Escape To The City

As our dress codes relax and we embrace a return to nature, performance brands have seen their fortunes rise. But, as Mitchell Oakley Smith discovers, innovation and authenticity is key to a brand’s success.

During any given daily commute on the MRT, you’re just as likely to see a Patagonia anorak as you are a Pal Zileri three-piece suit. In fact, since the past half-year of working-from-home culture has further casualised the way we dress and we increasingly multitask our days between Zoom calls and life’s other duties, the suit is almost entirely becoming an endangered sighting, its prominence replaced with the zips, cable-ties, pockets and straps of base layers and outerwear most typically designed for outdoor sports and elite athletes.

It is, of course, a paradox to describe this form of utilitarian dress as a style or aesthetic, designed as it is for function rather than fashion. But as these details proliferate runways and, as your commute will confirm, the real world, we’re seeing a complete collapse of boundaries between the worlds of sportswear, outdoor performance garments and high fashion.

That fashion and performance-wear have collided is long overdue, according to Dellano Pereira, the co-founder of Melbourne-based ski label Temple. “My happy place is when I’m strapping into my snowboard, it’s my utopia,” he says. “But for the entirety of my adult life, it’s the only time that I’m not wearing what I want to wear, simply because it doesn’t exist.” Along with his business partner Rob Maniscalco, Pereira set out to create a hybrid between contemporary fashion and snow performance outerwear because, as he says, “there had to be other people out there like us that didn’t just want to buy Burton, but no one was really challenging this space”.