The word luxury means different things to different consumers. For some, luxury is not coupled with expense but rather with experience. But what always rings true is that this notion of luxury is imbued with fantasy.

It’s this fantastical world that is at the heart of a new collaboration between The North Face and Gucci. It is the first collaboration under Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele who, as Angela Natividad wrote, manages to make the brand “feel accessible without compromising the fact that it is, ultimately, fantasy.”

The collection includes vibrantly patterned puffa jackets, woolen socks, perfect hats and co-branded backpacks made from the recycled nylon fabric ECONYL. It includes all the kit you’d need for a yomp across the moors or simply a short stroll to your local corner shop. The collaboration focuses on being comfortably cool, an aesthetic that many of us long for as the UK enters into another lockdown.

The North Face X Gucci dismantles the notion of luxury, coupling a brand more typically associated with walkers in the Lake District with perhaps one of the world’s more glamorous high fashion houses. In doing so, the clothing, and the aesthetic it conveys, suggests it can be worn by anyone. 

Unfortunately it still has the high fashion price tags attached to it but the world the brand creates is the kind of fantasy that we can all place ourselves in. The launch film and accompanying photography celebrates, as the campaign messaging declares, “the spirit of exploration,” capturing the mood of a world in hibernation and delivering a promise of sunnier times ahead.