Hyperinflation: how the puffer coat blew up

In the history of fashion, this may be remembered as the era of the puffer jacket. This synthetic cold-weather top layer, typically down-filled, has supplanted the more formal wool overcoat, becoming the winter wardrobe staple of skaters, bankers and suburban mums alike. It’s become a category no brand can afford to ignore, and a portal into the world of luxury for outdoor sports labels whose reputations were originally built on pure performance.

Though the puffer has had subcultural cachet for decades, its evolution into a bona fide luxury staple was foreshadowed by the arrival of the bulky Canada Goose parka, which became an unlikely status symbol seemingly overnight in the early 2010s. In 2016, one of the standout pieces from Demna Gvasalia’s debut collection for Balenciaga was an oversized ski parka designed to be worn slung off the shoulders. It was disarmingly elegant, a tidy visual metaphor for Gvasalia’s quick-change from avant-garde outsider with his brand Vetements to establishment pacesetter.

Balenciaga now produces variations on the oversized parka each season, and luxury labels such as Burberry have fallen in line, kowtowing to ground-up consumer demand. Lyst ranked The North Face’s Retro 1996 Nuptse puffer — the brand’s flagship product — as Q4 2020’s hottest item for both men and women. The jacket is as common a city sight as Apple’s little white earbuds.

This past January, Gucci closed the circle by releasing a capsule collection with The North Face that sold out almost immediately. Javier Seara, global leader in fashion and luxury at Boston Consulting Group, says the collaboration is part of a broad cultural shift towards wellness and outdoor activity as aspirational, and an acceptance of performance gear in casual settings.

“Down jackets were very popular at the beginning of the Nineties, but the luxury part of the market was missing,” says Seara. That white space has now been filled: The North Face parlayed a surge of youth interest in the 1990s, sparked by New York hip-hop culture’s affinity for the brand, into longstanding relationships with labels such as Supreme before joining forces with Maison Margiela and Gucci in 2020. Moncler, whose glossy, day-glo puffers have been a casual fixture throughout Europe for decades, launched the Genius program in 2018 — “a curation of the now” that eschews seasonal collections in favour of monthly product drops designed by and co-branded with the industry’s biggest names. Moncler, looking to shore up its position, recently completed the €1.15bn acquisition of competitor Stone Island, the progressive Italian brand founded by the late technical fashion innovator Massimo Osti with its own global community of diehard fans.

Even if you’re not a part of the subculture itself, you can still perceive its authenticity and the grit and excitement that brings with it

Errolson Hugh, a sage when it comes to contemporary outerwear, who founded Berlin-based technical clothing brand ACRONYM and collaborates frequently with Nike, sees the category’s present ubiquity as the flowering of subcultural seeds planted decades ago, when enthusiasts became obsessed with these brands for their function-first aesthetics. “Subcultures move mainstream culture forward,” says Hugh. “If that’s casuals rocking Stone Island in England or North Face ‘heads’ in New York rocking vintage Steep Tech and Expedition parkas, these things eventually percolate to the surface. Even if you’re not a part of the subculture itself, you can still perceive its authenticity and the grit and excitement that brings with it.”

Nate Bosshard, a former brand manager at Burton Snowboard and The North Face and now a general partner at venture capital firm Offline Ventures, echoes Hugh’s sentiments, and adds that it took outdoor brands as long to warm up to fashion as vice versa. Bosshard reflects on The North Face’s first foray into fashion with their debut Supreme collaboration in 2007: “There was a lot of nervousness. It was a very conservative brand. The guy who hired me at The North Face was Steve Rendle — he was the president of The North Face, now he’s the head of VF Brands [The North Face’s parent company]. It ultimately ended up getting approved because Steve’s son, who was in high school at the time and a skater, gave his dad comfort that it was OK to do a Supreme collab. Doing this was a way to give a nod to how people were interpreting the brand on their own, and embracing it.”

From this angle, the rise of the technical parka is an inevitable outcome of streetwear having become fashion’s lingua franca. Designers such as Gvasalia, or artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear Virgil Abloh, who grew up influenced by, for instance, graffiti writers wearing Arc’teryx shells to protect themselves from the elements, will naturally use these motifs in their own work.

Ana Andjelic, author of recent best-selling brand theory book The Business of Aspiration, offers another suggestion as to its popularity: “The rise of anxiety in society. This sounds far-fetched, but I don’t think it is. Ever since Vetements showed those oversized silhouettes, people have wanted them for safety, security, like a protective layer against the world. It’s turning millennial anxiety into taste.”

Times of crisis can also nudge us towards dependable purchases. Canada Goose’s ascent followed the financial crisis of 2008 and was driven by urban professionals. In a 2019 interview with the Financial Times, American designer Norma Kamali noted that immediately after 9/11, demand for her Sleeping Bag Coat, an extreme iteration of the puffer, spiked so drastically she had to produce another run off-season.

Against this backdrop, Boston Consulting Group’s Seara doesn’t see the down jacket market’s growth slowing. “I think, in the end, this is sneakers all over again,” he says. “Sneakers became the uniform of streetwear, then you could wear them to go to work, and then you start seeing the cheap ones, the luxury ones, and all variants of them. Rooted in all of this is that the functional benefits of the product are very obvious.” It was tempting enough to swap the wool overcoat for the cosy, water-resistant puffer before the latter got its luxury upgrade. Now, it’s hard to imagine a fashion landscape without it.

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