The North Face has partnered with GORE-TEX and Storm King Art Center in upstate New York to celebrate the launch of HKe, the brand's newest high-performance collection. The collaboration features a striking large-scale sculpture by Dutch designer and artist Johannes Offerhaus, marking an innovative intersection between contemporary art and technical outdoor apparel.
The centerpiece of the event is Offerhaus's "Tower," a nine-meter-high structure that combines cutting-edge materials including SPECTRA textile, carbon tubes, aluminum, and ropes. Installed on one of Storm King's expansive open fields, the sculpture merges the technical language of performance apparel with the spatial and material principles of outdoor architecture. The geometric design draws inspiration from tent systems and alpine pack construction, reflecting a shared philosophy between art, design, and high-performance outdoor gear.
This collaboration extends beyond the Storm King installation, having first appeared in The North Face's HKe campaign last month in Tungstølen, Norway. There, Offerhaus and a small team demonstrated the sculpture's portability by carrying each component on foot across a glacial landscape. They assembled the ultra-lightweight structure on site before carefully disassembling and removing every piece, embodying The North Face's commitment to minimal environmental impact and respect for natural spaces.
At Storm King, the Tower takes on new meaning within the museum's grassy terrain. The lightweight system interacts dynamically with open air and changing weather conditions, making movement and tension visible through its ripstop fabric planes. The prominent use of SPECTRA, a high-strength polyethylene fiber also featured throughout the HKe collection, emphasizes the direct connection between technical textile innovation and the physical environments these materials are engineered to withstand.
According to The North Face team, the HKe collection developed in partnership with GORE-TEX represents a growing convergence between performance design and cultural identity. This approach invites a fundamental rethinking of what outdoor gear can represent, successfully merging utility and aesthetics without establishing a hierarchy between the two concepts. Through this large-scale artwork installation, The North Face and GORE-TEX demonstrate how performance materials can serve both functional apparel needs and sculptural artistic exploration.
The installation feels naturally at home within Storm King Art Center, where the museum's collection has long featured artists who explore themes of scale, structure, and ecological relationships. Offerhaus's Tower continues this artistic lineage while evoking the precision of pattern cutting and the logic of engineered form. The sculpture serves as a testament to how SPECTRA fabric technology connects The North Face's apparel innovation with large-scale textile architecture, bridging the gap between outdoor performance gear and contemporary art installation.
