The Next 'North Face' Won't Be Made for Mountains

I recently got talking to someone with one of the best job descriptions I've ever heard.

He designs and makes gloves. For space suits.

Not the whole suit. Just the gloves. The bit that goes on the hands of someone floating outside a spacecraft, holding a tool, with nothing between their fingertips and the vacuum of space except his work.

I was hooked. I asked him everything. How do you test it? What goes wrong? What does it feel like to know your stitching is on someone's hand up there? And somewhere in the middle of all that, the question I actually couldn't stop thinking about popped out:

Just as outdoor gear became fashion, how long until people start wanting to wear space-wear?

The hardest bit of the suit

Here's what I didn't know. The glove is one of the hardest parts of a space suit to get right.

Think about it. A suit is basically a human-shaped balloon, pressurised so your body doesn't do horrible things in a vacuum. That's fine for your torso. But your hands need to grip, twist, pinch and feel. Every time an astronaut closes their fist, they're fighting the pressure trying to push the glove back open. Hours of that during a spacewalk, and your forearms are cooked. Astronauts have been known to lose fingernails from it.

So you've got a piece of kit that has to be airtight, tough enough to survive sharp edges and wild temperature swings, and still let a human being do fiddly work with a spanner. Protection versus dexterity. Every design decision is a trade-off between the two.

Which, if you've ever bought a pair of winter running gloves and then tried to use your phone in them, is a problem you already understand. Just with considerably lower stakes.

We dress like the people we admire

There's a pattern here, and once you see it you can't unsee it.

The trench coat was built for soldiers in actual trenches. Aviator sunglasses were made for pilots. The bomber jacket, same. The North Face Nuptse was named after a Himalayan peak next to Everest, and within a few years it was the jacket of choice on the streets of New York. Salomon trail shoes went from muddy ultramarathons to fashion week. The Patagonia fleece went from Yosemite to the City of London.

Every time, the same thing happens. The people at the very edge (the climbers, the pilots, the explorers) need gear that genuinely keeps them alive. Then the rest of us see it, and we want a piece of it.

Not because we need it. Nobody needs an 800-fill down jacket to walk to Greggs. We want it because of what it says. It's borrowed bravery. When you zip up that jacket, a little bit of you is on the north face of something, even if you're actually on the 66 bus.

I find this fascinating, partly because it's so irrational and partly because I'm guilty of it. The kit is a story we tell ourselves about who we are, or who we'd like to be. The function is almost beside the point. What we're really buying is proximity to the edge.

It's already started

If you think space-wear is a far-off sci-fi idea, look a bit closer.

The suits that astronauts will wear back on the Moon for NASA's Artemis III mission have been designed by Axiom Space together with Prada. Yes, that Prada. The design was unveiled at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan in 2024, and Prada called it the first step in a long-term collaboration (Dezeen). Prada's team brought its knowledge of materials and sewing to the suit's outer layer (Space.com).

Read that again. A luxury fashion house is helping dress the next people to walk on the Moon. The bridge between the edge and the high street isn't being built after the fact this time. It's being built in advance.

And look at what's already in the shops: NASA logo T-shirts in every high-street chain, metallic puffers, "astronaut" trainers, kids' bedrooms full of rockets. The appetite is clearly there. What's missing is the real thing, the actual technical kit, filtering down.

So, how long?

My guess? Sooner than we think, but not in the way we think.

Nobody is going to wear a pressurised suit to the pub. That's not how this works. Mountain gear didn't cross over because people wanted to dress like a full Everest expedition. It crossed over through one piece, the puffer, the fleece, the trail shoe, that was useful enough in everyday life and still carried the story of where it came from.

Space-wear will need its Nuptse. One item that's practical down here but unmistakably from up there. And honestly, after that conversation, my money's on the hands. Gloves that keep you warm, stay tough and still let you do fiddly things? Every cyclist, climber and winter runner I know would buy them tomorrow. Stick a mission patch on the cuff and the fashion crowd would follow.

The other ingredient is people. Mountain gear went mainstream when ordinary people started heading into the mountains themselves, even a little bit. The edge felt reachable. As commercial spaceflight grows and more non-astronauts make the trip, space will start to feel the same way. Not reachable for most of us, but reachable enough to dream about. That's all the high street needs.

Here's the bit I keep coming back to, though. We don't really want the jacket. We want what the jacket stands for: the nerve, the curiosity, the willingness to go somewhere hard and see what happens. The kit is just the closest we can get without actually going.

Which is a shame, because most of us don't need a rocket to find our edge. It's a trail run that's a bit longer than you think you can do. A wild swim in October. A first climb, a first race, a first night outside. The edge isn't only up there. It's wherever you're slightly scared to go.

The space glove guy has spent his career making sure people can reach out and touch the unknown. The least the rest of us can do is get out and touch something a bit closer to home.