Portfolio: The Patagonia Collection

Mythology started with a mistake. In 1980, Rick Ridgeway was hired to shoot photos for Patagonia’s first catalog. As an action photographer, he had skills; for models, perhaps not. When the catalog came back from the printer a few weeks later, owner Yvon Chouinard’s response was to stare at the floor and shuffle his feet. Kris McDivitt, the company’s general manager, turned to Ridgeway and said, “The pictures really suck, pal.”

A few days later, during a surf session, Chouinard suggested another approach. “We’ll run real photos of real people doing real things,” he told Ridgeway. Soon, Patagonia was seeding clothes to friends, photographers, and athletes to shoot in the field. It asked customers to send pictures, too. Soon, pretty product imagery became almost secondary to snapshots of grit and grime and good times. The move defined Patagonia as the “anti-marketers,” Inc magazine wrote, but more important, it helped bring form to the dirtbag, funhog, all-conditions, type-3 culture. By the late 1980s, the