If you haven’t come across the term, gorpcore is technical outdoor gear worn as everyday fashion, a waterproof shell or fleece doing a shift in a café instead of on a hill. It’s been around for a few years, but it’s stuck around long enough now to be worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a passing look.
What it gets right
It’s introduced genuinely good design thinking to a much wider audience than the outdoor world usually reaches. Durability, weather resistance, thoughtful pocket placement, none of that is exclusive to people who hike, and there’s nothing wrong with more people wearing gear built to a higher functional standard than typical fast fashion, even if they never take it further than the school run. It’s also normalised something that used to feel slightly odd: wearing technical gear without a trip attached to justify it. That’s a fine thing to normalise.
Where the tension shows up
The problem isn’t that people wear outdoor gear without going outdoors. It’s what happens to product design when a large share of demand is driven by how something looks in a photo rather than how it performs in weather. Colourways chosen for shelf appeal over practicality. Cuts adjusted for a flattering silhouette rather than layering properly under a pack. Durability and adjustability quietly taking a back seat to a cleaner profile. None of that is inherently dishonest, a brand is allowed to design for a fashion market. It does mean the same jacket hanging next to a genuinely trail-built one on a shelf might have been designed against a completely different brief, even if the marketing language sounds identical.
The test that doesn’t change
For us, the question stays the same regardless of who’s buying it or why: would this survive contact with an actual wet, windy, multi-day trip. That’s not a judgement on anyone wearing gear they never intend to test that way. It’s just the standard we’re building to, because it’s the one our actual customers need met.
Gear looking good and gear working aren’t opposites
They’re just two different design briefs, and it’s worth knowing which one a specific product was actually built against before assuming a technical-looking jacket will behave like technical gear once the weather turns. Gorpcore didn’t create that gap. It just made it a lot more visible.
Over and Out