LESSONS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Excerpts from a conversation between Nur Abbas, creative director at Goldwin 0, and Chase Anderson, lecturer and co-creator of the Outdoor Recreation Archive (ORA) at Utah State University.

(Thursday, July 24, 2025)

Nur Abbas: We were first in touch in around 2019 I think. We exchanged a few messages on Instagram, or something like that. That was the first time I’d heard about the archive. Can I ask how you started it?

Chase Anderson: It started in 2018 as a collaboration between myself and my colleague Clint Pumphrey, so only a year before you and I were in touch. Initially it was supposed to be a resource for students and we started posting imagery from the collection on Instagram in 2019. That decision was quite heavily influenced by Brian Kelley. I don’t know if you follow Brian on Instagram, but he has this amazing collection of national park brochures.

Nur: Oh yeah I have his book, ‘Parks’. I love that book.

Chase: Exactly, him posting his brochures onto Instagram was a real inspiration for us. That’s when we started posting our catalogues on Instagram, and we very quickly found that there were more people than just our students who were interested in the history of vintage outdoors. So we kind of pushed it further to make sure that people knew we existed and that we were a resource that could hopefully be of value.

Nur: It’s great that you’ve mentioned Brian Kelley, because he was definitely a source of inspiration for us, too. Namely the idea of creating printed matter. Both because he emphasised the way in which these organisations would use print, which is something that is difficult to do now because of production costs, and also because of how he took his archive and kind of disseminated it further and added to it by producing a book of his own. It’s something we are looking at with Goldwin 0 – having these documents that are sort of circular, starting off with an idea and the resource and then revisiting it and creating a new piece of printed matter that further contributes to the archive.

Chase: We’ve also gone kind of full circle now and we’ve produced a book of our own, ‘The Outdoor Archive’.

Nur: You asked me to write a contribution for your book, and I wrote about how I simply didn’t have access to this stuff when I was growing up. I grew up in Lincolnshire, in the UK, and where I lived there was only one very small outdoors store. But now people have much more access to things like archives. And your archive in particular allows much more depth in terms of the access. It’s a place where you can see the process that designers went through. You can look at magazines from across the decades, catalogues from across the decades. I think for a new generation that completely changes the direction they can take, purely through what they can access. I find it interesting how a new generation might be influenced by opening up this information or making it accessible and how that might change how people approach design for the outdoors, or technical design. You know, being able to look at the sketchbooks of designers from decades past that have made products that are very familiar – being able to see that processes is invaluable.

Chase: It’s very energising to have a student who wants to design and work in the outdoors industry come in and discover where this industry came from and to see who the key innovators are, the key products, the evolution of these brands. My image of what we are doing with connecting design students with the history of the industry is to hopefully help them understand that they are part of something bigger. This industry goes back incredibly far. I mean, just earlier today we were looking at some Abercrombie & Fitch pieces that were from, like, 1900 or even before, and I think that’s part of what has been successful for the archive. I think we’re introducing a lot of people to this idea that the industry that we’re all part of is a lot older than we might think and it has a rich history – far richer than maybe a lot of us give it credit for. So I think on the student side, it’s energising seeing them come into the space and feel like they’re part of something bigger and they can build on the legacy of the outdoors and these different innovators. At the end of the day, I think it’s really all about helping people get excited. It’s all about education, whether we’re educating our own students or helping to educate and provide access to this material for people outside of the university. It all comes back to educating, inspiring and providing access.

Nur: That question of access is really interesting. Because the internet, and Instagram in particular, has made things so much more accessible. It’s how I found out about your archive in the first place. But then so much of what people see and consume is fed by an algorithm. It kind of saturates.

Chase: It’s something we think about a lot here. The algorithm dictates so much of what we see and what we consume, and in many ways it then influences what our output is. It’s been fun for us to go through our catalogues and put imagery online that’s never been online before. So much of the algorithm is just recycled imagery. So we like digging and digging and finding things that have never been made accessible.

Nur: It is almost as though archives have become a natural resource. Everyone can see and share the same image, which is why I like to try and go to the source first hand, whether that’s in a physical archive or going into nature and looking at it directly. For me personally, coming here I was very excited to see original sketches. The portfolios of designs. I mean, these are things that just aren’t available usually. People don’t often get to see things like that. I just don’t think that anyone, the designers, the brands, ever really thought about showing it off before. I suppose in the past you’d maybe print a catalogue and you’d have to edit it down and be quite careful about what you release. So a lot of that material just got left behind and ended up in a storage container in Florida or wherever.

Chase: If you look at the outdoor industry compared to the fashion industry and how fashion houses operate, I feel like, at least from the outside, fashion houses understand why their back catalogue is important. They understand why their history and heritage is important. At least from the outside, it seems like they take it seriously. Whereas the outdoor industry, I think there’s a lot there but it doesn’t feel as old or mature as an industry. And yet it is! It’s a global industry, and I think with that, we’re helping the industry recognise its heritage and its history. There are brands that are 50, 100 years old with a long history and a long legacy, but it’s always felt like an upstart industry. It’s dirtbag climbers coming in from the outside and doing their own thing, creating something just for themselves. But I think as the industry has become globalised; people are starting to look back and realise, wow, we have an incredibly deep history and a deep back catalogue.

Nur: We’re getting into that phase where many companies do have heritage and they’re playing on that heritage more and more. With regards to fashion and luxury, I think that brands do understand how invaluable their heritage is. But if you look at some of the major players like Hermès or Louis Vuitton, if you go all the way back to the beginning of those brands, the reason they were able to start and get traction is that, when they started, they weren’t a heritage brand, they were just a new brand. And new brands have to play on innovation, and most often that innovation is based on society. Hermès was an innovation company that innovated around horses and creating bags for horse riding, because that was the way people got around. It’s the same with Vuitton. Their big innovation was creating trunks for train travel because that was the latest technology and that was innovation at the time. They’ve been around long enough now that all those things are just history and heritage. What I’ve realised is that I’m primarily interested in that initial innovation. Because looking at where we are societally or culturally, you have more people in society who have been drawn back to the outdoors. There’s this interplay between the wilderness and urban living and people are more drawn to connecting with nature. One of the technologies that mediates how we do that and that is becoming more important in our lives is fabric innovation, or insulation, or rain wear that allows people to explore further and stay out for longer and do it more comfortably. So maybe a hundred years down the line, the companies that were the innovators of this time will be the new heritage and luxury brands. But I think that first move, that first kind of innovation path is essential. That is what makes the brand what it is.

Chase: I think that’s a good point for anyone who’s trying to break into this space or start a brand. There’s so much noise, there’s so many young up-start brands, how do you stand out in this space? I think that point of innovation is the differentiator. If you look at most of the outdoor brands that are represented in our collection, you could probably trace their success back to one thing, an innovation of some kind that would define the company, like an Eddie Bauer down.

Nur: Right, exactly.

Chase: Down was the differentiator that defined that company. Or a company like Moss with their tents. Up until that point there were a lot of A-frame tents or straight-line tent designs but Bill Moss was known to say there were no straight lines in nature. And so all his tent structures are curved or round. That’s what really broke through. Or a company like Warmlite. It’s kind of an obscure company that not a lot of people know about but the story is similar: Jack Stevenson, who is an aerospace engineer, comes in and he understands aerodynamics and material properties and brings in more flexible tent poles into that space and creates the tunnel tent structures that would define that brand. So I think you’re spot on.

Nur: Every brand that is going to gain some traction has to have a reason to exist, and usually that’s because of a new idea. I think then the difficult part is to continue to have new ideas. One of the first things we did when I started on Goldwin was to look at the Goldwin Archive book to understand, well, where did this come from? What are the things that defined it from the beginning? We were looking back at the same time as looking forward, by trying to respect the same approaches, while not necessarily being too literal. Because actually if you can at least understand what the approach was and maybe kind of follow that same kind of way of thinking, then the outcome can be completely different but still relevant to the brand or relevant to that way of working. It creates a kind of system. It’s not necessarily that we have to always just repeat the same thing or create a copy of something. Instead, looking back at an archive allows us to say, ‘Oh, there was this jacket, it was this shape, that’s interesting… Do we follow it closely, or is there something there that’s going to inspire us to do something completely different?’ Again, I think that’s what’s really interesting about seeing the sketchbooks and designs in your archive. It’s one thing to see a finished product, but it’s a whole other thing to understand how they got there: What sketches did they do? What inspiration and images did they paste into their notebooks?

Chase: I think that’s a deeper lesson for how to engage with the archive and engage with a brand’s history. I think most people just immediately think of doing a reissue, which I think there’s value in, don’t get me wrong. But I think your point of taking broader lessons, looking at the values of a brand, looking at their processes and figuring out how to bring them forward to today. I think those are some of the deeper insights that can be learned by digging back through a company’s history.

Nur: Completely, and you can see these processes emerging right the way through. Like, one thing that really stands out with a lot of these brands is how they never stopped with the finished product. Whether it’s the documentation in their catalogues or magazine adverts, or even earlier with hand drawn renderings, the care and attention that would go into showing off and displaying their work is amazing. It’s a good reminder that it’s not just enough to make a good product that is innovative and will be high quality and work well. You need to also go the extra step and make sure that it’s shown in the right way, that the images are inspiring, that the layout captures someone’s attention and you can see that someone has taken care with it. All of that.

Chase: The lesson there is that craft is important. A little earlier we were talking about Steve McDonald’s immaculate handwriting and these beautiful renderings he would produce. I think students can look at that and feel incredibly overwhelmed. But that’s not necessarily what they are being asked to do today. They don’t need to produce hand sketched renderings that are super polished, rather I think the lesson is that whatever medium you are designing in, you should make sure you bring that same level of care and attention and craft that Steve did to his work. It’s about the process.

Nur: True, that extends right the way through whether it’s putting together the first sketches for a product or creating the final images for the campaign. There’s a craft to it, and to respect that process is to perfect it.

Chase: I think another lesson from the archive, and we’ve talked about this with social media and inspiration, is to just slow down. We could scan all the imagery here. We could scan it all and put the entire thing online, but I think there’s something valuable in coming here and flipping through the pages yourself. The context matters. If everything gets reduced to a single image shared on Instagram, you lose a lot. You don’t see what that image was next to. Flipping through a magazine, say, and seeing an advertisement next to whatever new product was being launched or the gear review that fell next to it. The context is really important and it comes with slowing down as part of your research. Slowing down means making discovery, true discovery.

Nur: I completely agree. And that can apply just as much to going out in nature to look at colour palettes, or coming here in order to go through folders and boxes full of images and printed matter. There is a focus that comes through the act of a research trip and intentionally going out to find something. It’s something I’ve done throughout my career. Stopping, leaving the office or the studio just to focus on finding inspiration.

Chase: It's about intention. Exiting your normal context, going out to find and see things first hand. I think that’s part of the journey.