendar… So of course, it requires a coordinating fashion statement!
What is Outdoorsy-core? Think: Theresa and Philip May on a walking holiday in The Lakes, but make it fashion, but also? Make it waterproof. Think: the Windsors at Balmoral in that episode of The Crown season four when Gillian Anderson’s Thatcher hasn’t got any of the right clothes, because the right clothes are Outdoorsy-core – which the Windsors are, while Thatcher is not. Think: Barbours and Puffas and Gore-tex and a fisherman’s oiled knit! Think: Patagonia, Carhartt, Sorel, Uniqlo Heattech and The North Face – whose sell-out collaboration with Gucci might be the purest expression of Outdoorsy-core we’ve yet to see! Think: lug-sole boots, worn firstly for their grip over slippy terrain, secondly because they’re cool and everyone from Loewe to Topshop has done them; think: a quarter-zip on the turtleneck of a sweatshirt, think: a sock so chunky, you need to go up a shoe size to accommodate! Outdoorsy-core is fit for purpose and ferocious in the face of a squall! Outdoorsy-core only ever stops for a nip from a hip flask and a pee in a bush.
Which is not to say Outdoorsy-core can’t be chic. Au contraire: any fashion statement as utterly pertinent to the literal and cultural climate in which it operates is by definition the height of chic. Also, it turns out there are ways to wear a padded jacket (belted), to layer foundation garments (cropped and oversized, over-long and slender) to achieve the perfect sock-tucksilhouette/the ideal mud-splatter pattern on the hem of one’s heavyweight cotton jogging bottom (too little = suspiciously clean, too much = too scuzzy), which make Outdoorsy-core the last word in an insouciant, windswept, actually very British kind of sexiness.