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https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-are-all-these-people-showering-in-their-arcteryx-jackets-11642422998
In its advertisements, Arc’teryx—a 33-year-old North Vancouver outdoor-gear company—shows its hardy outfits being worn on powder-drenched ski slopes and verdant forest trails. But lately, Arc’teryx consumers can’t seem to stop wearing the brand’s jackets in a far less extreme setting: their showers. On the video app TikTok, you can more than a hundred clips of people showering in Arc’teryx’s Gore-Tex jackets, with their cloaked heads and shoulders planted directly beneath a flowing showerhead. These clips are weirdly mesmerizing. Many commenters voice the same observation, that the water “just beads right off” the jackets (that exact wording has become meme-ified, becoming part of the in-joke). These videos are almost always set to “Arc’teryx,” an infectious 2021 song by British rapper YT, that opens with the swaggering lyrics: “Arc’teryx on me, nah, we don’t rock no Patagonia. Arc’teryx on me, I could go hiking in Snowdonia.”
What’s possibly the first such video was posted in May of last year by Jason Allred, 28, a quality control manager and nature photographer in Salt Lake City, Utah. He had just purchased a $599 Arc’teryx Alpha AR model, which the brand bills as being waterproof, and wanted to test out the jacket’s technical claims. So, he recorded a few clips to send to friends. In them, he runs the sleeve under a faucet, dumps a glass of water on the hood, then hops in the shower and finally, leaps into a pool. His friends were so entertained by the progressively rigorous testing in his videos (which took him just a few hours to shoot) that he compiled them into one clip and uploaded it to TikTok. The video, which is like a Benny Hill sketch refreshed for the gorpcore moment, has over three million views and, as it snowballed, copycat TikToks proliferated.
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.