The North Face’s Best Gear Looks Even Better Bigger
Spring/Summer 2026 might be a new season, but it presents the same old The North Face Purple Label. Even the name of this collection, “The Mountain Ivy,” remains unchanged from the Japanese label’s previous few drops.
Not that I’m complaining, though. So far, in the name of “Mountain Ivy,” The North Face Purple Label has delivered an abundance of plainly stylish trekking gear.
The brand’s combination of preppy Ivy League garb and rugged outdoor clothing is a distinctly Japanese phenomenon — quite literally, in the sense that it can only be bought in Japan: The North Face Purple Label is a Japan-exclusive line separate from the rest of The North Face. But there’s also a cultural angle at play.
“Heavy ivy” was born out of a ‘70s-era Japanese infatuation with the presumed style of WASP-y Ivy League college students in the American northwest. Japanese youth began mixing Oxford shirts and pleated chinos with mountain parkas and hiking boots, creating an all-American hodgepodge of contrasting styles before there was ever a Ralph Lauren.
Fifty years later, the look lives on through a handful of labels, like The North Face Purple Label.
Eiichiro Homma, founder of menswear label Nanamica, is The North Face Purple Label’s longtime creative director and, as always, he puts forth loose outdoor gear in versatile tones brought to life through sublime styling. Items like a boxy black GORE-TEX field jacket, bereft of any prominent logos, is styled with oversized organic cotton and chambray shirts to create a business-casual facade that’s secretly utilitarian — mountain ivy in a nutshell.
One look that departs from The North Face Purple Label’s typical subdued color schemes combines a field parka, designed to have a more relaxed fit than TNF’s typical offering, and matching wide-leg track pants made of a recycled nylon taffeta with an intentionally uneven dye, splotches of dark blue forming across light blue. A rare print for the brand, whose Spring/Summer 2026 collection is otherwise made up of single tones.
But other than the one experimental dyeing technique, it's business as usual for The North Face Purple Label and its fantastically preppy breed of mountain clothing. Thank God.
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