The chances of walking down the streets of London or New York without knocking into a self-proclaimed nature dweller adorned in the newest Salomons wearing their Arc’teryx gore-tex shell jacket is probably less than the chances of getting struck by lightning. Did all the men just wake up one day and decide to go back to their manly hunter roots?
GORP-core, as a term, first made its appearance in a CUT article in 2017. This trend ostensibly continues to stick around, but is not as unprecedented as it may seem. There has been a cyclical surge in ‘outdoor fashion’ that has resulted in an increased interest in outdoor activities and a slow creep toward the woods. Although the trend has encouraged newer generations to embrace the great outdoors, with hiking trips and outdoor walking groups growing in popularity post-pandemic, Salomons and Gramicci are more likely to be seen in Brooklyn holding an oat matcha than scaling mountains.
It would be easy to understand the lingering desirability of the trend if it were just about function over form, but tracing the history reveals a different story. From as far back as history allows us to look, men have always used clothing as a means to create a rugged facade. The iconic image of Teddy Roosevelt in his buckskin suit is a prime example of this illusion of masculinity. The narrative created when wearing one, of hunting and shooting a deer, skinning, tanning and then sewing it all together, was false. As Rachel S. Gross explains in Shopping All the Way to the Woods, it was often Native American women who produced these suits. Preceding the synthetic outdoor gear of the present, the ingenuity of Indigenous communities in creating waterproof and heat conserving fabrics was all one had to face the treacherous outdoors. This effort has since been long-forgotten.
On the other side of the Atlantic, clothing makers were creating garments to suit the sporting sensibilities of the Imperial English man. They were distinguished by their physical prowess in the wilderness and on the sporting field, and their self-sufficiency. Much of the new English sports have their foundations in the Colonies of the empire, similar to the foundations of modern masculinity. The idea of masculinity as rooted reaction to crisis originates from the intention to conquer rather than be one with nature. This “new masculinity” became framed by the preparedness to face the great outdoors, resulting in proliferation of Boy Scout programmes in the West. Some places where we can observe this construction of hegemony are the appropriation of a local Indian game played by both sexes. The British army appropriated this game, now known as polo, as a way for officers to perform masculinity when not on the battlefield. The outdoors remained a platform to perform imperial masculinity even upon the end of the empire. The race to the top of the Himalayas was a point of contention upon the loss of imperial power. It was equated to British-ness with the creation of the official “Mount Everest Committee.” These expeditions often involved the exploitation of local Sherpas in the West’s quest to compete and conquer. Mountaineers would often require the help of Sherpas as guides and mentors, but would tout their “successes” as products of self sufficiency, relegating the role of Sherpas to more feminine tasks in their tales.
In this way, the creation of masculinity in the outdoors came at the expense of colonial subjects. The surge in outdoor activity in the 20th century and the following rise of “Boy Scouts” is thus underscored by the formulation of an imperial masculine hegemony. It is not just the human desire to be one with nature, but also the colonial mindset of conquest that fashioned the love for the outdoors. When we wear our gore-tex and fleece in our day-to-day urban lifestyles, it is in some ways a result of colonial behaviourism that fashioned this masculinity.
