The old knock on Seattle’s sartorial habits goes something like this: Can you believe people in this town wear Gore-Tex and hiking shoes to the opera?
But a funny thing happened recently on the way to McCaw Hall. Apparel built to withstand even the harsh elements of the Pacific Northwest is increasingly flirting with the fashion mainstream.
Tastemakers in Milan don Filson jackets. Approach shoes suited for a North Cascades climb are carrying Brooklyn hipsters to work. Global fashion and apparel brands from Tokyo and Zurich are coming to Seattle to work with REI. Clothing lines born in Washington have rabid followings in the Japanese market, which seems to covet all things Pacific Northwest. (Though Portland, rather than Seattle, is becoming the outdoor-clothing-and-footwear epicenter for cottage brands seeking to unite form and function.)
The bottom line: When stylized in a way that mixes technical apparel with classic wardrobe staples, this type of clothing that was far from chic now garners cachet. For the stewards of Seattle’s storied outdoors brands, as well as fashion buyers from Seoul to Stockholm, this decade represents an exciting moment that vindicates the Northwest’s longstanding emphasis on timeless outdoor apparel.
As Vice President Isabelle Portilla of Co-op brands, REI’s in-house label, puts it, the fashion industry has reached an inflection point where “outdoor and style are not mutually exclusive.”
REI goes global
The fall is typically a high season for the fashion industry, but for REI, it’s more of a transition time between summer and winter. And yet, this autumn has seen Seattle’s homegrown national outdoor retailer land in the pages of GQ and receive glowing write-ups in the men’s fashion and streetwear digital media outlet Hypebeast.
Fashionistas have been going gaga for REI’s new collaboration with Swiss footwear company On and Japanese men’s fashion brand BEAMS. The REI Co-op x On x BEAMS collection consists of a trail running base camp with shoes, a tent, camping chair, sleep system and technical clothing. The capsule’s signature decal is a silhouette of each company’s iconic home base peak: Mount Rainier, the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji.
While REI is no stranger to high-profile collaborations — the company partnered with Airstream to design a limited-edition travel trailer in 2022 — this clothing and gear collection has sold like hot cakes. Less than a month after unveiling, Portilla said over half of the inventory has already flown off the shelves, the fastest pace of any collection in the company’s history. Some pieces are already being resold on eBay.
“That’s the kind of buzz we want to see,” she said. “The idea that we’ve tapped into a cultural chord is hard to do for an older retailer.”
REI’s long history appealed to BEAMS, a Japanese clothing and home goods brand that got started by imitating West Coast styles. When the collaboration began two years ago, a BEAMS team dived into REI’s archives at its Sodo studio for inspiration.
“BEAMS really saw us as the pinnacle of outdoor Americana,” said Portilla.
Zurich-based running shoe brand On, which has been eating away at market share from industry heavyweights like Oregon’s Nike, was tapped for its Swiss engineering, which upped the collaboration’s technical credentials. In other words, the gear needs to actually work as a base camp for, say, running the Wonderland Trail — not just looking cool in someone’s Berlin loft.
“It’s not about setting trends,” Portilla said. “It’s about being relevant to the culture of the outdoors.”
Filson alla Italia
On one of this fall’s first rainy weekends, several hundred people mixed and mingled in Pioneer Square for the first-ever Seattle Outdoor Fashion Week. High heels and hiking boots clicked and clacked on the wood floor in the RailSpur building for a Saturday soiree honoring Filson, the 128-year-old brand born in one of Seattle’s oldest neighborhoods during the Yukon gold rush.
Archival pieces, many collected by the buyers at Georgetown’s Barn Owl Vintage Goods, dated back to the 1920s. Woolen shirts, Forest Service uniforms and tin cloth jackets spoke to a rugged heritage outfitting the Pacific Northwest’s toughest workers: lumberjacks, fishing guides, ranch hands and park rangers.
That kind of authentic brand history is valuable — so much so that Bedrock Manufacturing, a private equity management firm, bought Filson in 2012. The acquisition has led to a drastic decline in the company’s domestic manufacturing jobs, with only three items still made locally, but also opened new opportunities.
In 2020, Italian fashion distributor WP Lavori took a minority stake in Filson. Last year, Filson debuted its first-ever women’s line, something that creative director Alex Carleton said would not have been possible without Italian fashion industry know-how.
“The design and product direction came from Seattle, but what we had in Italy were the resources,” Carleton said. “We had mills, wash houses and real tactical production capabilities, as well as a product development team to help us.”
Italy, it seems, might be the next frontier for durable outerwear inspired by prospectors departing Seattle for Alaska. Filson opened its first European outposts in the last two years, a Milan flagship designed to transport the customer to the landscapes of Washington and a boutique in the Italian alpine resort town of Cortina. The two cities will co-host the 2026 Winter Olympics in February.
So how are Italians styling Filson while they sip an espresso? Carleton, a regular at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, one of the world’s top men’s fashion shows, has seen a packer coat with a shearling collar worn over a tailored suit, bespoke denim, or a tracksuit from New York fashion line Aimé Leon Dore, which is known for its collaborations with outdoor brands like The North Face.
“Not to overuse the word iconic, but I think Filson has achieved this status where we make certain pieces of clothing that are just icons,” said Carleton. “And part of the definition of an icon is that it has many different end uses and can be interpreted by many different types of people.”
Form meets function
When On designer Jean-Philippe Lalonde came to Seattle for the REI Co-op x On x BEAMS brainstorming session, he made sure to stop in at Windthrow. The 2-year-old Capitol Hill boutique is a hub for rare outdoors brands that flirt with streetwear style. If you’re looking for an ultralight pack from Pa’lante, Japanese down jackets from Nanga or high-end sunglasses from District Vision, you won’t find them at REI. You will at Windthrow.
Curating interesting microbrands that strive to inject distinctive style into functional outdoor clothing is the task of owner Nate Hoe, who has both outdoor and fashion industry backgrounds. A store like Windthrow makes sense in the current moment because of a few trends, Hoe believes.
First, the last decade saw the emergence of fashion trends like normcore — an embrace of casual, everyday, prosaic clothing — and gorpcore — the aforementioned mix of outdoor technical clothing with urban style. While Hoe, who frequents Paris Fashion Week, is confident that gorpcore is already “passé” in fashion circles, there is a growing contingent of style-conscious consumers who picked up outdoor recreation hobbies like trail running and climbing in the last few years. They want to look good while they’re outside, and have even conjured a way to make that gear work in fashion-forward settings.
The West Coast-Japan ricochet, once again, plays an important role in some of the oldest brands sold at Windthrow. Gramicci started in California as a climber’s clothing brand, while Manastash was born in Ellensburg and named for a nearby ridge. Japanese interests bought both brands and elevated them to new heights — you can now buy tees with Washington state references created entirely by a Japanese design team. Kavu, meanwhile, remains based in Seattle but credits the Japanese market as critical to its 30-plus years of success. It’s a similar story for Seattle’s 50-plus-year-old down garments manufacturer, Crescent Down Works.
While PNW sensibilities, filtered through the Japanese fashion industry, populate Windthrow’s shelves, brands designed and sometimes even made in the Northwest share a common trait: a Portland address. Ultralight windbreakers from gnuhr, neutral tone staples from EarthStudies and the cult fleece from Senchi Designs all hail from the Rose City.
Portland has a clutch of design talent thanks to the swoosh, as Nike’s presence has attracted other top brands like Adidas and minted a large community of talented gear designers. Oregon and Oregon State boast two of the country’s three university-level outdoor product development programs (the third is at Utah State, in the outdoors-obsessed Beehive State).
Seattle, for all its heritage brands like Filson and REI, not to mention Eddie Bauer — who patented the down jacket in 1940, paving the way for today’s designer puffer as a fashion statement piece — has fallen behind on the innovation front.
But ultimately, Hoe opened Windthrow to embrace an emerging trend that he believes will have lasting appeal in this city, whose residents have an everyday aspiration to spend time outside in wild places as well as a sensibility (and the disposable income) willing to embrace more stylish gear.
“There are brands like CAYL from Korea who make amazing technical gear that also looks cool,” Hoe said. “I can use it out on a ridge traverse. And I can also walk around Paris because it looks awesome. That’s what Seattle can bring to the table in some unique way.
“In my fantasy about this place, we can do both those things.”
