Grunge On Ice -- Snowboard Fashion Has That Dirty Look

It's ski season, and like most sports stores, Olympic Sports at Northgate is a sea of puffy parkas, powder pants, sleek jumpsuits and accessories in eye-popping combinations of teal, azure, emerald green, fuchsia and orange. The palette in the men's department is more subdued, though even many dark jackets are trimmed in peacock hues of kelly green, red and marine blue. The kaleidoscope of cheerfully bright clothes suggests the decor of a well-appointed preschool and explains why skiers on the slopes need sunglasses even on overcast days.

Across the parking lot at Olympic's snowboard shop, the look is decidedly more somber. The boxy jackets are made of black or brown backpack-weight woven nylon, the polyester fleece work shirts, baggy pants and pullovers are mostly dark. Nary a spot of fuchsia to be seen. Even the few prints and plaids are dark and have a gritty, utilitarian style instantly familiar to anyone who's observed youthful street fashion in recent years. It's a fleece-and-Cordura hybrid of workwear and skateboard fashion and might just as easily be called grunge on ice.

If downhill ski fashion were music, it would be sung by Barry Manilow. Snowboard fashion is pure Pearl Jam.

Says Debie Masterman, a clothing manager for Olympic Sports in Bellevue, "The overall snowboard look is bigger, baggier, kind of military and the colors are real neutral. Everything is brown or khaki or olive; there's a lot of black. Basically, it's anything that looks like dirt."

LOOK IS GOLD

Snowboard fashion may look like dirt to some, but to those in the skiwear industry, it's gold. Though the growth in downhill skiing has been flat for the past decade, snowboarding - a sport that most people hadn't even heard of five years ago - is growing at 20 percent to 30 percent per year, mostly among teenagers and adults under 30 with an appetite for full-throttle thrills and spills.

About 10 percent of all ski lift tickets are sold to snowboarders, according to Ski Industries America, an industry organization, and most of them would rather careen into a tree (if unintentional, this is called "wrecking" - purposely plowing into a tree is "bonking") than show up on the slope in the sleek, bright skiwear worn by their downhill-swooshing parents.

"Kids don't want to wear a Roffe ski jacket on the slope," said Christine "Tuna" Wood, 28, co-owner of No Billy No, a 2 1/2-year-old Seattle snowboard-apparel company. "They want to wear flannel shirts and baggy pants, which is one reason the fleece work shirt works so well for us."

Thanks to the unique regional profile of year-round snow (snowboarders ski glaciers at Mount Hood and Blackcomb, B.C., in summer), trend-setting youth culture and entrepreneurs with a high tolerance for risk, the Pacific Northwest and the Seattle-area have become hotbeds of snowboard fashion and equipment manufacture. There are perhaps half a dozen upstart snowboard-apparel companies in the region.

BOARDHEADS RUN THE SHOW

The apparel manufacturers tend to be owned and run by people in their 20s with little experience in the rag trade. They are snowboarders, skateboarders, surfers and bartenders who, in many cases, accidentally found themselves in the middle of the hottest winter sports trend. Thanks to the cachet of small labels, many of the companies have sales growth of 100 percent to 400 percent per year. The apparel retails at anywhere from $30 for a simple fleece pullover to $300 or more for waterproof jackets with detachable vest.

Their clothes fall into two categories: technical wear, which implies sturdy outerwear made of Cordura nylon and other tough fabric; and street wear, meaning fleece, corduroy and twill clothes that look similar to skateboard or workwear. Either way, snowboard fashion is unlikely to be confused with downhill gear.

Take the hot-selling "fireman's" jacket from Bonfire, a 3-year-old Salem, Ore., outerwear manufacturer. Squarish in silhouette, the jacket is made of dark, waterproof nylon and has heavy brass-colored toggles on the front.

"I think people like it because it fits into the industrial work wear fashion thing that's happening," said Brad Steward, who with his wife and two other relatives owns Bon Fire, which last year had a 400 percent increase in sales. "But it's also technical, and we're trying to make it work. It has a zip-out vest that can be worn alone. It's not just a Carhartt jacket that's been ripped apart and taken to the sew shop," he said referring to the venerable Carhartt workwear label meant for farmers and mechanics but currently fashionable with urban youth.

Or there's the "chubby," Mambosok's generously cut, below-the-knee fleece short padded on the knees and rear with large patches of Cordura. Chubbies are for spring skiing or, say Mambosok's founders, to be worn with long johns for a layered, winter look.

"We think of ourselves when we design," said Dan Hoard, 29, co-owner. "If we like it and our friends like it, we figure it will work."

BOYHOOD BUDDIES

With about $3 million in annual sales, 3-year-old Mambosok is the area's biggest snowboard-apparel success story. Hoard and his boyhood buddy Tom Bunnell, 28, were on a backpacking trip to Australia a couple of years ago and got the idea to market a silly hat that looks like half a pair of men's boxers. Hoard started selling them at a Seattle tavern where he worked as a bartender. The hats soon became so popular with college kids and skiers that the pair had them manufactured in fleece. When ski shops and customers badgered them for Mambosok apparel, Hoard and Bunnell went into the garment business. About 65 percent of their business is now in fleece and flannel shirts, vests, pants and shorts. In September, the pair was on the cover of Inc. Magazine.

An outlaw esprit - part real, part tongue in cheek - pervades both the sport and its fashion, one reason why downhill skiers have come to refer to the generally younger, more daredevil snowboarders as "shredders." In attitude as well as athletic skills required, the sport is related to skateboarding and surfing. Even the jargon is a patois of retro surfer and skateboard talk: "Rad" for radical, meaning cool or wild; "goofy-footed," meaning putting your right foot in front on a surfboard, skateboard or snowboard, as opposed to "regular-footed"; and discussion of pipes or tubes, meaning partial tunnels of potentially menacing water, concrete or snow to be navigated by skillful riders.

"A lot of the styles are created by young males from 16 to 23," said Janet Freeman, who with her husband, a surfer and snowboarder, owns and operates TON A' WAWA, a Portland snowboard-apparel company.

At 33, Freeman, who studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design in New York, says she's old by the standards of the snowboard industry. So she keeps a gauge on what's in by listening to her teenage and 20-something employees. Like many other Northwest snowboard and equipment manufacturers, TON A' WAWA is distributed nationally and in Europe, Canada and Japan.

No Billy No captures the unrestrained enthusiasm of many snowboard aficionados by referring to its line as "fiend wear."

"It's for hard-core anyone. The fiend. Anyone who gets up at 4 a.m. to go to (Mount) Baker or rides their bike all over town even in the rain," said Ross Jurgensen, 29, company co-owner. A psychology and sociology graduate of the University of Washington, Jurgensen is low-key, boyish and slightly bashful - yet he refers to himself as a "fiend." "I still don't own a car, so I wear the stuff we make when I bicycle around town. It's very practical."

HUMOR ON THE SLOPES

They may be the bad boys and girls of the slopes, but they have a sense of humor. Besides funny hats, the clothes snowboarders like best have funny names that are clearly too outre to have been dreamed up by a corporate marketing committee. Freeman of TON A' WAWA says the name of their company was born when her husband was flipping through a surf magazine and "he saw a photo of guy about to be creamed by a big wave and he said, `Oh, that's a ton a wa wa.' " The couple printed it on T-shirts and immediately had an offer to buy the name. They hastily trademarked it instead.

No Billy No refers to an extremely rambunctious Airedale, a canine fiend, who goes everywhere with company co-owner Wood. In the cavernous space the business rents near the Kingdome, a cry of "No, Billy, no!" is frequently intoned by Wood, Jurgensen and their employees as Billy bounds into a pile of clothes about to be shipped or tries to escape with the UPS man.

Mambosok was picked because it sounded funny. And Seattle company Ned Limbo Phd, a 2-year-old snowboard-outerwear manufacturer, was so named because of "that feeling of floating between space and ground when you're snowboarding," said Rebecca Olson, who owns the company with her husband.

More young women are getting into the sport - 28 percent of snowboarders now are female - and many apparel companies are making the unisex clothes in small sizes to accommodate them. Meanwhile, there's evidence that some skiers are crossing over to snowboarding; boarders insist it's easier. Given such signals of the sport's continuing growth, it's no wonder that big ski companies are falling over themselves to get a toehold in the equipment and apparel markets.

Vashon Island-based K2 was one of the first majors to get involved in snowboard making - it jumped in five years ago - and this season introduced its first line of snowboard outerwear. Portland-based Columbia Sportswear will introduce a snowboard line next fall aimed at "crossover" apparel, said spokeswoman Denise Keith. "Snowboarding is something we don't want to miss out on," she said.

Still, small labels know they have a marketing advantage in competing with corporate Johnny-come-latelies. "I find a lot of kids I know would rather have a small label," said Freeman of TON A' WAWA. Big apparel companies know this, and usually pick another name for their snowboard lines. The snowboard apparel label SWAG, for instance, is a division of Effe, a big European skiwear maker. Columbia plans to call it's line "Convert."

Small shops also have a leg up in targeting boarders, an idea that Olympic sports obviously understands. (Along with its snowboard and bicycle shop at Northgate, it has tried to create a hip, somewhat isolated snowboard department at its Overlake store by hauling in a hulking Volkswagen van to lend youthful ambiance.) Among snowboard shops in the Seattle area, some of which double as skateboard shops, are Snowboard Connection, U Skate, Borderline Snowboards, Crescent Down Works and Marley's.

Marley's co-owner Ian Fels, 27, a friendly guy in baggy jeans, a wispy goatee, beefeater sideburns and a black ball cap, says the snowboard look boils down to "wearing anything you like. There's definitely a look of skateboard stuff, but snowboarding is a little bigger and baggier. But it has to be comfortable and functional. It's not as goofy as you might think."

And it's not just on the slopes. "I'm at the Bellevue Starbucks the other day, I see this mom wearing our brawny (polar) pants," said Bunnell of Mambosok. "Then there's my mom, who's a teacher on Mercer Island, and she wears our plaid pants around town. . . . I always say that the best place to scout out our stuff is at Husky Stadium home games. We try to focus on snowboarding, but its definitely going to other markets."