Mr Chouinard’s foray into fashion began with a rugby shirt in primary colour stripes that he picked up on a winter climbing trip in Scotland in 1970, heavy enough to keep the hardware slings from digging into his neck, flamboyant enough to catch the attention of fellow climbers who realised they could scale El Capitan and look fab doing it. They ordered a few shirts from Umbro, in England (take heart, hype hoarders: Patagonia began as an Umbro reseller!) and the rest is organic cotton history. Now it’s a billion dollar company with an anti-consumerist ethos. On Black Friday in 2011, Patagonia took out a full page ad in The New York Times, imploring the public “Don’t buy this jacket”. In 2016, they donated all their Black Friday sales to grassroots environmental nonprofits.

Mr Chouinard is a conservationist, and Patagonia commits much of its resources to environmental and labour advocacy, so much so that it can resemble less an apparel company than an activist collective with a robust merch component. Patagonia’s store in SoHo, streetwear’s red zone and home to Palace, BAPE, Off-White and Supreme, looks more like the student union at a liberal arts university, with a message board toward the front plastered with posters railing against dam proliferation and plastic pollution. The brand’s self-imposed “Earth Tax” means it donates one per cent of its sales to nonprofits. And, earlier this year, the company filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Mr Ryan Zinke, the secretary of agriculture, the director of the Bureau of Land Management and the chief of the Forest Service, arguing that the government had overstepped its authority in announcing the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two national monuments in Utah.

Patagonia’s eco-conscious ethos not only means it’s free of the hairy politics that can make a citizen of the world think twice before pulling on a puffer, but that doing so almost counts as a political statement. Still, warm feelings alone don’t explain its popularity among city slickers. The modern expression of streetwear is something of a paradox. As much as streetwear fanaticism is predicated on the new, it also values pedigree. The mere hint of a whisper of the word “authenticity” sends devotees into priapic spasms. Which is where Patagonia enters the frame. Patagonia is sportswear in the truest sense – not as catchall categorisation for anything that isn’t suiting, but precisely what you would wear if you’re doing sport, the serious kind, like dangling off of K2 or crashing through whitewater rapids on the Ocoee. That association makes it as attractive as Supreme is to kids who have never seen the upside of a vert ramp (not incidentally, Supreme released a line paying homage to Patagonia in 1998).