Power dressing usually comes in the form of a suit or a wide-shouldered wool coat. But right now, things look a little different. This week, Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, appeared at a joint press conference with Denmark’s leader to say that he had no intention of acquiescing to Donald Trump’s stated desire to “own” Greenland – all while wearing a glacial-blue windbreaker.
It is a garment Nielsen wears regularly but, in this shifting geopolitical moment, it took on a new, loaded and striking messaging.
A practical outer layer, the windbreaker or anorak is widely seen as a modern descendant of the parka, which was invented in the Arctic region to which Greenland belongs. Traditionally made from intestinal membranes from marine mammals – a proto-Gore-Tex – the parka was designed for survival. Nielsen’s jacket has been called “a modern take on the Inuit anorak”.
The windbreaker’s resurgence has also been fuelled by popular culture. It followed one of the most rollercoaster press tours in recent memory, for Marty Supreme, in which a $250 (£185) windbreaker took centre stage.
Part of a collection produced by the LA-based luxury brand Nahmias in collaboration with A24, the film’s production company, along with the actor Timothée Chalamet and his stylist, Taylor McNeill, the jacket was emblazoned with the film’s title and three gold stars.
Worn by Kendall and Kylie Jenner, the American ballet dancer Misty Copeland, the rapper Kid Cudi and even, as seen via a festive Instagram post, Ringo Starr, it helped transform a film about a striving ping-pong player into the kind of manufactured cultural moment not seen since Barbie turned 2023 pink. As the brand’s founder, Doni Nahmias, told GQ: “It’s like a modern take on vintage sportswear … we kind of just decided the fans are going to need these.”
The windbreaker, although not actually featured in the film, quickly sold out and is now on offer for many times its original price on resale sites – a blue size large was listed at just under £16,000 on StockX.
More affordably, Depop – where searches for “windbreakers” are up 60% in the past six months and searches for “Marty Supreme” have soared by 1,475% in six weeks – is awash with retro versions that closely resemble the original.
Nor was it the only cultural moment to bring the windbreaker in from the cold. Hailey Bieber, Zoë Kravitz and Charli xcx wore versions on the front row of Saint Laurent’s Paris show in September, securing the jacket’s unlikely status as both fashion item and cultural signal.
According to Daniel-Yaw Miller, a sports and fashion journalist and writer of SportsVerse, “windbreakers are definitely having a moment in both menswear and womenswear. There’s an emphasis on an elevated style of dressing inspired by 90s sportswear and street fashion.”
For J’Nae Phillips, a trend forecaster and the creator of the Fashion Tingz newsletter, windbreakers feel timely because they “sit at a very specific emotional crossroads: practicality, nostalgia and irony, without tipping fully into any one of those”.
The brooding Britpop summer may also have played a role: the outdoor specialist Berghaus reissued its 90s Trango jacket, fronted by the campaign’s leading man, a moody Liam Gallagher, accessorised with his trademark pinched pout.
But there is another, meteorological, reason. “We’re in a permanently ‘in-between’ climate moment,” says Phillips, as Storm Goretti brings 99mph gusts to the UK. “Not cold enough for a coat, not warm enough for nothing. Windbreakers are designed for uncertainty, which mirrors how people are dressing more broadly: adaptable, layerable, non-committal.”
In general, she says, windbreakers “align with a broader mood shift away from aspiration and toward realism. They’re democratic, vaguely sporty, slightly unfashionable in a way that now reads as chic. They acknowledge that life is windy, unpredictable, and often a bit damp, and that being dressed for that feels oddly reassuring right now.”
So it is that, even though they generally read more trainspotter than trendspotter, wind is being broken all over the high street. Zara is hitting two trend birds with one stone with its polka dot version, while Damson Madder, a London-based brand beloved of “the girlies”, has several takes. Cos offers its own iteration, and the Scandi label Ganni a leopard-print option.
Leading the charge, however, is the Paris-founded, Milan-based brand K-Way and its reimagined Le Vrai jacket. Lorenzo Boglione, the chief executive of BasicNet Group, which owns K-Way, said that while “windbreakers started as simple protection from the elements, today they’ve become true lifestyle pieces”.
Damson Madder is also framing windbreakers as a “lifestyle object rather than a technical one”, favouring “soft colours, clean lines, easy shapes”. Still undeniably sporty and outdoorsy, the rebrand means they no longer represent “gorpcore at its peak; it’s gorpcore domesticated. The girlies aren’t dressing for Everest, they’re dressing for walking, errands, life.”
