Gone Camping: Mapping Fashion’s Foray into the Forest

We asked the award-winning journalist to consider fashion's recent obsession with the outdoors. Accompanied by an editorial styled by Romany Williams and shot by Rebecca Storm.

That’s how the earliest clothing-memory of my father became a version of Patagonia’s first fleece jacket, a full-zip in rust. It had a smooth outer shell with comically thick fleece pile on the inside, like a sheepskin. By the time I was old enough to register the memory, it was pilling all over and smeared in white house paint. The best photo I can find of the jacket online is an ebullient snapshot of a young Yvon Chouinard, the Patagonia founder, and climber Rick Ridgeway, laughing. Ridgeway holds a champagne bottle in one hand. There is no stemware in sight. The pair are apparently somewhere on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, presumably having just climbed some vertical face up there at the top of the world, maybe with ice picks. They’re both wearing the jacket. The photo captures a free, daring feeling we’re all after, now, while this sort of clothing—outdoor wear, hiking boots, climbing gear, wicking fabrics—has surged back into fashion just in time for the global death of wild places, showing up in spaces 80s climber culture never did. A year when I see Outdoor Research shells on the F train, Hoka One Ones on the runway at Collina Strada, and camping-themed hype sneaker campaigns. A year when Frank Ocean showed up to Paris Fashion week FW19 in an Arc’teryx hat and Mammut jacket.

It’s certainly retro, which fits: It’s retro in the way actual wilderness is retro.

Last year, scientists published a study in which they peered into the stomachs of 102 sea turtles, representing all seven species of sea turtle found in the world. Every single one had eaten plastic. And the vast majority of the plastic bits found in their stomachs were synthetic fibers. We did it, we’ve stuffed every turtle’s stomach with fleece and performance base layer.

Then there is the issue with moisture-repellence, that holy attribute of highly engineered clothing. The short version is that the thing that makes gear waterproof has sparked the biggest global water-contamination crisis the world has seen since the days of DDT.

The long version is that globally, tens of thousands of people have been unknowingly drinking perfluorinated chemicals in their water, a byproduct of manufacturing the types of coatings that make things nonstick (Teflon) and waterproof (Gore-Tex). A number of perfluorinated chemicals, known collectively as PFAS, are now detectable at low levels in the blood of virtually everyone. Culpable companies—mostly DuPont—knew of the potential health effects but, much like Exxon and climate change, chose not to say anything for a long time. Today, studies link elevated exposure to it to heightened cancer risks, infertility, and developmental delays. Young men exposed to a PFAS site in Veneto, Italy were recently found to have smaller penises and lower sperm counts.

Gore-Tex has promised to phase PFAS out of their gear by 2023.

That sense of wholeness is lost to most of us who don’t have the chance to go to the woods. But we have a sense of what we’re missing, I think. Can you grasp at it by wearing hiking boots on your commute? I think so. It is a reminder of what’s out there.

Or, what increasingly isn’t. In 2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the word “solastalgia” to describe the type of grief felt by the loss of one’s home environment changing while you stay put; signals of seasons lost to the shifting climate, or tracts of wilderness eaten by wildfire, your childhood trees drowned in too much rain. Solastalgia sounds enough like “nostalgia” to evoke the feeling of longing contained in that word.

In 2017, the American Psychological Association validated “eco-anxiety” as a clinically legitimate diagnosis, drawing a bigger circle around the feeling of loss: you can feel eco-anxiety from afar, and angst about the loss of the natural world at large.

If hiking clothes could be seen as a confused signal of affinity for earth, a soft protest of what’s being actively disappeared by petro-capitalism, what about a white hiking shoe? Is that a cheeky site of cognitive dissonance or a display of total nihilism? In the world of the white hiking shoe, does wilderness still exist? Will those milky soles ever touch dirt? Does it matter? Maybe not.

Indeed, some have taken the trend past utility and into the realm of purely decorative literalism. A Comme des Garçons Homme Plus x Nike collaboration birthed a sneaker enveloped in its own miniature tent, dubbed the “foot tent.” Miniature fiberglass poles float the tent a few centimeters above the toe box. Theoretically a person wearing these Nikes within, say, The North Face Domey 3 tent would be making a pomo Russian doll of the genre. That particular tent comes in a “heat map” print that makes the structure look entirely subsumed in orange flames. In an era of increased forest fires, what better way to embrace the solastalgic abyss while still embracing the theme?

Burn the whole thing down. Or don’t! It’ll do it itself.

Zoë Schlanger is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is a staff reporter at Quartz, where she covers climate change, pollution, and other environmental calamities.