Will we ever say goodbye to gorpcore?

“Man, am I gorpcore,” I thought, resplendent in North Face jacket, fuzzy blue Patagonia long underwear top and black Merrell boots. Everyone else present was gorpcore too, of course. I was in a ski lodge in Vermont, surrounded by red-faced children in Gore-Tex, stuffing themselves with $20 chicken nuggets between runs. The kids wore it better, frankly. Still, it’s nice to be on trend, even if briefly and by coincidence, and even if the trend is named after a hiker’s utilitarian snack (“good old raisins and peanuts”). 

Gorpcore — functional outdoor clothing worn for everyday rather than to stay warm and dry in the elements — turns out to have an alpinist’s endurance. It was first noticed in the wild six or seven years ago, its ascent roughly coinciding with camping-chic runway shows from Prada and others. Puffer coats, Patagonia fleeces and technical-looking shoes have been seen in New York bars ever since. 

Of course, there is nothing new about sporting gear morphing into casual wear. All of preppy clothing, from boat shoes to polo shirts, is built on this migration. And no less of a style master than Gianni Agnelli wore hiking books with a suit. By such twists the history of fashion is written. 

I have heard murmurs that gorpcore is dead at last. If true, this will render three decades of my accumulated outdoor gear obsolete (except for the several weeks a year I spend outside). But the brands have not gotten the memo quite yet. Burberry is pushing on with, for example, $990 Teva-like sandals in its namesake plaid. 

There is, I would speculate, a reason for this endurance. Gorpcore has a powerful commercial logic. Arc’teryx, boss of the gorpcore brands, can take what is (in my assessment) a North Face raincoat, double the price and sell it to someone who will only test its seams between a taxi and a restaurant. Excellent work, if you can get it, and better still if, like Burberry, you can quintuple the price, instead. 

The persistence of gorpcore contrasts with its sort-of ancestor, normcore, which appeared over a decade ago and has slipped into the no man’s land between obsolescence and ubiquity. Normcore was white sneakers and white athletic socks, average-looking jeans, nondescript baseball caps and the like. It has succeeded as a word, and perhaps as an approach to life, but it just didn’t give the brands much to sell. High-end normcore was a contradiction, and looked dumb.

The critic Arthur Danto noted a striking feature of late-20th-century art (everything after Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes”, basically): much of it was materially indistinguishable from normal, everyday stuff. What made it art, then? Context. It is part of a community, a history and a philosophical dialogue. The artworld, as he called it, “transfigures” commonplace stuff into art. True enough, but when artists swap beauty and craftsmanship for ideas and innovation, they do so at their own risk, or rather ours. You might get Warhol. But you can also end up with Jeff Koons, selling rich idiots’ inanity back to them at extraordinary prices. 

The analogy with fashion may be too obvious to belabour, but here goes. Those who would turn hiking boots or ponchos into fashion also aim for transfiguration. This magic trick is, in one form or another, as old as fashion. The question is whether the trick’s early-21st-century version still works. In the absence of other likely materials, trendmakers and brands grab at one or another form of simple functional clothing and hope to make it into something that demonstrates taste, discrimination and (let us not forget) wealth.

Lately, the trick is a bust most of the time. A Carhartt is just a sturdy canvas jacket; a puffer is just a winter coat; white Air Force 1’s are just plain trainers. These are fine-looking, inexpensive, casual garments, which in our dressed-down world we are free to wear whenever or however we like. But repeated efforts to make them into something powerful and original — into real fashion — have worn hopelessly thin, and now produce little more than an acrid smell of commercial machinery run to the breaking point.

Robert Armstrong is the FT’s US financial commentator

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