Olympic fashion: Winning or not?

For Ralph Lauren, Burton and The Hudson's Bay Company, kitsch is out and streamlined is in

The 100-day countdown to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, may have just begun, but the race to the fashion finish line among the various teams is well underway.

Canada, France, and Poland began to roll out their outfits last month — there was even a special Olympic fashion show in Warsaw that also featured with Croatia, Greece, Latvia and Serbia. This week, the United States hopped off the starting blocks and into the fray.

On Wednesday, in a kind of style relay, Ralph Lauren unveiled the closing ceremony looks for Team USA, Burton showed off the snowboarding kit, and Nike introduced the hockey jerseys for both the United States and Canada.

Thus far, the leader seems to be... sportswear!

That may sound ridiculous, but fashion has become so much a part of recent Olympics (in the same way fashion has attempted to send its tentacles into pretty much every part of designed life), that the out-of-competition clothing that athletes wear, and even some of the in-competition stuff, has increasingly started to seem like basic runway merch. A list of the designer brands that have played wardrobe coach includes Stella McCartney, Giorgio Armani, Lacoste and Prada, to name a few.

But this year, it’s as if, in the weird circular way of fashion, sports clothing, which has been exerting its own influence in ateliers and on catwalks for the last few seasons in the form of streetwear and athleisure, has now effectively changed that game enough so that when designers move to the Olympics, their actual sportswear looks again like sportswear. Roll your eyes if you want to. It’s true.

Ralph Lauren being the prime case in point. The closing ceremony styles for 2018 (the opening ceremony looks are being held until closer to the Games just to, you know, keep the anticipation going), involved a simple white down jacket over streamlined navy track pants with a red stripe down the side and a red, white, and blue striped sweater. They are relatively no-fuss and low-kitsch — especially compared to the offerings for the 2014 Games: patchwork Americana grandpa cardigans for the opening ceremony, and pea coats for the closing event. There are also some brown work boots with red laces.

It’s the same story with Burton, which in 2014 also produced a weird patchwork-themed snowboarding style based on an old prairie quilt (Really: The print was faded squares of flags and plaids, and it was paired with khaki pants) but this time around has gone with an astronaut concept that actually looks pretty cool. Think white puffa onesies or glimmering jackets and pants given a metallic sheen with a micro-thin coating of aluminum, and bright orange under-layers.

“Spacesuits are like the ultimate engineered garment,” said Greg Dacyshyn, head of design for the Burton Olympic program. Wearing them, athletes “can imagine blasting out of a pipe, like blasting off into the atmosphere.”

There are exceptions, of course: Australia’s formal uniform, worn at team functions, consists of a blue-and-white checked button-front shirt, blue suit, green crewneck, tie and brown pants, making the athletes look more like high school biology teachers than high-level competitors (“Are these the worst Aussie Winter Olympic uniforms?” asked The Daily Telegraph). Perhaps the actual competition gear, still to be seen, will change that.

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