THE X GAMES? NO, X FASHION
It’s a mighty long way from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park to the Louis Vuitton flagship on the Champs-Élysées, but don’t mention that to Virgil Abloh. For his fall 2019 collection, Abloh, the creative director for menswear at Vuitton, introduced a chalk bag not unlike the kind climbers like free soloist Alex Honnold use to attack rock walls with little more than their limbs and their nerve.
Traditional outfitters like Marmot, North Face and Black Diamond make versions of the bucket-shaped carryall for holding the chalk crucial to keeping climbers’ hand dry as they scale crags and mark ticks on rock faces. Most sell for around $20.
The Vuitton Chalk Nano costs $1,590 (or $3,000 in backpack size), its added value, in corporate-speak, being the “understated Louis Vuitton aesthetic coded into the allover LV monogram.”
Fashion has had a long love affair with sports of all kinds, and it is easy enough to trace an arc from the genteel sports of the leisured classes of the 19th century to the more crazily individualistic ones of today. Since the 1990s, at least, extreme and adventure sports have excited designers, who imported to their runways superficial elements of gear created for street lugers, off-piste snowboarders, arctic surfers and those who push the outer limits of athletic pursuit.
Consider the new fall menswear collection from Prada, a label that has probably done more than most to advance the blending of adventure sports and fashion, exploiting technical fabrics and sporting motifs for collections that ready men for every conceivable style or climate challenge on, say, Fifth Avenue.
Its designs have varied widely through the years, and yet the visual vocabulary of extreme and adventure sports is a constant.
“With time, the aesthetic could and has changed,” Miuccia Prada wrote recently in an email. “But the technical and performing element, therefore research, remains at the core of the collection.” She was referring to a group of fall clothes conceptually inspired, in part, by team wear for the Luna Rossa Challenge, the Prada Pirelli challenger for the America’s Cup.
Actual race wear for the team competing in Auckland, New Zealand, next year will be rigorously streamlined. “Performance is, and has to be, the absolute priority,” Miuccia Prada wrote.
On the other hand, the multicolored paneled, cinched, zippered, hooded windbreakers and parkas and backpacks and scoopneck pullovers Prada showed in Milan in June came festooned with so many bellows pockets and utility compartments that a wearer would need a route map just to find his car keys.
It was probably inevitable that, as tech advances propelled sports culture further away from the contractually dictated sameness of numbered team uniforms and closer to the individualistic and highly Instagrammable realms of death-courting pursuits like free soloing and wing-suit flight, fashion would follow. In a certain sense, it had no choice.
The streetwear that has for so long stoked fashion’s edge eventually stalled, and as hoodies and saggers became a form of urban normcore, they yielded to the embrace by fashion-forward types like rapper ASAP Rocky of zip fleece parkas from labels like North Face, Columbia and Arc’teryx — “gorpcore” as it was christened by The Cut.
Even Alessandro Michele, the Gucci panjandrum, went around looking like a base camp groupie.
“I believe that the streetwear and sportswear influences we have seen lately in fashion are mostly aesthetic,” Miuccia Prada wrote. “It is solely a fashion statement.”
Yet for many of the labels represented in a crammed adventure sports pavilion at the recent Pitti Uomo — the world’s largest trade show dedicated to menswear and held twice yearly in Florence, Italy — the get-ups of the ornamental dandies for which the fair has become famous seemed as if designed for inhabitants of a distant universe.
At brands like Woolrich, Raeburn, Mountain Research, And Wander and others, it was adventure sports that drove the aesthetics of clothes better suited to the Iditarod than the cobbled streets of Florence.
Reinforced, padded, antiabrasive, reflective, filtering, thermo-regulating, rated for water resistance to depths of several hundred feet, the designs were said to have been inspired by Thoreau’s survivalist essays, NASA’s Mars exploration program, ice fishing, survivalist bushcraft, bouldering and the rockface daredeviltry that turned the 2018 documentary “Free Solo” into an unexpected success.
“What I find interesting about the extreme sports influence, which speaks to this very ’90s moment we’re living in and some of the ideas Prada and Helmut Lang first introduced, is the extension of it to all aspects of the wardrobe,” said Ken Downing, a former Neiman Marcus executive who is now creative director of Triple Five Group, the Canadian developers of retail and entertainment centers like the Mall of America. “It’s a continuation of where casualization is heading beyond the sweatshirt.”
“If you think about it,” he added, “it’s even begun to find its way into tailored clothing. Functionality is the new decoration, in a way.”