There’s a high every Gore-Tex obsessive knows. It’s the feeling of pulling a jacket zipper to your chin and enveloping yourself in stretched Teflon. Whether you’re prepping for a wet, blustery New York City day or a dead-of-winter hike in the Adirondacks, the sensation is the same. Suddenly, the strongest gust of wind feels like a cold wisp of smoke grazing your eyelids. Every drop of water beads off the fabric, glistening like VVS diamonds. And the beat of rain pitter-pattering off a brightly colored shell sounds more satisfying than the illest drum loop unearthed from a crate of vinyls.

Over its near-six-decade lifespan, Gore-Tex has grown into an outerwear standard and a prolific brand collaborator. Alongside winter jackets and pants, its logo appears on everything from Nike sneakers to Palace zip-ups, each partner dressing its goods in what’s reputed to be the most waterproof fabric in existence. But in the 1980s, the utility of Gore-Tex was hazy.

“Everybody was trying to figure out what to do with it,” recalls Mark Erickson, a former VP of sales, marketing, and design at The North Face. “Can we use Gore-Tex to make tents or sleeping bags? Nope, not a good idea. We found its rightful place was in outerwear.”

If there’s any Gore-Tex piece that feels as timeless as a Polo Bear sweater or a pair of white-on-white Air Force 1s, it’s The North Face’s Mountain Jacket—one of the outdoor label’s most iconic products. Introduced in 1985 in royal blue and yellow colorways, the jacket was the catalyst for a line of products dubbed the Expedition System, which included mid-layer garments designed to be worn together to conquer the world’s greatest summits.

In 1997, mountaineer Conrad Anker donned a red Mountain Jacket for the first ascent of Antarctica’s 7,759-foot Rakekniven Peak. Two years earlier, though, LL Cool J wore the same jacket on the red carpet at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. While it was engineered for extreme conditions, the Mountain Jacket became one of the first pieces of outerwear to reverberate through the streets of New York and beyond. Today, you’ll encounter veteran hikers wearing 30-year-old Mountain Jackets in the Catskills and OGs rocking minty ones with a clean pair of Jordans on the 7 Train.

Whether you prefer the original editions or reimagined versions by high-fashion labels like Sacai, it’s undeniable that this North Face garment shaped how we see outerwear, balancing function and style. The Mountain Jacket remains a visually and technically forward statement piece and foundational part of the brand’s identity.

“The original Mountain Bibs didn’t have a chest pocket,” McCoy recalls. “Say you’re hot. You zip it down; you’ve got to stick your gloves and hat in somewhere because you’ve got your harness on. So accessing normal pockets was difficult. So we changed a little bit of the pocketing on the jacket and bibs, the width of how it fit, and some of the patching on it—esoteric things, like where your crampons go and how that works.”

Those adjustments informed the design that the Mountain Jacket carries today. But a bigger revelation came from the Everest trip: the importance of layering—how every garment, from basic long johns to down jackets to fleeces and hats, had to work together.

“Aside from the Mountain Jacket and Bib, we took several other pieces on the climb that weren’t perfectly suited for Everest, really,” McCoy says. “I was sitting up there and was like, ‘OK, we need this to work, and it needs to layer.’ At the time, Columbia was dominant, with their Whirlibird and their three-in-one-system jackets. But they weren’t technical. We needed a technical layering system that would really work.”

In 1988, these observations translated to the North Face Expedition System, a line that introduced iconic apparel like Denali fleeces and Nuptse puffers to the brand’s catalog.

“There were 10 or 12 pieces in it, and it was effectively a layering system for mountaineering,” McCoy says. “One of the concessions we made to the commercial market was that you could zip in either the Denali or the Lhotse into the Mountain Jacket. For consumers, it was perceived as a convenience, and Columbia had already convinced consumers it was a really cool feature.”

Yet something unusual happened to one piece designed for the Expedition System. The Sagarmatha Expedition Parka, a nylon puffer jacket filled with 19 ounces of goose down that weighed over three pounds, was a lighter take on The North Face’s Brooks Range. It was designed for 8,000-meter elevations and cost $400, making it one of the brand’s priciest pieces at the time.

“We might have made 300 upon launching it,” McCoy says. “When I was looking at the sales, I realized that almost all of them were sold in Detroit.”

McCoy wondered why the piece had caught on in the city.

“The rep said that there seem to be people wearing them on the streets everywhere. So it was a fashion statement, but we didn’t realize it immediately. It took a little bit of time to realize we were cool.”

“All these guys were outside those stores with fly cars, fly gear, and these big-ass North Face coats.”

“The Marmot Biggie and Sagamartha came out the same year, and that was just a big thing for the hustlers,” shares Omar, who remembers browsing North Face gear as a teenager in the early ’90s at KP Original Sporting Goods stores in Harlem. “All these guys were outside those stores with fly cars, fly gear, and these big-ass North Face coats.”

Omar, who’s from New Jersey, said seeing someone in his neighborhood wear a Nuptse jacket zipped into a yellow and black Mountain Light in 1994 inspired him to buy his first North Face piece, a black Nuptse, in 1995. “I was so big on that shit back then, my actual yearbook picture, when everyone else got suits and ties on, I got the black Nuptse on,” Omar says. “And I’m not the only person in the yearbook doing it like that.” Although hip-hop and Black culture helped popularize The North Face in the 1990s, Omar stresses that the Mountain Jacket connected with a different crowd in New York City.

“You’d see the Mountain Jackets mostly on graffiti writers, Spanish kids, or hip white kids at the time,” Omar says. “Like, when we were young, older guys were taking coats but couldn’t sell Mountain Jackets in the hood because nobody wanted a thin jacket.”

The Mountain Jacket was the first North Face piece prolific Brooklyn-bred gear collector and graffiti writer Tommy Rebel, aka REBEL SC, ever owned. Rebel recalls first seeing the Mountain Jacket in 1992 at the outdoor store Campmor in New Jersey. His mother balked at the $300 price tag, questioning if it was a jacket he would wear for only one season. A year later, he went back to buy one, and says he was one of the first kids in his high school to wear The North Face before it blew up across the five boroughs. The appeal of the Mountain Jacket was simple: It was a Gore-Tex coat that came in many colors—perfect for what Dallas Penn called Outfit Architecture.

“When you got a dope North Face and it’s raining, you don’t really want to wear sneakers. You had to have a dope pair of Gore-Tex boots, such as Vasque Skywalks, Asolos, or Sundowners, and Gore-Tex pants,” Rebel says. “Depending on the color of your North Face jacket, you had to build your outfit around it, because you had to be fresh from head to toe. Full Monty. You’re not coming with three pieces; you’re coming with 12.”

As the Mountain Jacket, alongside North Face pieces like the Steep Tech, grew entwined with New York’s graffiti culture, local writers literally boosted their popularity.

“It was a graffiti writer’s uniform in New York City during a certain time period. Sneakers, Gore-Tex boots, Polo, and North Face,” Rebel says. “I guess for me, in the early ’90s, expensive, flashy clothes, like rare Polo pieces, not just Stadium or Snow Beach pieces, were synonymous with The North Face. If you were walking in the Ville”—the West Village—“and you saw somebody in a North Face jacket and Polo, nine and a half times out of 10, they were a graffiti writer or hung out with dudes that wrote.”

The North Face released a slew of coveted outerwear in the ’90s, but the hallmarks of the Expedition System did not change greatly. You would find only subtle differences when comparing a Nuptse or Mountain Jacket in a North Face catalog from 1994 with the same pieces in one from 1998. And the black-shoulder-patch look the Mountain Jacket initiated would be carried across other popular styles, including Kichatna shells and Baltoro puffers.

Yet, as with any innovative outdoor clothing label, advances in technology and fabrics meant that some styles were sacrificed. Despite the cachet it held in the ’80s and ‘90s, the Mountain Jacket fell out of The North Face’s catalog in the 2000s.

“There were only so many people out there that were willing to spend $345 for a Mountain Light or $400 for a Mountain Jacket,” says Brown, the East Coast sales director. “So The North Face came out with HydroSeal and introduced two jackets that looked just like the Mountains but were much less expensive.”

Fabrics also evolved.

“The Mountain Jacket was heavy, and as the 2000s rolled around, Gore-Tex began producing really lightweight fabric. The technology just blew by.”

That appreciation is apparent in New York City today. In 2023, Omar from No Idea Is Original and Instagram influencer Mista Splurge organized a North Face Day event on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that drew dozens of collectors. Everyone from the late Dallas Penn to Joey Ones, a prominent North Face enthusiast, was in attendance, alongside younger fans—many bedecked in the latest Expedition System pieces reinterpreted by brands like Supreme.

“We organized the North Face Day to really show how many people are still into it—and the age ranged from babies to guys who are nearly 50 years old,” Omar says. “Certain things are just generational. It’s really just timeless clothes.”

Rebel is so passionate about The North Face that he created his own make-ups of the 1994 Steep Tech Highlander through his Brooklyn Basements clothing label—inviting friends and family to design one-offs using a catalog of fabric swatches. Another one of his designs, a reflective Mountain Jacket from 2006, predated the version Supreme released with The North Face in 2013. The silhouette is timeless, he says.

“My buddy has one of the newer ones with the big Gore-Tex logo on it, like the Trans-Antarctica jackets,” Rebel says. “I love it. The North Face should tap into the people who are passionate about this culture for insight and wisdom so that we could make mind-blowing Mountain Jackets in the future.”

Today, four decades after the Mountain Jacket’s debut, original North Face designers like Erickson believe the silhouette informed the direction of outdoor brands took in its wake.

“If you want to figure out what a jacket should look like, first analyze what is the function of the jacket, what’s it going to be used for, and what does it need to do,” says Erickson, who also designed the iconic 1990 Trans-Antarctica Expedition line for The North Face. “The Mountain Jacket helped shift the industry towards a form-follows-function approach to design rather than a fashion-oriented approach. Now, ironically, that is fashion.”

The Mountain Jacket still has a place in McCoy’s closet. The former North Face sales manager says she recently wore an original skiing and loaned one to The North Face’s design team in Europe to help with an anniversary release centered on street style. In 2019, when the brand released a Mountain Jacket with the Taiwanese streetwear retailer Invincible, it featured photos from the 1987 Snowbird Expedition that shaped the Mountain Jacket and The North Face itself. Although McCoy doesn’t see the Mountain Jacket as something to wear to a bar, she did receive Invincible’s version of it from her son, and occasionally finds herself zipping it up in the winter.

“It’s obviously meant to be a fashion piece, but it’s still made out of great materials,” she says. “I think it shows there’s this sense of consistency with Ingrid’s design and this visual clarity that really hangs together well. It’s a wonderful tribute to her. And, truthfully, The North Face hasn’t ruined it, which is great.”