It’s a Layered World

Heritage and functionality, innovation and icons: Woolrich and GORE-TEX continue their historic union in the new SS23 collection.

Everything around us is layered. Everything that dwells within us is layered. Elements and stories, human beings and sensations, nature and inspiration. Our world is stratified, populated by interior perceptions and external needs, vistas that translate thought into matter and turn resolve into form, history into modernity.

This world is engaged in a constant dance between performance and style, comfort and utility. All of this is expressed in Woolrich’s SS23 collection and in some of its products, developed and conceptualized around a material-manifesto of the outdoor universe, its imagery and its needs: the GORE-TEX INFINIUM™. This collection includes a fully taped and 100% waterproof high-tech jacket, the High Tech Waterproof Jacket, the breathable and wind-resistant Long Hooded Parka, and the Shirt Jacket from Outdoor Label Designed in Japan. All of these are ideal for outdoor activities and lined with a special sweat-absorbing mesh fabric. Woolrich teaches us that every product has space for determination, vision and storytelling. In every hood, pocket, and zipper we can find the DNA of a brand that has always been iconic; a brand that has never turned its back on versatility, aesthetic spirit, or practical sensibility.

This can be found all the way back in the 1830s, with the genesis of the ‘Doing it Right’ philosophy, and the insight to provide attire for actions that define people and for people who define action. It all began around the concepts of functionality and utility, from understanding and studying a part of society that symbiotically embraces nature and faces its dangers and temperament. Hard Wearing for Hard Workers, for people who experienced each layer as an extension of their own skin, as a rational shell to be cast off and reassembled according to their needs, driven by the single, pragmatic goal of survival.

At the crossroads of the great industrial revolution, we discovered that, when everything was said and done, human beings were energetic machines. And our protection and survival might depend on the conscious adjustment of clothes and materials, on ‘layering’. A hat could prevent hypothermia. A jacket might enable homeostasis, the self-regulation of body temperature. It is in this advancement that the Woolrich heritage nestles. It lies within the scientific evolutions and cognitive layering that, following the natural course of things, bring together those who have made the outdoor world their temple.

From Sunday skiers to climbers conquering monumental peaks – like the first expedition on Dhaulagiri in 1973 and the invincible K2 two years later – to backpackers and two-wheeled mountaineers, America’s oldest outdoor clothing company has achieved the sublime where the air becomes rarefied and blood turns to ice, where the heart pounds and breath becomes short. They’ve done so with multi-faceted technology capable of enhancing the exceptional as effectively as the normalcy of everyday life. This exceptionalism flowed through modern creativity and would translate into design and awareness.

Only knowledge can produce the iconic. Only fusion and blending can produce excellence. Encapsulated in this manifesto is the synergy between Woolrich and GORE-TEX, born in the 1970s with a product that has become an icon, the Mountain Jacket. The micro-pores engineered through Bob Gore’s scientific genius have intertwined with Woolrich’s outdoor vision, cyclically reinforcing its identity, collection after collection. Almost half a century later, this marriage of mastery continues to protect hikers and urban explorers around the world, divided and coinciding in a modern world that is no longer compartmentalized.

Everything around us is layered. Everything that dwells within us is layered. Amidst remote quarries and metropolitan vistas, paved roads and trodden paths, the relationship between Woolrich and GORE-TEX continues to disseminate these ideas in SS23, protecting those who choose them and are chosen by them. It is a layered world, always has been, always will be. Each layer will carry on transforming thought into matter, turn resolve into form, history into modernity.