Polyester, really, made the outdoors sexy. "It's a pretty simple equation," Joe Walkuski, a textile R&D executive for Patagonia Inc., told Outside in 1997. "Comfort in the outdoors is based on oil refinement. It's not an easy issue." But it was a trend that Patagonia itself pioneered with its introduction of petroleum-based fleece, in which polyester micro-fibers are stretched, shorn, and treated into a warm, breathable, and decidedly un-petroleum-like fabric. And back in 1969, chemical engineer Robert Gore had stumbled onto the incredible properties of the polytetrafluoroethylene membrane, which could be stretched and bonded to material to form a waterproof, breathable wonder fabric.

Patagonia sold its first fleece jackets in 1985, almost a decade after the first Gore-Tex shells hit stores. And when Madison Avenue finally did another wilderness fly-by, in the late eighties, the shaggy hiker had morphed into a neon-colored high technologist, swaddled in Polartec and polypropylene. His tools were no longer a walking stick and a poncho, but space-age diving watches, composite skis, and titanium mountain bikes. Especially compelling, for advertisers, was the idea that all this gear was actually essential to the lifestyle—it was functional and it exuded the requisite amount of hipness. Its cachet only grew as affluent young Americans, tired of Eurail passes and Florida spring breaks, discovered international trekking and adventure tourism. Already the boom was being documented and celebrated in both this magazine and in Patagonia's catalogs: glamorous images of attractive, athletic travelers covered in grime and hunkered over their packs in the Karakoram, creating the notion of the Himalayan range as playground. Even better, from a marketing standpoint, this person, it could be implied in a magazine photo of a Your Brand Here—clad outdoorsman, was clearly engaged with life in a way that was meaningful and fulfilling.

This, of course, was because the outdoorsman himself was still heading into the frontier—not Frontierland—for the same life-affirming reasons that John Muir had gone into the Sierra Nevada. More and more people were hiking, camping, skiing, and kayaking in more and more remote locales, and they were buying gear that could stand up to backcountry punishment. But what the marketers saw was that these new adventurers looked simply terrific. And so Madison Avenue tromped off into the wild after them, huffing up the trail in crocodile loafers, taking copious notes.

The new sports were crucial to the nascent Frontierland. Snowboarding, for example, provided countercultural street cred while extolling the basic American myth of rugged individuality. Hence its passing, in record time, from an outlaw sport to an icon of hyperadolescence to an ofÞcially sanctioned Olympic event. "Within ten years," says Thomas Frank, author of the advertising critique The Conquest of Cool, "snowboarding went from being considered dangerous to being on a postage stamp, which is the definition of orthodoxy." Frank points out that the harder adventure-sports athletes have tried to resist the commercialization of their sports, the more attractive their sports have become to advertisers. How better to illustrate the sexiness of youth than with sky-surfing or snowboarding, sports that didn't even exist when boomers fancied themselves snarling threats to the establishment?

To the credit of the outdoors companies, the gear makers didn't really pander to the mainstream. They didn't need to. The mainstream rappelled over to the activewear aisle. In the early 1990s, high fashion was stumbling and designers from Donna Karan to Giorgio Armani were stuck in basic black potholes. Enter the austere, relentless functionality of expedition wear. The heavy zips, the pulleys, the straps, the toggles! It was all so divertente. "This stuff was loaded with detail and þair and fashion when traditional fashion was putting itself to sleep," says David Wolfe, a fashion-industry consultant at the Doneger Group. Thus gear took over fashion. And fashion appropriated gear, as America's doyennes of high fashion succumbed to the call of the wild. A skier and mountain biker himself, Ralph Lauren began shifting his look from rustic frontier to Frontierland. "I wanted to design clothes for these sports because I love them," says Lauren of his forays into gear design. "I wanted RLX to be real athletic equipment."

So Polo begat Polo Sport which begat last spring's RLX, which is actually more technical than some technical apparel. Prada spun off Prada Sport. This fall, the Gap and Old Navy focused their marketing efforts on zip-up fleece and nylon vests, which appeared 70 feet high on billboards above Times Square. (It doesn't hurt margins that a fleece jacket is made from approximately a pound of polyester staple fiber, which wholesales for about a buck.) Meanwhile, virtually every performance item has drifted into the mainstream—hip-hop stars wearing The North Face on MTV, everyone wearing Teva sandals everywhere, an army of Phish fans streaming into shows in Patagonia Synchilla Snap-Ts. By the millions, Americans embraced the narrative of the wild and rediscovered the driving myth of the culture as a disaster yarn—only this time in a Polartec jacket, a pair of Timberland boots, and most of all, a Land Cruiser, 4Runner, Range Rover, Cherokee, Expedition, Explorer, or Xterra.