The Race To Make The Warmest Winter Clothes

In September, the luxury outerwear company Canada Goose opened its fourth store in the US, in Short Hills, New Jersey. The store is packed with the company’s expensive and now-ubiquitous winter jackets. But this new Canada Goose store also has a “cold room,” where shoppers can try on the parkas in temperatures as low as minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit. These in-store freezers, which also pop up in the brand’s stores in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, Boston, and Montreal, are something of a gimmick. You don’t really need to stand in a freezer to decide if a Canada Goose coat is warm; the fact that the coats are everywhere today probably speak for itself. But they are also there to prove a point. “We have stores in cities like Vancouver and Tokyo where it hardly snows or goes below 0 degrees Celsius, but people want the best,” Dani Reiss, Canada Goose’s CEO, tells me. “A decade ago, outerwear was purely a commodity, something you wore out of necessity — it wasn’t a fashion statement. Today, outerwear is part of people’s wardrobe and they look forward to wearing it.” Read more at Vox.