Adventures in outdoor retail catalogs
And a puzzle: Why is Patagonia the most trusted brand across both political parties?
Living as I do in the remote mountains of northern Westchester, high-performance tech wear is essential. I stick to a simple layers strategy: weatherproof shell for setting the garbage cans on the curb (with under-arm venting in case the walk back up the stairs is too strenuous); natural wool or hemp for its wicking properties in hot or cold weather; a variety of cotton tees, usually from Japanese retailers, that serve primarily as a signal to other adventurers that my tastes are austere but considered. My Crocs, of course, are an All-Terrain model.
Utah State University (USU) Libraries’ Outdoor Recreation Catalogs & Magazines collection represents an ongoing effort to collect these catalogs and other outdoor recreation publications. Within this digital exhibit, you can browse, by company, the covers of more than 1,300 issues from manufacturers like Lowe Alpine and Sierra Designs to retailers like Eastern Mountain Sports and REI. You will also find publications for outdoor enthusiasts, like Backpacker magazine and Ski Research News.
Chase Anderson of USU, who among other titles is an “Outdoor Archivist,” shared some of his favorite images from the collection with Scope Creep. The digital collection is somewhat thin at the moment—mostly covers, although work to get scans online continues—but researchers can request access to the physical collection in Logan, Utah and visit the archive in person. The mega-tradeshow Outdoor Retailer is returning to Salt Lake City this year after a multi-year dalliance in Colorado, is about 90 minutes from the USU campus in Logan, Utah.
I haven’t been to OR since the last year it was in SLC, but recommend it for anyone who enjoys product design, especially fabric; it was at an OR where I spoke to a supplier from a Japanese materials giant who—before realizing I was there as a journalist, not a buyer—listed many of the brands for whom the company not only provided cutting edge weather-proof fabrics, but also sewing and even design.
A truth of the industry is that there really just aren’t that many different ways to make outdoor clothing, most of which is plastic, and many of the same “sustainable” companies’ petroleum-based fleeces are made in the same factories that make products for Walmart or other generic retailers. In fairness to many of the name-brand techwear companies, most are trying to find more sustainable yet still as performant materials to replace plastics within their supply chains.
Patagonia in particular has positioned themselves as the most transparently aware of their contribution to the planet’s plastics glut and is making sincere attempts to at least use recycled plastics in lieu of virgin plastics where they can. Their brand positioning in 2022 sits almost exclusively at that tension: they’ll put out documentaries that skew towards eco-radicalism while also giving a tacit shrug to the reality that some of their marquee products are also shedding microplastics into waterways every time they go into a washing machine. We’re looking into it, but also here are 2023’s latest throwback colorways.
I don’t quite know what to make of it.
But I suspect that tension factors in somehow to the fact that Patagonia is the top brand that both Republicans and Democrats find reputable:
It’s not all a bummer: Supplier Primaloft has a biodegradable fleece option called “Primaloft Bio” that was announced in 2018 and is now being used by Kathmandu in a line of (fairly generic looking) fleeces.