The polypro memory

There's a photo in my mum's album of a school camp at Ruapehu in 1989. Twenty kids, all grinning, all wearing the exact same base layer: bright horizontal polypropylene stripes — red, yellow, blue, mint green — over black pants. The photo is burned into my head.

We're making merino base layers now because of that photo.

What happened to the stripes

Polypro — polypropylene — was the 1980s wonder fibre. Cheap, warm, dried fast. It came in every colour, because plastic does. Every school camp base layer, every tramping hut photo, every Saturday-morning netball warmup was striped. Loud, obvious, bright.

Then in 1995 an Auckland company put merino against skin and proved it outperformed polypro on every axis that mattered. Warmer when wet. Cooler in heat. Didn't hold the smell of a three-day walk. The whole industry pivoted to merino inside ten years.

And somewhere in that pivot, the colour disappeared.

The category got serious

Go into any outdoor retailer today. Look at the base layer wall. Ninety per cent of it is black, charcoal, navy, or a muted burgundy the brand calls "port." Merino got better and got duller at the same time. The companies selling it decided — correctly for their market, at the time — that serious performance wear shouldn't look fun.

I respect the decision. I also think they accidentally made merino invisible to anyone who wasn't already into merino.

What Long Jons is

We aren't reinventing the fibre. Merino already works. The 1995 company figured that out.

What we're doing is putting the colour back. Not randomly — every Long Jons pattern comes from a 1933 colour dictionary, which is its own story — but deliberately, and with the specific goal of making a merino base layer someone who was at Ruapehu in 1989 would recognise.

What we're not doing

We're not making polypro. It sheds microplastic every wash. It crunches when it's cold. It holds sweat smell after one day. The memory of polypro is better than the fabric. Wool is the upgrade.

We're just giving it back its personality.

The polypro photo wasn't a fashion statement. It was kids at school camp, wearing what their school gave them. What made it stick was the colour.

That's the whole brief. Everything else is a detail.