Eulogy for Arc'teryx Veilance
i remember the first time I picked up a veilance graph cardigan and realized merino wool was a material that could be woven with a hard face and a soft face and composite paneled with sheets of mechanical stretch nylon. lift my arms and gussets beside my chest would lose their slack as spiral patterned sleeves rotated up the length of my arm. the body was too long yet simultaneously hugged my bmi barely out of the teens. i felt like cayce pollard or the lisan al-ghaib putting on their outfit for the first time.
before I saw the nemis jacket i'd always thought of collars as a closure device which for practicality embeds a zipper or a button which goes all the way up unless it was meant for a suit in which case it must simply open to provide a taper. little did I consider that between two sheets of plain weave nylon which puckered and crinkled like crepe, the madmen installed a zipper track that quit well before making it to the top, erecting a triple height mandarin collar fused with the aesthetic sensibility of a bomber.
i was never able to justify spending quad digit canadian pesos on the crown jewel of the veilance baggadocio, the nomin (no-meen) backpack. every once in a blue moon I see a fellow connoisseur who knew they needed a harness adapted from thirty years of climbing technology to lug their macbook to an office job. they absolutely needed, glued to that harness, an obsidian pebble built with waterproof TPU lined nylon and then seam taped inside and then waterproof zippers so that their laptop would not see the slightest bit of moisture.
as the years passed I came into the means to indulge my veilance penchant but it is telling that I can count all pieces I eventually owned on a single hand.
little did I know that socialism with chinese characteristics was coming straight for north vancouver. in 2019 anta sports finnished buying arc'teryx from its previous parent company. two years later the supreme commander himself showed up in a burly down arc parka to survey a venue for the winter olympics.
four years later responsible outdoor stewardess arc'teryx decided to set off mass fireworks as an art piece in the ecologically fragile tibetan plateau. hilariously the foreign english-language apology pointed fingers at their chinese subsidiary while the chinese-language apology bent the knee completely to the powers that be in their number one market.
every few years I'd flip a catalog to note which pieces that made me feel would lose their souls. the graph never made it long with its impossibly skinny fit - even I gained even muscle on my wiry frame to grow out of that sleek sweater. in a magnificently symbolic act the nemis zipper was readjusted upwards to a generically normal height, sealing the decorative collar, before a completely unforeseeable lack of sales prompted its archival. released just a few weeks ago, the anodyne anodic backpack mercifully sheds its nominal nomin connection while gaining a suite of pragmatic improvements and bearing an identical resemblance to every other roughly rectangular bag.
in 2025 taka kasuga (veilance bossman) and greg grenzke (arc'teryx design bossman) decided to take their talents to south beach nike and patagonia. absolutely no one cared.
i read an interview from january with veilance's new creative director ben stubbington. stubbs nails the remarkable but these days common achievement of repeatedly contradicting himself within two sentences:
We're not chasing trends – our timelines are so long that we can't feed into the normal fashion cycle. What felt modern 10 years ago, dressing like a storm trooper in sleek outfits, is now too dystopian.
he says, repudiating trends while detailing exactly the ethos of a brand that he is abandoning because it is no longer trendy.
"As logos became more prominent and cuts became oversized to the point of engulfing people's bodies, fashion lost some of its true essence. [...] Our products work just as well on a 25 year old as a 65 year old."
he spouts, maybe he doesn't even recognize the only cut which could possibly work for a young and old man simultaneously is oversized.
the remaining designers have been put out to pasture. two interns remain. one walks to uniqlo each month, deciding which silhouette will be replicated in a fabric randomly selected from the mainline catalog. the other walks to the archive room to engage in similar stochastic agitation, finding a favorite piece to remake but worse and without a hood. the fit forms have been swapped for spherical cows. every garment is breathable and not a single garment can breathe because they are all being crushed under the weight of a legacy that imposes momentum and not purpose.
let us stop beating a dead bird and say goodbye.