I’m always happy when I get to read something of Andy Kirkpatrick’s; he is incisive, original, fearless, and, most importantly, has a very advanced bullshit detector. It’s coincidental that this essay, on outdoor clothing, should come out, a couple of days after Doug and I returned from a trip to the Snowy (but not that snowy) Mountains. Everyday I had worn my old Patagonia insulated pull-over. An extremely simple piece of clothing: a layer of synthetic insulation sewn between two layers of light wind resistant nylon with a quarter zip at the neck. No hood, only one small breast pocket, elastic in the sleeves and bottom, and no sewn baffles. After 20 years, this piece of clothing is still going strong: sure it has a couple of patches and I avoid wearing it unprotected if pushing through trees and brush, but, if you consider both warmth for weight and longevity, this pull-over has beaten the odds.
It’s impossible to buy a pull-over like this anymore. Although Patagonia has 95 women's jackets on the site, not one approximates this pull-over. The new way to make jackets is to sew at least several dozen baffles in so that the jacket is criss-crossed with seams and has a certain “puffer jacket” look. Never mind that all those seams allow cold air to leak into the jacket and warm air to leak out. You look sharp, and, apparently, even in the rarefied shopping space of Patagonia (which we used to call Patagucci because every clothing item was so expensive) looking sharp is more important than being functional.
My current pull-over, like the previous one before, was bought from a Patagonia outlet shop. There were two of these in North America, one in our home town of Nelson, BC, and one in Dillon, Montana. Both extremely unlikely places to find Patagucci outlets and I’m not sure how the outlets came to be in either location. In Nelson, the outlet was downstairs from the main clothing store which sold a variety of brands, and, on occasion, you could score a reasonable jacket or pair of climbing pants at half the regular price. I used to buy all my Goretex (or similar clone) jackets from there as the jackets wore out with great frequency and were expensive to replace. They never fit quite right because the items that went to the outlet store were “failed” Patagucci items. There was always something a little odd about the cut and fit, but not odd enough to put you off buying something that was at least solidly made from quality material.
The Dillon outlet was much better than the Nelson one, despite the town being a third of the size. Dillon is home to the University of Montana Western and as such had a lot of young people amongst its small population. The outlet was always hopping and, in addition to having racks and racks and racks of clothing, at least 50% off again from the Canadian price (most things in the USA are 50% of the Canadian price which is why the USA has a more robust economy), the outlet did mail order so that while you were browsing the racks, the store attendants would be walking about the store gathering up items to ship off to far away locales. I’ve still got a pair of shorts and a tank top from the Dillon store, in addition to my pull-over.
I got my first pull-over from the Nelson store – a sky blue one that was subsequently ripped apart on backcountry ski adventures in the Selkirk mountains – and my second, current model, from Dillon. When we were in Canada in 2019, I searched all the outdoor stores for a replacement pull-over for Doug whose black pull-over had worn threadbare but was absent all the rips that mine had accumulated. I could not find anything even close, and the prices were exorbitant. MEC was in the death throes of its eventual financial collapse at the time – driven, of course, by DEI and ESG and marketing executives fresh out of graduate school who did not know a tricam from an ice-screw – and jackets (there were no pull-overs) were upwards of $500 each. Marketing is expensive and the money to fund marketing must come from somewhere.
These days, I buy my outdoor clothing (with the exception of rain jackets) from Aldi (centre-aisle) or K-Mart. The items cost under $30 (although disturbingly, these are likely made in some off-shore sweat shop, but so are the more expensive models) and no worse and very often better than a name brand like Kathmandu. There’s a persistent myth in the outdoor space that high tech, high cost gear is needed for every adventure from a two hour trail run to a multi-day ski trip. It’s a myth as old as time. Pre-social media days, people would buy their high tech gear to wear to the local coffee shop, these days, the high-tech gear is more likely to appear in the latest carefully staged social media post. But it’s not gear that gets shit done outdoors, it’s guts and grit, and perseverance and the ability to tolerate discomfort if not outright pain. None of these can be bought off the rack at a shop but must be earned in the daily battle against inertia.
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