Why Patagoniacs Can’t Get Enough of the Brand’s Vintage Gear

In the pantheon of outdoor labels, there’s one etched not just in stone, but in aluminum chocks and windproof fleece jackets: Patagonia. It’s a brand that’s been forged on rock faces, chiseled through rebellion, and eventually refined so you can find it everywhere from El Cap to the espresso line. That ethos has always extended beyond what Patagonia makes to how it makes it.

Much like Volvo refusing to keep the seatbelt proprietary, Patagonia took an equally open‑handed approach with fleece, pioneering the fabric not for exclusivity, but for impact. Developed with Malden Mills (now Polartec) in 1979, fleece was intentionally shared across the industry to improve performance and sustainability at scale, before Patagonia later trademarked its own Synchilla line in 1985.

I’ll admit it: I kept the brand at arm’s length for a while—somewhere between the finance‑tech vest bro era, the Snap‑T internet arms race, and the GORP overload. But eventually, practicality won out. A Los Gatos fleece from a few seasons back got me in the door, and after a handful of time‑tested staples, Patagonia did what it tends to do best: quietly turned skepticism into loyalty.

Each season Patagonia continues to dip into its archives and bless the masses with OG pieces—now, of course, made more ethically. I’ll be the first to disclose that I’m not the most outdoorsy person, but I do appreciate good design and a brand that stands for something.

Although the fleece program, along with Baggies and the Black Hole bag series, is what you likely conjure up when you think of Patagonia, the rugby polo was actually the brand’s first lifestyle piece. “The problem back then was finding really heavy, durable fabrics that could handle being scraped along granite during the climbing period,” says Mark Little, Category Senior Director for Lifestyle Essentials at Patagonia. The wild colors were about visibility; you needed to be able to spot climbers on the wall, and they often came from leftover yardage. As Little explains, “A lot of our early color history came from using leftovers from other production runs, and that’s what ended up being injected into the lineup.”

The current rugby polo has been updated with a warm recycled wool blend, which neatly sums up Patagonia’s evolution. As Little puts it, the brand is “taking some classic pieces and reinventing them through the lens of 100% naturals—creating iconic silhouettes that historically might’ve been found in synthetic products, but executing them in natural or natural‑heavy blends.”