Gone Fishing: How Fly Fishing Hooked Fashion

Every few seasons fashion finds a new costume in the outdoors.

Hunting gave it the field coat, sailing the pea coat, mountaineering the down parka. Now it is wading into the river.

Fly fishing was never meant to be fashionable. Its clothes were built to keep an angler dry and his flies within reach, and the best-dressed person on any river is usually the one whose kit is oldest. That is exactly the appeal. In a menswear market tired of logos and novelty, the wading jacket and the fishing vest offer something hard to fake: function, patina and a story about a slower life spent outdoors.

This autumn, the sport has arrived at the centre of American fashion.

Ralph Lauren wets a line

Ralph Lauren has been selling the American outdoors for more than half a century, so it is no surprise to find his Fall/Holiday 2026 campaign by a river. The season’s settings are pine forests, a misty lake and a winding river valley, and its copy speaks of the freedom of living close to nature. Fishing has long had a place in that world, alongside polo, sailing and the Colorado ranch that gave Double RL its name.

What is new is how directly the fly rod is used. In this season’s film it takes the lead, and it lands on a generation that came to outdoor clothing through gorpcore and now wants something with more history behind it.

The timing makes sense. Fly fishing offers what fashion has been chasing since quiet luxury ran its course: pieces where every pocket has a job, cottons that age well, and a sport that is slow, solitary and tied to place. Ralph Lauren is not the first to notice. In the past few years an Italian heritage brand, a cult New York label, one of pop’s biggest stars and a small Munich designer have all gone to the river.

Fay: back to the river

For Fay, fishing isn’t a borrowed theme. It is part of the founding story. Before the Della Valle family of Tod’s took it over, Fay made technical garments for fishermen and firefighters, according to Robb Report. Its signature 4 Ganci jacket, with four metal hook closures, traces back to the work coats Diego and Andrea Della Valle saw on a local fire department in Maine in the early 1980s.

The brand’s Fay Archive line, started after Diego Della Valle brought in Michele Lupi in 2018, leans on that workwear past. Its “Field Test” series puts the clothes on people who actually work outdoors. Field Test #9, “The Fly Fisherman”, sends the 4 Ganci to Iceland’s Blanda river to guide Erik Koberling, who leads anglers after the river’s notoriously strong salmon.

The feature’s best line is his. Standing alone in a river every day might look lonely, he says, but it makes him feel complete. It is a good summary of why the sport sells: the jacket is the product, but the solitude is the pitch.

The new wave

Aimé Leon Dore x Woolrich. The Queens label’s fifth collaboration with Woolrich, released in May 2022, was built entirely around fly fishing. The launch film opened on a fly being tied. The line-up read like a fly shop’s apparel wall: a multi-pocket fishing vest, a fly fishing jacket and shirt, zip-off trousers, a trout fleece, a lure cap and a mesh cap. The vest sold for $425 and the zip-off trousers for $350, and most of the drop sold out on ALD’s site the day it landed. Teddy Santis’s genius was treating unglamorous angling staples as heirlooms.

Nike x Drake (NOCTA). In October 2024, NOCTA, the Nike sub-label Drake founded in 2020, launched what Fly Fisherman called “fly-fishing-inspired urban wear”: khaki wading trousers, jackets, vests, hats with bright orange camo sun shields, fishing-inspired golf shirts, T-shirts printed with Teton fishing scenes and denim insulation layers. The hardware was serious. Nike licensed Abel Reels of Montrose, Colorado to build 100 NOCTA reels based on its Vaya series, with a cut-out frame echoing the NOCTA logo and a hand-painted swoosh on the drag knob. Sixty came in solid green and forty in a gold-green fade, each a 5/6 sold with matching nippers for $2,500.

The launch was pure Drake. For three nights, 8 to 10 October, NOCTA turned a parking lot at 88 Madison Street, a block from Chinatown, into a temporary forest around a casting pond, with a DJ, open bars, a light show and a digital scoreboard. Invited casters, mostly New York media and influencers who had never held a fly rod, aimed at 1-point and 3-point hoops while their Instagram handles lit up the board. Denver guide and comedian Eeland Stribling hosted. The same month Drake appeared on the cover of The Drake. According to Fly Fisherman, it was his friend and business partner Niko Carino who got him into fly fishing. Jeff Wagner, CEO of Abel’s parent Mayfly Outdoors, said the project took more than a year and called it a rare chance for fly fishing to reach people “outside of our own echo chamber.”

A Kind of Guise, Zambezi Fisher Jacket. Released this spring, the Munich label’s take is the most direct translation of a wading jacket into city clothing. The Zambezi comes in a red-earth cotton-polyamide blend (73/27) that is water-repellent without PFCs, windproof and slightly waxed to the hand. It is cut wide with deep raglan sleeves, a hood stowed in the stand-up collar, large bellows pockets front and back and sleeves that zip off. Made in Italy, it costs €840.

What gets borrowed

Put the Zambezi next to a proper wading jacket and the lineage is obvious. The short, boxy body exists on the river so the hem stays above the water when you wade deep; the elasticated hem keeps out wind and spray. The big bellows pockets with flaps are fly-box pockets, with a zip chest pocket above them for licence and tippet. Zip-off sleeves turn the jacket into a vest, the angler’s oldest garment, for warm afternoons. The hood hidden in the collar is there for the squall that always arrives an hour from the car.

The same handful of details turns up across every collection named here:

• The vest. ALD’s multi-pocket vest, NOCTA’s vests and the Zambezi worn sleeveless all trade on the fishing vest’s grid of pockets.
• The short, wide cut. A wading jacket ends at the hip; fashion likes the proportion because it squares the shoulders and works over trousers cut wide.
• Earth and river colours. Tan canvas, olive, faded red and rust: the colours of gear that has spent seasons in the sun.
• Wear and tear as decoration. Ralph Lauren’s licence tag, leather shoulder patches and badges: signs of use, sewn on new.
• Waxed and water-repellent cottons rather than technical shells, because they age the way old fishing kit does.

Fishing for meaning

Anglers can be forgiven a raised eyebrow. A €840 jacket that will never see a river, a $2,500 reel bought to sit on a shelf, a vest with nothing in its pockets: it is easy to read all of this as costume. Some of it is.

But the borrowing runs both ways. Fly fishing has spent decades worrying about how to reach anyone younger or less wealthy than its traditional audience. Drake on the cover of The Drake put a fly rod in front of an audience no industry campaign could reach, which is exactly the opportunity Abel’s CEO described. A teenager who first sees a fly rod in a Ralph Lauren film may one day want to know what the loop of line is actually doing.

And fashion, for all its appetite, keeps returning to the same truth the river teaches: things made for a purpose look better than things made to look good. As long as that holds, the fly fisherman will keep turning up in the lookbooks, rod in hand, licence pinned to his back.