Nike's latest piece of outdoor kit says a lot about where outdoor fashion has landed. In June, the brand seeded its new Radical AirFlow long sleeve — nicknamed the "Holey Shirt" — to a handpicked group of running influencers, and the internet did the rest. The shirt is genuinely technical: perforations that widen toward the outside of the fabric pull air across the skin to cool you down, and Nike athlete Caleb Olson won the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in a prototype. But most people talking about it care less about thermoregulation than looks. "It just looks different," The Business of Fashion's Lei Takanashi told Outside. "You don't have to be a marathoner to wear it."
The shirt marks the relaunch of Nike's ACG line, originally born in 1989 and rebooted in February with a self-aware, streetwise, nineties-MTV attitude. And it lands at a moment when the old vocabulary is wearing out. "Gorpcore" — coined by The Cut in 2017 to describe tech bros in Patagonia fleeces and Arc'teryx on runways — now feels stale because outdoor clothing has simply merged with everyday streetwear.
Salomon is the clearest case study. After its XT-6 trail runner showed up on runways and on Rihanna in the late 2010s, the brand spun out its Sportstyle line — gorp turned down, style turned up. Takanashi argues Salomons today aren't really trail shoes at all. "They're just dope sneakers."
The shift has practical roots: people like comfortable, functional clothes, and American dress codes keep loosening. The pandemic-era boom in hiking, running and wellness brought a wave of new, more diverse and casual participants — the Outdoor Industry Association noted as much in a 2025 report — and brands are now chasing that audience with collabs like The North Face x Skims (featuring Kim Kardashian) and collections with Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen, whose flower-appliquéd Base Camp duffels had fashion writers gushing.
Critics who say heritage brands are selling out aren't saying anything new — Eddie Bauer executives grumbled about the same thing in the 1970s. And The North Face has little reason to listen while posting double-digit quarterly revenue growth and still sponsoring athletes like Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker. Meanwhile, insiders like Hadley Hammer, a former pro skier and cofounder of outdoor-fashion Substack Togs, argue the crossover has made trailwear genuinely better, pushing heritage names to sharpen their designs and newcomers like Hikerkind, Halfdays, Zara and Vuori to offer silhouettes beyond the old outdoor uniform.
For travellers, the takeaway is simple: there's never been a better or less intimidating time to buy outdoor kit. The wall between "serious gear" and "what you'd actually wear" has collapsed, meaning the jacket you hike in doubles as the jacket you wear to dinner — and the fashion crowd's money is funding real innovation, like Nike's cooling fabric, that works on the trail too.
Original reporting by Outside Online.
