Don’t Buy this Flamethrower!
And other reasons why Patagonia has made way for Canada Goose, the puffer or parka of choice for today’s elite
Winter is coming? Global elites converging on the snowy Swiss town of Davos last week would argue that it’s already here. What better garment to defend the establishment from the residual chill of 2017 than the increasingly ubiquitous, (and notoriously pricey) Canada Goose coat? Billionaire Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s choice of the C$795 Montebello Parka for women served as a potent signifier for soft power relations.
From specialist origins as supplier for rangers, city police and municipal workers, the Canadian apparel-maker has seen its shares gain 40 per cent since its trading debut in March 2017, boosting its market value to $2.3 billion. Having conquered the US market, they are now making in-roads in the UK.
Wearing what Canada Goose boast to be “the warmest jacket on earth,” film stars and management consultants hike the uncompromising terrain of late capitalism’s elite circuit — between UberX cars, first class lounges and executive boardrooms. Padded with premium goose down and a coyote fur hood trim, the signature Expedition Parka designed for scientists working for the United States Arctic Program, Planet Earth’s most affluent are dressing for their worst nightmare. Not for a wet, slippery sidewalk in Davos, but for the imminent unknown of capitalism’s collapse.
Like Land Rover or Patagonia, Canada Goose’s brand prestige is drawn from their authentic and practical origins. In this case, equipping Canadian rangers and Arctic scientists. Rather than quibble with the superfluous fancies of ‘fashion’ its’ wearers have bigger things to worry about; tooling-up and investing in themselves to face a fast-approaching economic trauma.
Catastrophe-play has become an aspirational ‘privacy’ mode for our live-streamed times. As the utopian promise of the internet melts away to reveal Geohell, our new Trumpian reality has induced a repressed atavism observed in the sovereign commitment of the affluent and isolated prepper. A lifestyle-typology absorbing Tesla, Soylent, Crossfit and UnderArmour that’s determinedly trained on a (very boring and lonely) life spent in a modernist glass cube in the forests — like in Ex Machina or numerous episodes of Black Mirror. A splendidly isolated existence far from the realities and challenges of society.
The bloated puffers and parkas conceal as much as they reveal. This is stealth luxury for those who are running out of hiding places. As a combination of populism and cynicism erodes the accessible veneer of pseudo-Buddhist SoulCyle or the ironic posture of normcore, private rapacity is forced out into the open. Canada Goose is privacy, exhibited, bearing its’ teeth.
In the phenomenon of raw water and its subsequent online mockery, we see the poetic death of a certain kind of sage-like capitalist steward, once represented by Steve Jobs. Now, Elon Musk dominates as the archetypal representative of modern capitalism. Last week he sold 20,000 flame throwers under the name of his tunnelling enterprise, The Boring Company. Having promised that they would “work against hordes of the undead or your money back!” he later implored his followers on Instagram not to buy one.
If Patagonia said “Don’t Buy this Jacket” to introduce the voice of the ethical superego to temper the destructive, ego-driven world of consumer decision-making, Musk says “Do Not Buy this Flamethrower” as weak, ironic lip-service to the dying superego that simply does not “like fun.”
In the flame-throwing shadow of the adventurer archetype, we toil in the era of ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ corporate culture. As the profit-motive hunts further afield for new opportunities—the corners of the internet, life sciences and the moon — it drags us with it. Finally, the ‘corporate explorer’ has fully emerged in the dawn of a new sun. Shorn of its suit, brief case and corner office, business acumen is now represented by pure speculation. The corporate explorer must be scrappy, brave and mobile — a daring and dangerous agent of progress and innovation. Elon Musk famously described entrepreneurship as “chewing on glass and staring at the sun.”
So why, when there are so many in the marketplace, is Canada Goose the outdoor wear brand of the moment for the corporate explorer? Perhaps the quotidian practicality of North Face and the fluffy ethical values of Patagonia feel like holding the brace position in a doomed aircraft. We need a sturdier investment to wage war against the catastrophe-play GIFs that loop inside our heads.
Canada Goose is closed-circle equipment. Like big headphone cans and hummers, they draw the wearer inwards, wherein they become lonely boxers or Olympic swimmers psyching themselves up for a war, of some kind. Canada Goose offers wearers the historically material values of rugged self-sufficiency for the immaterial — often imaginary — battles that corporate explorers wage in today and tomorrow’s unforgiving boardrooms.
Canada Goose’s competitor Moncler vividly brings to life the inversion of stealth luxury and the unmasking of capitalism’s appetite in a startling collaboration with Chinese artist Liu Bolin. Drawing on H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and Plato’s tale of the Ring of Gyges, questions around the ethical value of individual isolation and invisibility are animated.
Moncler and Liu Bolin ask us: can humans can be trusted to act justly when they are invisible and unaccountable to all but themselves?
-Rosie Picton and Kourosh Newman-Zand
