Rocky Mountain Featherbed, vintage Americana, and thoughts on the New Luxury

Some trend pundits have linked the recent resurgence in popularity of workwear and Americana-inspired menswear to our recessionary times. The ensuing appetite for dependable, hard-wearing product with an emphasis on trend-busting authenticity can certainly be linked to a rejection of logo-led clothing, fussy and functionless design and fly-by-night fast fashion. Some commentators go a step further suggesting that at its heart this return to rootsy, blue-collar clothing symbolises an age dictated by austerity, frugality and a rejection of luxury. The Fashion Buyer team could not disagree more.



Menswear's current fascination with traditional clothing is underpinned by luxury, albeit an updated definition of the word. Rather than being symbolised by brash branding, far-fetched designs or deep-pocketed marketing spend, this new luxury is hardwired to a sense of quality.
Not a world apart from the plummy aristo who favors the roll of a Huntsman lapel over Prada's, or the well-heeled Victorian travellers who over a Century ago invested in Louis Vuitton luggage less for its monogram and more for its hand-crafted strength and understated elegance, today's discerning menswear connoisseurs are shifting their collective focus towards a batallion of brands whose arsenal is underpinned by authenticity and pedigree, and whose battle-cry is fuelled by an uncompromising sense of quality.



The Fashion Buyer blog has trumpeted this campaign towards artisan-led luxury product since its inception over a year ago and has reported emphatically on the brands which have helped to furnish the movement from Nigel Cabourn and Quoddy to SNS Herning and Yuketen, but it still brings a smile to our faces when we catch wind of another.
The latest heritage brand to register on our radar is Rocky Mountain Featherbed. Cast your minds back to  the late 1960s, a time when New York was witnessing the birth of Pop Art and scores of straw-chewing beatniks were abandoning their hometowns to follow the pied piper of love to San Francisco. Tucked away in an unassuming corner of Jackson, Wyoming, another slice of history was being carved out - the inception of Rocky Mountain Featherbed.


The currency in Jackson was neither  soup-can screen prints or limp-skinned jazz cigarettes. The major product coming out of Jackson's Rocky Mountain Featherbeds was the leather-yoked cold weather vest. An instant hit with frost-bitten cowboys, the down-filled invention soon led to the introduction of a jacket version in 1974 and before you could say Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Rocky Mountain Featherbed became a byword for premium quality in the sportswear world.
A decade passed and as the beatniks swapped their free-thinking hug-a-tree ideals for a yuppy's diet of Armani suits, breeze-block cell-phones and dollar-bills, America fell out of love with Rocky Mountain Featherbed.



Like so many historic American brands to lose their voices against the clatter of mass manufacturing  it took an Americana-obsessed Japanese vintage collector to dust down and revive Rocky Mountain Featherbed. Unfortunately, for the modestly-funded modern clothing enthusiast, upholding the brand's premium roots and fastidious attention to detail comes at a price and today's entry price Rocky Mountain Featherbed gilet will give you little change from £400 with long-sleeved outerwear starting at £775. Just goes to show that while the notion of what constitutes as luxury may be evolving, the price tags attached to it remain frustratingly for most just out of reach.Source URL: http://icip2idayusof.blogspot.com/2010/10/rocky-mountain-featherbed-vintage.html
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