The North Face Jackets
Expedition outerwear became high-school currency. The North Face started as a mountaineer's brand and somehow became the cold-weather uniform that separated the haves from the have-nots—a puffy jacket and fleece that climbed from base camp to your hallway.
Douglas and Susie Tompkins opened the first The North Face store on October 26, 1966, at 308 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. The Grateful Dead played the opening. The couple began as mail-order and retail merchants selling climbing and camping gear—technical equipment for serious outdoor enthusiasts. The logo, drawn from Half Dome, the dramatic granite formation rising more than 8,700 feet above sea level in Yosemite, became the symbol of a brand rooted in the Sierra Nevada.
Equipment made for mountains and glaciers didn't stay confined to mountaineers. The Denali fleece, born with the brand's 1988 Expedition System and worn on serious high-altitude climbs, crossed into casual wear. The Nuptse puffer—named for a peak beside Mount Everest—followed in 1992 as part of that same expedition layering line, then evolved into something unexpected. The 1996 version became so iconic that the company still re-releases it today under the name "1996 Retro Nuptse," nearly three decades later.
By the late 1990s, The North Face had expanded far beyond the outdoor-gear enthusiast. By 1997 the label's buyers already included New York rappers, and the look spread to kids from neighborhoods where you'd never see a real mountain. The puffy Nuptse and the Denali fleece worn over a hoodie migrated from trailhead to school hallway, becoming THE cold-weather status jacket—the one you begged your parents for, the one that marked you in a crowd. In 2000, The North Face was acquired by VF Corporation for $25.4 million, entering corporate ownership but losing none of its street credibility. The half-dome logo never left the hallways, and today the same silhouettes sell as retro re-issues to a new generation of kids—the children of the kids who wore them in 1998.
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