00:00All right, David Gurra, how often have you worn camouflage?
00:03Approximately zero times in my life.
00:05That surprises me zero percent.
00:06All right, so a very specific type of camo that you usually see in the deep woods is now getting
00:11kind of a resurgence,
00:12and you're seeing it on runways and city streets.
00:15Camouflage is getting a surge, and it's getting licensing deals with some major brands.
00:19So here to explain what exactly this is and why it's happening is Bloomberg Pursuits' Madison Derbyshire,
00:25who has come with a show and tell, I believe.
00:28So when I read this and it said camo, I thought, like, fatigue camo, but that's not quite it.
00:34That was what we did in, like, the early aughts, but this is a different—this is, like, Deepwoods camo?
00:38This is Deepwoods camo. We call it hunting camouflage.
00:41And when I started reporting the story, I didn't actually know there was much of a difference.
00:45But it turns out it's an entirely different category of camo, and it's dominated by a few very large companies
00:51in the deep south.
00:52And I kind of—I didn't even know to be looking for it until I had to write a story last
00:57year about hunting that required me to buy an outfit.
01:01Bloomberg bought me this beautiful jacket so that I could do the story, and I started wearing it around New
01:06York City.
01:07You could see it's got, like, leaves and sticks on it.
01:10Very intemible.
01:10I started wearing it around New York City, and people would stop me on the street and ask me where
01:15I had got my jacket, what designer was it?
01:18And I had to tell them it was Bass Pro Shop from Harlingen, Texas, but—and it cost $15.
01:24But it was easily the most complimented item of clothing in my wardrobe.
01:28And I started to wonder, like, why were people so interested in the style?
01:32And then I started seeing it everywhere in New York City.
01:35I wore the wrong one.
01:37I wore the military fatigue camo.
01:39So is there a right or a wrong way to wear it?
01:42Like, can I—can I—can I don the Yankee hat with the—this is a lot of camo.
01:48Does this work?
01:49Well, I think—no?
01:49I think it works.
01:50How do you wear camo the right way?
01:52I think she's being very polite to you, Lisa.
01:54She's being very polite.
01:55I think it works, but they—they mean very different things.
01:58So the—that green hunting—or this green camo that you have on your hat was essentially—it was the only camo that
02:05until the mid-'80s existed
02:06because it was created essentially for America's last foreign war, which was Vietnam.
02:11But hunters in the American South were frustrated that the camo didn't really work with the topography of the region,
02:17and they were still finding themselves, like, very visible to the animals that they wanted to hunt, like turkeys.
02:22So there were two—two kind of major players in this.
02:27One's named Toxie Hayes, and the other is Bill Jordan.
02:29And they decided to design their own camo in kind of two separate camo empires, one called Realtree, one called
02:37Mossy Oak,
02:39in order to create hunting camo that was a little bit more appropriate for the topography of America.
02:43And that camo has not been popular in fashion until very recently.
02:48Like, this camo was a very big part of the anti-Vietnam War protest.
02:52It's something that you would see in Abercrombie and Fitch.
02:55I know that I wore it, like, my entire early adolescence.
02:59I wore cargo pants.
03:00But to a lot of people, this camo really suggests military.
03:04It suggests, like, aggression.
03:07It's very masculine.
03:08And there's something that's really interesting happening with the hunting camo is that the associations people have with this pattern
03:15tend to be very regional.
03:16So people who hunt, people who are from the South, will be very familiar with this pattern.
03:21But until the last five years, you really didn't see it that often in New York.
03:24Let me ask you about that.
03:25So you here are the trendsetter going to Bass Pro Shops and coming to New York City wearing this trendsetter.
03:31You know, you asked if I've ever worn it.
03:32No, but I grew up in the South, so it is recognizable to me.
03:34When and how did it make the leap to something that folks here in New York, there would be a
03:39cognoscent in New York who would recognize what this is?
03:42American style, rural southern style, has kind of become a ubiquitous aesthetic for Americana right now.
03:49You see cowboy boots have had this major boom.
03:52Carhartt jackets are everywhere in Williamsburg as well as the South.
03:56Virginia and Brooklyn.
03:57Yeah, there's nowhere you can go where men do not want to wear a vintage Carhartt jacket, which when I
04:03was growing up, like I have a lot of family in the Deep South.
04:05That was considered workwear.
04:07My grandfather used to call it clothes for honest labor.
04:09You bought them in the tractor supply.
04:11They were not sold on high streets of Paris the way they are now.
04:16But what people were really looking for was this kind of vintage aesthetic.
04:19So they started buying the vintage Carhartt that looked like they had been worn in, like worked in.
04:25And the kind of logical next step for that was hunting camo because it has this very American, very rural
04:32association.
04:33But people, one of the really interesting things about this moment is people are buying used hunting clothes.
04:39So things that have been really broken in are being worn by men who have never hunted a turkey in
04:44their lives.
04:45That's what I was going to ask is, like, my issue with the Carhartt is someone else who grew up
04:49with people actually wearing these for work is, like, you're cosplaying a working American.
04:53It's giving, like, Marie Antoinette playing Milkmaid.
04:55Like, is there something kind of off about these guys who've never done this, you know, trying to emulate this?
05:01Or is that just fashion and just kind of part of the fun?
05:04I think it's both.
05:05It is fashion.
05:07People want to wear things that suggest an identity that they want to be a part of.
05:13Like, denim and workwear really entered fashion in the 70s and 80s when, like, blue jeans were not a thing,
05:19right, before they came into fashion because people wanted to wear things that suggested blue collar.
05:25They want, because it was seen as, like, more virile, more masculine.
05:28And you see kind of the same thing coming into play.
05:31We're in this moment where traditional masculinity is kind of politically ascendant.
05:36And so there are people who are unironically wearing these articles of clothing because that's what they think an American
05:43man looks like.
05:44And then there are people who might be wearing it like the Balenciaga jacket that kind of fashion loves irony,
05:51right?
05:51And so they want to suggest these things.
05:53And there is something a little ironic about paying $2,600 or $2,700 for a hunting jacket that you
06:00can get at Bass Pro Shops for $15, right?
06:02So it is really interesting the way that fashion takes these controversial images and they ironize them.
06:09And also to some people, like, one of the things I think we don't talk about enough is there's just
06:14not that many patterns that men feel like they can wear that are culturally acceptable for men to wear that
06:19fit with traditional ideas of masculinity.
06:22You know, they don't really have animal prints the way that women do.
06:25They don't really have florals unless they're feeling particularly bold.
06:29Maybe they have stripes.
06:30And camo is one of those things that men really gravitate towards and then women gravitate towards to steal from
06:36the men.
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