Fashion and fascism in the Dolomites
“White is the colour of purity, of cleanliness, of calm, of ironed shirts and weddings, of linen tablecloths and holiness”, writes Caterina de Biaisio in Rivista Studio: “white is a difficult colour”. Recently, homesick for the mountains in which she grew up, white has been constantly served up to Caterina by the TikTok algorithm: white, homogenising blankets of snow covering the jaggedness of the rocks beneath.
But there is something else on the white, something unpleasant and increasingly overt: the classism of skiers, some apparently turned on by the rising cost of the activity and its exclusivity, even by the callous thought that, with climate change, they may be amongst the last generation to enjoy it at all.
“The 70-euro ski pass is natural selection”, boasts one on TikTok. “I’m not a Communist, I’m not a woman, I’m not from the South and life is great”, says another. De Biasio investigates why there is so much elitist, right-wing culture on the slopes, and on social media. The mountains risk becoming a 2-dimensional backdrop, with a muted colour palette passing for “quiet luxury”. (Mocha mousse, De Biasio notes, is the Pantone colour of 2025). Skiing as social performance.
“People dressed in designer clothes from head to toe and carrying the latest, newly-bought equipment often ask me for a discount on lessons”, says Georgia Esposito, a ski teacher at Cortina. For these people, in a choice between new clothes and learning to ski with a good instructor, clothes win every time.
Meanwhile, away from the mountains, it has become quite fashionable to dress as if you were in the mountains. De Biasio cites the ‘gorpcore’ trend. Who hasn’t seen a climbing carabiner used as a key ring?
Technical clothing is essential for the mountains, but it tends to be made of material which isn’t very sustainable. And as it has become a trend, the fashion-conscious may have several, wasteful unused items, rather than one.
Some are trying a different approach. De Biasio talks to Giorgia Celante, a fashion designer who lives in the mountains, and who has created a line of wool clothing which use beeswax to achieve the standards necessary for mountain wear. Giorgia has given up ski-lifts in favour of the combination of adrenaline, physical exhaustion and beauty-seeking of ski mountaineering.
Far from being a site of performative natural selection as some false individualists have it on TikTok, it is always better to be in a pair in the mountains, writes De Biasio. The severity of the mountains demands passion and dedication, rather than the bland luxury sameness of the thousand beige ski suits about to go out of fashion and to age – “most likely badly”. And when it does? Winter, even white itself, will have to be reimagined.
Full original in Italian by Caterina de Biasio under the title ‘La nuova lotta di classe sulle piste da sci’, published on 16 January 2025 and available here.
Rivista Studio is an Italian news, culture and lifestyle publication based in Milan.
