En 1947, the Florentine designer Emilio Pucci, then on vacation in the Swiss resort of Zermatt, shook up the current dress code by imagining an anorak with a hood, accompanied by pants tightened over the shoes. An accomplished skier, the young man had the idea of creating this ski outfit that was as chic as it was practical for his aristocratic friends, who, like him, were passionate about winter sports. The whole thing has its effect, even ending up in the pages of Harper‘s Bazaar.
This is because it has all the makings of a small revolution: at the beginning of the century, the slopes were worn down in street clothes, hunting clothes, even horse riding clothes, with ties and tweed jackets for the gentlemen and fur coats for the the ladies. There was indeed, in the 1920s, an ersatz parka made from Bonneval cloth – a woolen fabric as warm as it was waterproof – but nothing elegant enough for an upper middle class accustomed to spending their vacations winter in the great outdoors, between St. Moritz and Gstaad.
For a while, aesthetics and technique do not necessarily go well together. Nylon ski jackets, then Gore-Tex, are reserved for high-level athletes, who seek to combine performance and comfort without worrying too much about style. It was not until the 1990s that the parka became popular off the slopes. When launching his Snow Beach collection in 1993, designed for board sports enthusiasts, Ralph Lauren did not expect it to find its way onto the streets of New York.
The embodiment of the American dream, the designer – and in particular his Polo line, more “pop” – attracts the attention of the Lo-Life, a gang of young people from the working class neighborhoods of New York who seize this piece, whose primary colors and the XXL logo seduce even the rapper Raekwon, member of the Wu-Tang Clan, who wears it in the title clip Can It All Be So Simple (1993).
Unions at the top
Today, blurring the lines, slaloming between trend and technology, sports equipment manufacturers and fashion figures are uniting for good, sometimes even merging. A pioneer in the field, the Frenchman Jean-Charles de Castelbajac applied his naive motifs to parkas and other ski jackets signed Rossignol in 2002.
Moncler, a transalpine reference in terms of down jackets designed for both asphalt and summits, joins forces with the cream of international creation (the American Thom Browne, the Japanese Chitose Abe, etc.) and pop culture (Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams), while regularly recalling his mountain origins, Grenoble in this case.
When it’s not luxury brands launching their “skiwear” collection… From the Chanel branded snowboard, released for winter 2001-2002, to the latest communication campaign by Balenciaga and shot on a beach with sand as white as snow: this obligatory step, which consists of accompanying its customers wherever they go , rarely goes unnoticed.
