In the Spotlight: Everyday Mountaineering
The functional outdoors brand is meant to merge outerwear with luxury fashion.
Designer Scott Ferguson looked to his lifelong hobby to create his functional outdoors brand Everyday Mountaineering, which made its debut this month.
Ferguson, who has a background in fine arts, took a step toward fashion design two years ago when he started developing the genderless line with the intention to create elevated outerwear styles that could work in the city or the mountains. The designer looked to his upbringing of competitive rock climbing as the starting point for the brand's aesthetic.
“I grew up competitive rock climbing throughout middle school and high school and I'd say around that same time all of my friends were into skateboarding and it was always easy to dress like you skateboarded and wearing those clothes every day,” Ferguson said. “So, I think going into creating clothes for climbing, I was interested in making clothes exist in the city and the outdoors.”
The designer initially started creating more technical outerwear pieces and then pivoted to elevating the styles with looser fits, bright colors and high-quality fabrics. In addition to outerwear, the brand offers athletic shorts, vests, climbing pants, knitwear and accessories.
“Orange and purple have turned into the brand's core colors,” Ferguson explained about the aesthetic. “I love orange for standing out so much — it is my go-to jacket color for climbing and snowboarding because it's very visible. I also have a relationship with purple growing up wearing Patagonia and having purple be the accent color on so much.”
Sustainability is also another pillar of Everyday Mountaineering. Ferguson explained that the full collection came into full gear after he teamed with his design partner Audrey Louise Reynolds to source sustainable fabrics and use natural dyes to create the brand's knitwear. One sustainable method Everyday Mountaineering used for the collection was to dye some pieces using rainwater. This resulted in each piece having its own unique quality.
“Everything was zero waste as far as the dyeing goes,” Reynolds explained. “It was just catching rainwater and then we added the natural materials and nontoxic, no AZO dyes and then producing that and the water runs away afterward. It was kind of like we interrupted nature to help us create these colors and unique patterns.”
Taking this type of approach and using high-end fabrics were important for the brand to give that elevated feeling to the outerwear pieces.
“We spent so much time just worried about the hand feel and the color and what we were bringing to market that wasn't going to oversaturate it,” Reynolds said. “We wanted to make sure we were making something to fit into the niche of ‘from pavement to alpine,' like [Ferguson's] saying is, so we could really wear it walking around the city and feel chic and cool, but also by the campfire after a long day of climbing.”
In line with Everyday Mountaineering's sustainable mission, collections will be made in small runs to focus on creating higher quality items. Everyday Mountaineering's offerings range in price from $100 for accessories to $1,900 for down jackets.
Everyday Mountaineering is gearing up to show at market this January to solidify its distribution. The brand currently sells its accessories on its website and will be adding more offerings in the next few months. Ferguson is already working on his spring collection, looking to more sustainable materials and methods for the line.