The Future of Fashion Might Come from Vancouver

When you need to escape from the malaise of mainstream fashion, you basically have two options. Option one is the world of crafty maximalism, where you can revel in the joy of collecting a bunch of beautiful, artisanal stuff. Option two is sleek, minimalistic techwear, a rigorously utilitarian corner of the fashion universe where design flourishes exist only insofar as they help the wearer achieve extra comfort or convenience. It is where you turn, essentially, when regular clothes stop making sense, and when only a monkishly edited closet will do.

Lately, brands like A-Cold-Wall* and Alyx have offered a glimpse at the bleeding edge of survivalist-core fashion. But for the past decade, Veilance, a diffusion line of the performance outdoor company Arc’teryx, has been making some of the most purely and severely utilitarian clothing in the world. Given that we’re entering a period where sartorial malaise is inevitable, where what’s cool and what’s popular are now, essentially, the same, Veilance makes a compelling case that the future of clothing might look like what’s coming out of its factory southeast of Vancouver.

It’s hard to imagine, looking at some of those Veilance products, that they were constructed through an existing manufacturing process. The Veilance Gore-Tex tote bag looks like a gray pebble that’s been smoothed into a perfect soft rectangle by a million years of waves. The brand’s sleek hooded parkas with impenetrable taped seams could be uniforms salvaged from the crash-landed UFO of an advanced civilization.

Veilance Spring-Summer 2020

Veilance gear is, of course, manufactured, most of it in an Arc’teryx facility southeast of Vancouver, which is referred to somewhat dramatically as “Arc’One.” There, some 400 employees create Arc’teryx’s most advanced products: climbing harnesses, foul-weather parkas, massive waterproof rucksacks that Navy SEALs use to transport radios underwater, and Veilance outerwear. When I went to Arc’One last month with Veilance creative director Taka Kasuga, it occurred to me that he might be the luckiest fashion designer in North America. His design studio is a mere 30 minutes from the factory. When his team creates a prototype jacket, he can drive it to the factory and watch one of the most advanced performance-apparel factories in the world turn it into a fully realized product.

As so many of today’s top performance brands were, Arc’teryx was founded by a couple of rock-climbing buddies, in 1989. The fledgling label adopted the name and image of the archaeopteryx lithographica fossil, thought to be the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. Evolution wasn’t just a symbolic gesture: The brand soon went from making climbing harnesses to making pricey performance wear, the quality of which Acronym designer Errolson Hugh once compared to Hermès. (Hugh, a former Arc’teryx collaborator, came up with the name Veilance.) These days, the Arc’teryx fossil logo is ubiquitous from the slopes of Aspen to Frank Ocean’s Instagram.

As with most Arc’teryx employees, Kasuga lives the outdoorsy British Columbian lifestyle the brand caters to. When he picked me up outside my hotel to go to the factory, he folded his legs into the backseat of his colleague’s very sensible, very Vancouver three-door hatchback, and proceeded to cramp up—he had been playing in his soccer league the previous night, and the match had gone to extra time. (Kasuga’s team lost in a heartbreaker.)

Kasuga grew up in the Japanese countryside and discovered skateboarding and the Beastie Boys at a young age. He enrolled in Tokyo’s famous Bunka Fashion College, and in the early aughts, after his graduate collection was picked up by Browns, he landed a job with Junya Watanabe. Kasuga had had plans to move to Europe to pursue more conceptual fashion design, but he found it difficult to reject the sheer wearability of the Americana-inflected clothes he was making at Junya. (When he arrived, the brand had recently begun its famous reconstructions of clothing by Levi’s and the North Face.) “I realized that actually what people wear today is T-shirts, jeans, sneakers—all of which were basically invented by American culture,” Kasuga told me. He was, moreover, fascinated by the fact that what’s now considered casual sportswear has its origins in performance. “All of these clothes were purpose-built,” he said. “Levi’s invented jeans for a customer who was a coal miner. Since things that people wear today come from utilitarian stuff, I was interested in being involved in what comes next.”

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