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This month Jonah Weiner made a purchase that was a cry for help. Or at least a new financial adviser.
He spent $910 on a fleece pullover.
“My wallet wept,” Mr. Weiner said.
But, as Mr. Weiner, 43, the co-writer of the ur-cool guy fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, pleaded, this was no prosaic Polartec. It was an all-wool, Austrian-made fleece from the 5-year-old French brand Rier. With its gleaming Riri zippers and monochromatic scheme, it is like Dieter Rams’s vision of a Patagonia pullover.
“What really leaped out was the cut,” Mr. Weiner said. He tossed out adjectives: balloony, droopy, malleable. What he meant was that this wool fleece, which he purchased in a tangy yellow, draped unlike any other fleece he had tried on. His credit card didn’t stand a chance.
If Mr. Weiner is a mark for dropping the equivalent of more than six Patagonia Snap-T jackets on a single fleece, he is a mark among many.
At the Canadian retailer Ssense, Rier’s pullover is out of stock in a number of sizes and colors. Highsnobiety, the hypey blog turned hypey retailer, is nearly out of the fleece in brown. At Outline, a women’s boutique in Brooklyn, the jacket in a Tweety Bird yellow has flown off its shelves.
And Rier’s is not the only upscale fleece crowding the market.
The buzzy New York designer Colleen Allen offers a fitted $1,200 poly-fleece in a Victorian-inflected hourglass silhouette. It’s the fleece that stumbled into “The Gilded Age.” Drake’s in London sells a $530 bouclé fleece as nubby and vibrant as a stuffed Elmo. The princeliest fleece of all comes from the Milanese fashion house Miu Miu: a mouse-gray full-zip that frankly could be a $46 Colombia coat, save for the teensy Miu Miu logo on the left chest. For that it fetches $2,350.
If Miu Miu’s logoed fleece demonstrates the power of brand — particularly a resurgent brand led by Signora Miuccia Prada — Rier’s fleece spotlights something deeper about what shoppers crave today: clothes ordinary in look but opulent to touch.
“I don’t think the piece itself is particularly groundbreaking,” said Calvin Holmes, the men’s wear buying manager at Ssense. “But the fabric feels great, the colors are amazing and the fit makes it look great on pretty much anyone.” He would hope so: Mr. Holmes owns two Rier fleeces in navy and gray. (He said he used his company’s generous discount to get a deal on the pricey jackets.)
The fancy fleece reflects, or at least combines, several trends of the past decade in one irresistible package. In its banal fleeciness, it channels normcore, a knowing adoption of suburban-mall clothes. Its to-the-neck Patagonia-like shape nods to gorpcore, an inclination toward functional outdoor gear worn off the trail. And most of all, it syncs with quiet luxury, the very “Succession”-era push toward princely items like cashmere ball caps and suede field jackets that are elitist, but incognito.
“There’s a focus on fabric and construction and color versus obvious branding,” Mr. Holmes said of the fleece. He offered a surprising comparison: Loro Piana’s $980 Summer Walk loafers. They’re a conventional silhouette, lack branding and have become an in-the-know signifier. Summer Walks for Lear-jetting billionaires, Rier fleeces for buyers who trudge to Paris fashion shows.
There is also a cohort that seems to have convinced themselves that they’re punishing their wallets for the benefit of the planet. Mr. Weiner said he and others were “skeeved out by the notion of wearing petroleum.” (Most economical fleeces on the market are produced from polyester.) Shoppers like him, Mr. Weiner said, are soothed by the idea of buying something that connects them “as close as possible to some sheep on a hillside.”
If this is a rosy image of people who spend $910 on clothes, it’s one that will please Andreas Steiner, the Italian-born founder and designer of Rier.
Though he spent about seven years working at Prada, refining a palate for luxury goods at their most distilled, the inspiration for the wool fleece flows from growing up in the shadow of the Dolomites, where locals draped themselves in natural wool garments.
“If you go hiking, climbing outdoors, of course you need something that dries faster or is not that thick and heavy,” said Mr. Steiner, who displays a conservationist’s brio absent in most high-fashion designers.
His wool fleeces, he said, won’t leach microplastics into the water as polyester versions have been found to in studies. He went as far as to claim that the fleece could decompose entirely within about six weeks if it was buried. (The New York Times did not test this out.)
Mr. Steiner is aware that there’s any number of ways he could get the cost down. He could add thrifty polyester to the material, produce them in Bulgaria where wages are lower than Austria or switch the zippers. But that would compromise his vision. The price, he said, is “honest.”
Some shoppers seem to agree. Even if their wallets hate it.
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