For decades, The North Face’s rarified Purple Label line has haunted menswear forums like a puffer-clad poltergeist. The Japan-only sub-label is notoriously hard to find stateside, and short of booking a flight to Tokyo, the best most folks could do was read about it on Reddit or double-tap its product shots on Instagram. (I own exactly one Purple Label jacket, and it’s best not to ask where or how I got it.)
Sadly, that’s still true. But with the launch of The North Face’s Red Box collection—a brand new label that sneakily hit shelves in late July—American outdoors fiends are one step closer to gearing up like their Japanese counterparts.
The first drop is pretty tight, but pretty much all of it hits. The inaugural down jacket, for example, offers a pared-down riff on The North Face’s iconic Nupste by ditching the horizontal paneling on the exterior, and swapping the front zippers for snap closures. Thanks to the 700-fill down, the finished product is what we’d call “dumb warm” in industry parlance—and looks just as righteous with climbing pants as it does slinky wool trousers.
Speaking of, both the packable wind pants and the cuffed sweats could valiantly tackle a weekend camping trip with zero backup, but they’ll also dramatically enhance any bodega-to-bed pipeline for people with less ambitious itineraries. And while I’m an on-the-record sucker for an indefatigable tote bag, the Red Box version already has me sizing up pocket space and muttering to myself (complimentary) while I parse the corresponding product specs.
The true standout piece, though, might be the half-zip fleece, which happens to be one of the resurgent genre’s very best—and priced at a very reasonable $175. It’s made with a plush recycled-poly fabric, features two super-secure zipper pockets, and is finished with elastic at the cuffs and hem to help it hold its shape (and block wind doing it). Prefer your branding a little less flashy than typical TNF fare? You’re in luck: the logo here lands on the cuff instead of the chest, so you can strut your stuff with the subtlety of a jimuguri slithering through the forest.
If all that seems fairly straightforward, well, that’s kind of the point: this is elite-tier outdoors gear designed to read as deceptively simple. The only element that isn’t straightforward about the entire Red Box assortment, in fact, is how much of it was made. Get in while you can, or log back onto the forums to commiserate with the masses.
