A Kinder, Gentler Explorecore

Vintage Banana Republic, '90s Armani and the dream of adventure

Even with rising gas prices, inflation, and Covid not going anywhere anytime soon, people still want to travel. They want to get out and see other parts of the world so much that the summer airport scene is looking like pure chaos. The glamour of travel is back, baby! Get ready to get loaded onto a plane like cattle after you’ve eaten an overpriced but incredibly terrible meal at the airport, or spent time in your preferred airline lounge eating off-brand microwaved breakfast sandwiches and drinking cocktails made up of 75 percent melted ice and a dash of liquor.

Travel is fun, traveling…not so much. It’s a means to a beginning, essentially. You go through the indignation of going through the airport, getting on the plane, the delays, the gross bathrooms, the internet not working and then you get to your destination. You touch the ground and you think “I really went through a lot to get to this place,” and then your adventure starts. And since you’re on an adventure, I think it’s nice to dress like it. Maybe pack some gurkha shorts or a Panama hat or something like that. Embrace your inner-T. E. Lawrence or Hemingway without all the racism and alcohol abuse even if you’re just going to a resort with your family for a few days. And if that’s the case and that’s what you’re doing, then maybe a few drinks wouldn’t hurt.

That probably sounds like overkill, but I’m also a person with a small collection of old Banana Republic catalogs who just finished reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I’m really drawn to how people used to dress when traveling—from the world war years of the 20th century to the Slim Aarons jet-set era—but I really love that specific moment in time when there was a longing for the past, back when guys wanted to try and look like they were going to go looking for a treasure with Indiana Jones. It’s silly, basically cosplay. But I was recently putting together my packing list (I prepare early) for a few weeks in France, and I thought, man, it would be nice if I could just totally replicate Armani’s spring/summer for men from 1989 and not give it too much thought beyond that.

That just seems easier to me. I like thinking about dressing a specific way and just sort of going from there. The ‘80s Armani stuff is appealing to me because it all has a very “Doing some digging for old books in Paris one day, getting on a jet to hang out with Paul Bowles in Tangier the next.” That was a very late-1980s thing you saw constantly whether it was fashion houses or mailorder catalogs. It was the whole reason a guy like John Peterman could go from minor league baseball player to dog food salesman to beer cheese company owner who saw a duster he liked and had an idea. And that idea became J. Peterman. And J. Peterman, of course, became famous because of Seinfeld. The fictional version of Peterman, played by John O'Hurley, was an adventurer. And the real Peterman sold adventure. He sold this idea of a rough but glamourous lifestyle. That’s why I love the cover of his book so much. He looks like he’s going to be out there herding cattle in a John Ford film, but really, it’s about “adventures...through life and the catalog business.” Yee-haw!

Nobody probably did more for explorecore than Mel and Patricia Ziegler did with Banana Republic. And, like Peterman, the Zieglers weren’t swashbuckling archaeologists; they were journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle who wanted to do something different. Mel, trying to find some easy freelance money, took a press trip to Australia, and when he came back, Patricia didn’t recognize him in a khaki brush jacket and an olive green wide-brimmed hat. “The four-pocket jacket screamed ‘authentic,’ and ‘adventure,’ Patricia wrote in the couple’s memoir, Wild Company. And from there, the couple made a fortune selling Bombay shirts and overcoats that made you look like you spent time at Rick's Café Américain during the Second World War. And the way they sold it was brilliant. Just go look at the site Abandoned Republic to understand why people are obsessed with the company’s golden age today.

Explorecore started dying away by the 2000s. Nobody wanted to explore. The world was too scary. That, and all the new travel restrictions plus the boom in athleisure meant people could at least dress comfortably for an uncomfortable plane trip. I get the why people are always talking about how people don’t dress nicely to fly anymore, but I also understand why people just want to wear sweatpants, take a pill and pass out with noise-canceling headphones on. But here we are, people just want to get out and try to see something other than the few blocks around their house they’ve been mostly relegated to, and explorecore looks to be making a comeback.

Huckberry has been doing this sort of thing for years. They’ve always done a great job of bridging the gap between stylish stuff for guys in the city and stuff dads who read Men’s Health would wear. “Duck Paradise” short sleeve shirts and work gloves that might make you actually want to do work. They have the adventure stuff, but they also have the whole call back to a time when dudes worked kinda thing that I think people like myself, who spend their days behind a computer monitor, do appreciate deep down. But it’s all sold through this idea that it’s for an “adventure.” Even right now as I type this, the word is up on the top of the company’s website for their Father’s Day sale: “Life’s Wildest Adventure.”

Another personal favorite of mine has been Quaker Marine Supply, particularly because I got really obsessed with long-brim ballcaps after I saw Rip Torn as Artie wearing one during my recent Larry Sanders rewatch. The company has a lot of great stuff, but the Swordfish hat is something I particularly like even though I’ve never gone out into the Atlantic in hopes of catching a marlin the size of a surfboard.

I see little bits of explorecore here and there and I’m not totally sure if it’s coming back or not, but it wouldn’t be bad. I mean think bandanas around the neck (a personal favorite), a chambray shirt, some khaki shorts and a pair of desert boots with some socks? Why would you not want to embrace your inner-Sam Neill in Jurassic Park once in a while?

Ultimately, the explorecore thing does have its downsides. When you look at the icons of the whole look, namely Teddy Roosevelt and Hemingway, they’re not exactly in step with where the culture is at right now, and there’s a very good reason for that. The golden era of explorecore, similarly, was very much geared towards white people with money to spend, who might look at photos of European colonists from the 1920s and say “Wow! What style!” when the fact was those people were brutalizing the native population. Of all the cringey-as-hell things that happened when Trump was president, I still can’t forget when Ivanka went to Kenya dressed as if the Nazis sent her to go exploring for lost treasure in a lost Indiana Jones script. So if explorecore is to make a comeback, it would have to really take all that into consideration and grip with the fact that a lot of this stuff does have connections to some pretty dark times and bad people.