Shopping All the Way to the Woods

In Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America author Rachel Gross explores the irony of how trips into nature usually start with shopping in an outdoor recreational store or browsing through online offerings. The American outdoor experience of visiting wild spaces first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output.
Drawing on material from the Hagley Library’s holdings on DuPont, as well as documents from Gore Products Inc., Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person determined by what you wore. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.

Rachel Gross is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado, Denver. She received several grants from Hagley to support her research for this book.

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