When did the realm of adventure and wilderness travel become Madison Avenue's favorite image bank? A traverse across advertising's new frontier.

By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Photo Illustration by Craig Cutler

On my way home from work one autumn afternoon, I stopped in the Prada Sport boutique in Manhattan's Soho—a solemn, white-lit, concrete bunker filled with racks of olive, gun-metal grey, and safety orange outfits broadcasting a cacophony of messages: big-beat ravewear, Euro functionality, hard-core survival gear. Milled of Cordura, Gore-Tex, and a host of other expedition-ready fibers, the vests and jackets were replete with buckles, straps, pulleys, zips—all the bells and whistles of a technical parka by Marmot or The North Face.

Yet nothing here was ever meant to see a blizzard or a week below zero. Beneath our highly technical veneer, the clothes seem to wink, in the end it is only fashion. The sleek showroom, the racks of neoprene jackets, the sturdy, telemark-like boots—this isn't for the real outdoors. What Prada wants the purchaser to understand is not that he might want to scale Mt. Rainier or head into the backcountry or go out of bounds, but rather that he's eminently prepared for the virtual outdoors. It is all meant to incorporate the wearer, the Prada Sport customer, in the thrilling narrative of a place called Frontierland.

Add up all the positive connotations of the wilderness—the expansive vistas, the sylvan splendors, the pine-scented mountain air, and the pioneers' noble triumph over all that untamed nature. Subtract the downside—frostbite, starvation, heatstroke, blackflies, mosquitoes, infant mortality, and typhoid epidemics. Now call the remainder Frontierland, with a capital F, not in a nod to Disney but...oh, hell, it is a nod to Disney. Frontierland represents all that is compelling, gratifying, and ultimately America-asserting about the outdoors, without all the messy hardship. Frontierland is the safe and antiseptic outdoors of television commercials, where models wearing colorful parkas and beefy boots drive SUVs to cavort in scenic settings and engage in hot new (to Madison Avenue) sports like rock climbing and snowboarding. This virtual outdoors flourishes in pitchwomen's fantasies and lensmen's imaginations, free from disturbing danger but brimming with the edgy frisson of risk-free (at least on Madison Avenue) thrills. It is as far removed from the real frontier as the Chevy Suburban is from a kicking mule.

But don't for a second get Frontierland, with all its rugged beauty and extreme sports, confused with the other outdoors, which we will call the frontier, or the wilderness, or the desert, or the mountains, or—well, call it anything you want, but remember that this is where bears can maul you and rockslides can crush you and swelled streams can drown you and even your own traveling companions might eat you.

America, as it is defined today, by its mission to sell as many cars, clothes, and sodas as possible, is awash in Frontierland. Take note of the companies that are now associating themselves with Frontierland, firms selling everything from cell phones and long-distance telephone service to chewing gum and bottled water. The visual language of Frontierland has become the lingua franca of advertising, so much so that even marketers pitching products as removed from the outdoors as life insurance are linking themselves with Frontierland's adventurer-citizens. When did this happen? When did the outdoors as theme park become the dominant American advertising motif of this fleeting fin de siècle, with snowboarding, rappelling, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, and BASE-jumping replacing the log ride and those banjo-playing bears?