What If Performancewear Didn’t Look...Like That?
The level of tactical gear — or, Gorp-iness — in someone’s outfit is a useful litmus test for determining whether someone spends too much time on r/menswear or is a doomsday preparer. Often, it’s both. This reality cannot, however, eclipse the movement’s underlying ethos, one that asserts that clothes should be able to be put through their paces and survive to tell the tale. The question is whether or not technical clothing needs to look like it’s built to survive a dystopian hellscape. But what if you could disguise all of that with tailoring, and get the best of both worlds: clothing that looks as good as it performs?
Graphpaper teams up with Descente to create what is essentially anti-gorp gorp. The Japanese label takes eight familiar wardrobe staples and reworks them through Descente’s performance-driven approach to sportswear, leaving a byproduct that is equal parts outdoor functionality and tailored attitude.
Take the wide coat, for example, a silhouette original to Graphpaper now optimized by Descente’s water repellent wool-blend fabric. Essentially, it’s a piece light enough to resemble your heavier wool outerwear, with the performance of, say, an Arc’teryx rain slicker. Which is to say: This piece looks like a proper coat more than a piece of weather-proofing technology, but in fact, it is both, and well-balanced to boot.
Striking this ideal blend of design and performance isn’t easy to do. In fact, it’s more often than not that fashion-as-performance doesn’t land quite as intended, as with the 2021 Arc’teryx x Jil Sander collab which alienated a large swath of the Canadian hiking brand’s consumer base with the Jil Sander prices. There was also the 2020 MM6 x The North Face collab, which was essentially a conceptual collection of circle-shaped puffers that were, while really dope to look at, simply too weird for a human to ever practically wear.
Graphpaper x Descente is like an actionable solution here because it doesn’t envision an imaginary catastrophe for its wearer to survive. The collaboration merges the utilitarian with design, without veering too trend-forward “what if your clothing could do both” way. Everyone can benefit from clothing designed to perform well, especially the people who like their clothes to just look like clothes. What a lovely treatise.
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