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In 2017, Jason Chen coined the term gorpcore to describe fashion’s burgeoning fascination with “defiantly ugly…practical, element-braving” outdoor clothing brands. Prior to Chen’s coinage, gorp, an acronym for “good ol’ raisins and peanuts”, wasn’t especially well-known. But Chen was onto something: since then, gorpcore has come to define a genre of menswear designed to handle the rigors of the outdoors, even if the folks wearing them never make it off the couch.
The earliest proto-gorp brands—think Eddie Bauer and L.L.Bean—were around long before the term caught on with the menswear crowd. But over the last few years, brands like Arc’teryx, Patagonia, and The North Face have largely replaced them as stalwarts of the category. The basic goal remained the same, but the products, and the customers they were marketed to, changed dramatically.
Now gorp’s third wave has arrived. There’s a new vanguard of outdoor-adjacent brands steadily encroaching on a market once dominated by bigger counterparts—and they look whole a lot like their Gorp 1.0 predecessors. Each of the next-gen brands below sell clothes that go “from the crag to the coffee shop,” Wes Allen, owner of Understory, pithily notes. If Gorp 2.0 was all about hyper-technical, high-performance gear engineered for hiking, climbing, and exploring, Gorp 3.0 focuses on menswear tangentially inspired by the outdoors that still looks perfectly at home, well, at home.
Gorp 3.0 emphasizes natural fabrics like lightweight cotton ripstop, breathable hemp, temperature-regulating wool, and duck canvas, which ages like scotch and is tougher than kevlar. Plenty of brands also rely on artisanal dyeing and weaving techniques, which offer texture and depth synthetic materials can’t replicate; instead of using Gore-Tex or PFAS-rich fabrics, they opt for recycled nylons and polyesters.
There's a no-frills functionality to the new gorp, too. If designs are technical, their details skew less clunky; references to brands like Bauer and Bean are reverential but worn lightly. “I like the imperfections of ‘90s L.L. Bean or Patagonia,” says Mike McLachlan, the designer behind Connecticut-based Manresa. “They were climbing Everest then,” he points out, and managed okay without advanced technical fabrics and a surplus of “crazy pockets.” (Alex Honnold free solo’d Half Dome in a button-up and khaki shorts and didn’t seem too bothered.)
The next generation of outdoor clothing brands might not help you scale your own Everest, but when it comes to gearing up like Frank Ocean at fashion week they're the best place to start.
18 East
18 East feels as New York as the sign above its Elizabeth Street store, but it's perfectly at home in the woods and skate spots its products are designed for. Designer Antonio Ciongoli, formerly of Ralph Lauren and Eidos, brings a mad scientist’s sensibilities to his fabric selection and a tailor’s precision to his silhouettes, which tend to be roomy, oversized, and cut with a skater's eye for proportion.
Manresa
Connecticut-based Manresa takes inspiration from the New England outdoors and the hard-wearing, easy-going clothes folks from the area still swear by. Its slouchy rollnecks and waxed jackets are a little preppy and a lot practical (and as a bonus, boast some of the best product labels in the game). It all harks back to an era when clothes had actual jobs to do, and the biggest flex of all was the burly, capable, time-tested gear that helped you do it.
Adsum
Adsum was founded in Brooklyn in 2015, where it carved out a niche hawking understated, highly functional menswear that feels at home in the city, but really thrives outside of it. You could wear the brand head-to-toe on a casual Friday, swap out the shoes for a hike on Saturday, and then run the whole thing back at brunch on Sunday and never look out of place. Adsum's MO might skew technical, but unlike its predecessors, nothing it makes leads with that technical prowess, or leans too hard into it. If Volvo sold clothes, they’d probably look a lot like these—and that's about the highest compliment we can pay 'em.
William Ellery
William Ellery doesn’t make things for the sheer sake of it; the brand keeps its catalog almost frustratingly limited. That calculated restraint doesn't make it easy to get your hands on its rugged, no-bullshit clothing, but if you can…sheesh. The Brooklyn team behind the label loves to dive into menswear lore, riffing on (or reproducing) designs that have stood the test of time for decades—and have stood up to the outdoors for as long. Its beefy rugby shirts and nubby cargo trousers look killer anchored by trail-ready boots, and even better with lug-sole loafers.
Earth/Studies
Earth/Studies is something of an experiment—or, at least, the result of multiple experiments with fabrics, shapes, and textures. Like some of the other brands on this list, Earth/Studies releases products in extremely tight batches, often called—you guessed it—“Experiments,” each one with a specific focus. Come for the earthy, autumn-coded color palette, stay for the slouchy-but-not-sloppy silhouettes.
Venturon
Venturon was founded by a father-son team in France, where it makes clothes, per the label's website, “suitable for a gentle trail or a multi-day off the beaten track.” Their gear might pass through daily life undetected, but it'll seamlessly transition to the rigors of the Alps with David Blaine-level sleight of hand. Like the other brands on this list, Venturon doesn't sell a million pieces each season, probably because each and every one of them is rigorously wear-tested in the French Alps. It doesn't get much realer than that.
