Fashion Archaeology: The North Face Denali Jacket
The Y2K-era status symbol you wore and loved is back.
Welcome to Fashion Archaeology, a Clotheshorse series that explores the sartorial and cultural impacts of some of fashion, beauty, and retail’s most iconic artifacts.
I bickered with my parents about a lot of things in 2004. Chief among them: why they wouldn’t take us to Atlantis for spring break so I too could stumble across smuggled stolen antiquities, enjoy a week-long PG-rated romance, break curfew, and feud with Megan Fox. But our longest, most relentless conflict may have been centered around a minty-green The North Face fleece I wore into the literal dirt.
This jacket single-handedly taught me about the concept of cost-per-wear and had me lecturing about ROI like a Goldman Sachs senior analyst. But my parents, being rational adults with three additional decades of life experience, found it absurd and probably a little gross that I only took it off to bathe. I specifically remember their frustration when I, at 14, insisted on wearing it to a funeral service, and they very reasonably did not want me to do that. (To Betty and Dave: I am so sorry.)
If you’re roughly my age (mid-30s-ish) and were even marginally as absorbed by both material culture and social status in middle school as me, you may have a similar memory. Which makes this TikTok that recently came across my desk all the more startling:
Other posts you might like:
There’s a lot to unpack here, least of which is the use of the word “retro” in reference to my adolescence and the way it makes me feel like the Crypt-Keeper. This TikTok has been viewed nearly 85,000 times and there are hundreds of others like it, with similar-looking comment sections. “omg i always wanted one in middle school bc everyone had one😂😂😭,” wrote @mikaylamadelyn; “ive still got my black one shes ready to make a comeback,” wrote @_jessica.reid. Whether we peak-millennials like it or not, the North Face Denali jacket is yet another piece valuable ephemera of a bygone era in which it cost 10 cents to send and/or receive a single text message.
Back in October, actor and creator Angie Cocuzza posted her own now-viral TikTok about the Denali jacket comeback, so I asked her a penny for her thoughts.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
“Getting a hold of that jacket in the early 2000s was the equivalent of gold,” she told me. “It was the ultimate status symbol, next to having the little Hollister bird or the Abercrombie moose on the corner of your babydoll shirt. If you had some sort of dupe, it was like having those Emu boots instead of Uggs. Sure they served the exact same purpose of keeping you warm, but it just wasn’t the same.”
Angie, like me, found her Denali on discount whilst at TJ Maxx with her mom. (Mine came from a summer sidewalk sale at my hometown’s since-shuttered outdoor retailer. RIP, Uncle Dan’s.)
“I also remember deeming it my ‘winter coat’ even though it was merely a fleece meant to be layered under a bigger jacket,” she said. “I’d go out to the bus in the mornings with just the Denali on and my mom would beg me to put something over it. And I thought, at the risk of people not being able to see this North Face logo? Certainly not.”
Of course, the Denali jacket falls in line with the comeback and re-commercialization of the Y2K trends we knew and loved as youths. But Angie, who self-identifies as being at the tail-end of the millennial generation, credits the Denali resurgence to something more specific than the general trend cycle.
“Thrifting has been made very popular in recent years, including the creation of those thrifting Instagram pages where the girlies go out and source at thrift stores and sell curated thrift bundles for a price, plus shipping,” she says. “The very clothes that are mainly in those thrift stores are all stuff people have donated from the ‘90s and 2000s.”
Naturally, this is influencing current brand behavior. Retailers of all makes and models — including capital-F fashion houses, as my friend wrote about last week — are increasingly capitalizing on nostalgia by reintroducing classic designs, iconic styles, and past collaborations. But I wanted to see just how much of a trickle-down effect this had on fleeces, specifically, so I called a Gearhead Outfitters location here in Chicago and talked to a very friendly store associate named Alex, who’s worked at the store for the past three years. (Hello, Gearhead Outfitters corporate! Please get in touch so I can tell you to give Alex a raise.)
Indeed, Alex said that on the shop floor, retro-look, fleece-lined jackets are very “in” these days. Some of this may be nostalgia-driven, he hypothesized, but he’s also noticed an uptick of interest in eco-friendly styles with recyclable materials — the likes of which leads themselves more naturally to retro-style fleeces, like the Denali.
Just last week, cult-favorite Danish label Cecile Bahnsen unveiled its collaboration with The North Face, which comes complete with $1,000 nylon jackets and $600 nylon shorts and a $900 nylon dress — for the professional mountaineers who are down to drop some serious dough on a little bit of whimsy. It is an interesting experience in brand partnersips, to be sure, but will it sell? In her review, The Cut’s Shopping Editor Hanna Flanagan wrote: “I can’t think of a single occasion that calls for flower-adorned 100 percent nylon and 100 percent polyester bermuda shorts.”
I can tell you with some certainty, though, that a Denali redux would do numbers. If The North Face would like to bring me on as a consultant, I’m available to discuss.