How Gear Determinism Became the Defining Cultural Marker in Skiing

In October of 1998, the venerable backcountry skiing publication Couloir came to press with their yearly gear guide, but while that fall’s edition of the magazine appeared like the typical equipment fare, it was more than a simple overview.

With a deep review of dozens of skis and snowboards, incorporating many options with newer technologies like parabolic shapes and wider profiles, the small, core magazine was perhaps unknowingly on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift in ski equipment.

Covering that revolution-in-the-making that was then occurring in skiing, the issue began with an introduction from founder and editor Craig Dostie. “A great snowboard or pair of skis will make a mark on your heart and soul, (and your wallet). They will also help you ride better,” he wrote. Dostie’s comments were meant to affect a distinction between ski options of differing quality and to strike a balance between consumption and need. But they also illuminated that along with a nascent revolution in equipment, a related, long-present ideal of innovation-justified consumerism in skiing was beginning to put down modern roots; a shift that when later mixed with social media and conglomeration would have profound effects on a broader culture that up to that point had been driven by gear, but also by the do-more-with-less ethos of a less innovative and consumerist time.

In bringing the conversation back to the ideal that gear was merely part of the whole, not a majority of it, Dostie noted that “perhaps those of you who don’t give a rat’s ass about the performance of the skis or board you buy have the right attitude. The skier is more important than the gear,” he wrote. “However, a cheap ski can often be just a cheap ski, while a better ride is always a better ride.”

As time has gone by, the outdoor world, inextricably tied to the use of equipment, has seen the latter of Dostie’s ideas rise over the former, with manufacturers, consumers, and media all seeming to push a gear-determinist vision of skiing.

Keep reading for more from this edition of The Brave New World of Skiing.

The 90s Renaissance

As the 90s grew late, skiing’s eponymous equipment was entering a technological renaissance of the likes the sport had never before seen.

Long dominated by homogeneous designs, innovations like turn-aiding shaped sidecut brought to the fold a new user-friendly ideal. Soon after, growing underfoot widths tuned to deep snow skiing became commonplace. These two concepts, amongst others, like twin-tips, would eventually be married, moving ski design ever after along a more innovative trajectory, marking the primordial soup of what would become the modern ski paradigm that we now enjoy–rockered profiles, creative constructions, inventive sidecuts, and the proliferation of untold models offered for nearly any use case.

While outdoor pursuits have long been marked by a consumerist bent,until the late 90s, that proclivity was tempered by an outdoor industry that offered only so many options and harbored only so much marketing conduit. Before then, while undergoing almost constant innovation, skis still relied on an elder tooling and technology that rarely saw huge leaps of the likes the late-90s saw. And even as this revolution coalesced, its dissemination was relegated to the marketing of the day, namely ski shop word of mouth and ads in print magazines. 

Innovation would soon revolutionize not only the skiing experience but also the marketing reach of the ski industry, forever reinforcing the ascendence of gear. 

Still, skis have always been subject to modification. While the straight, 68mm underfoot, 210cm plank seems to embody the ski of time immemorial, home tinkerers were innovating from the very beginning. Sondre Norheim, often regarded as the progenitor of the recreational skiing movement, is said to have, in the mid-1800s, fashioned his own skis with sidecut and camber–the bowed shape from tip to tail that allowed the skier’s weight to be distributed more evenly along the length of the ski, allowing stronger edge engagement.

In a world soon industrialized but technologically backwater, innovation in ski design came slowly but steadily. By the 1930s, layered, laminated constructions using waterproof glues came to the fold. And in the late 1940s, continuous steel-edged skis became available, reaching full realization with the Head Standard, released in 1950. Soon, fiberglass construction emerged, becoming the industry standard, all these evolutions rendering the modern ski paradigm. Still, the long, narrow profile of skis remained largely unchanged, and would for decades to come.

But several innovations of the 90s would come to illustrate not only the sea change then occurring in ski design, but also the modern tipping point of how outdoor equipment was conceived and marketed. In the ski world, this inflection point was instigated by several aforementioned design principles: sidecut (often referred to as ‘shaped skis’), reversing the typical camber profile, and increasing the width throughout the ski. 

In 1993, the Slovenian company Elan instigated the modern parabolic craze with their SCX ski, the first widely distributed ski with pronounced sidecut. By the late 90s, Salomon came to market with their 1080, the first twin-tipped ski, a model that marked a revolution for freeride and park skiing. And, in perhaps the most monumental of all the innovations of this time, legendary skier Shane McConkey literally turned ski design on its head. As Micah Abrams wrote in the September 2009 issue of POWDER, recounting the late skier’s role in developing Volant’s Spatula, released in 2001, “this was the first ski to acknowledge that powder snow is the exact opposite of hardpack and, therefore, required the exact opposite design philosophy—hence, reverse camber and reverse sidecut.”

The industry has been marked by breakneck research and development ever since that heady decade of ski innovation. Myriad models of skis now fill the market, not only with reverse camber and pronounced sidecut, but also newer advents like ultra-light wood core construction, novel use of metal reinforcement, and beyond. And all this has come to fruition as the internet has ushered in a new world of gear information and commerce, making purchasing as easy as a single click. But the proliferation of online commerce has perhaps been most operative. The advent of the internet, especially in its modern, social-media-heavy form, has had vast ramifications for the sport’s subculture–in its rising affluence, and the dispersal of its ethos and mythos.

In this mosaic of factors, the quaint ideals surrounding skiing and outdoor experiences broadly, which has always been something of an idealistic fallacy, would fall ever behind the philosophy of gear determinism; the construct that equipment and the never-ending innovation and purchase of such is as or more operative to successfully enjoying skiing than any other notion. And in a technologically ascendant time, not only has the industrial capacity finally emerged to usher in an era of immense production volume, a fully mature internet—rife with influencers and social media ubiquity—has followed suit, allowing the consumerist vibe a channel for not only mass dispersal, but complete injection into the culture.

The Social Media Age

In this new paradigm, social media influencers have become conduits directly linked from brands to individuals, often promulgated by ski media. In September of 2025, POWDER (now owned by The Arena Group, a publicly traded, online media conglomerate of mostly non-outdoor titles) ran an article noting the “13 Ski Instagram Accounts You Need To Follow,” which included several prominently sponsored athletes. With their targeted reach of like-minded followers and the perception of authenticity and authority, influencers have become an indispensable tool for modern outdoor marketers. The Watauga Group, a marketing agency that touts its work in the outdoor and tourism sectors, notes the importance of the influencer to the industry in their site copy, stating that “partnering with outdoor influencers helps you shape consumer perceptions and drive sales. A target audience gains genuine insight into a brand’s offerings in a way that is natural, authentic, and engaging.”

Moreover, search engine optimization has become another leading concern in the ever-more online outdoor industry. In this competitive mire, ever quantifiable with page metrics, once small, core outdoor outlets from manufacturers to media, have become sought-after prestige brands; their success making them subject to conglomeration.

Once independent ski and gear blogs like WildSnow.com have become targets of buyouts by heavily financed companies, in this case, by a parent brand known for affiliate-link revenue programs. As these strategies have become widely influential money makers for many outdoor media outlets, the scope of their coverage has mirrored the ascendant vibe. Gear and purchase of it has become a primary focus the subculture over. 

Many publications offer some transparency to their process, with outlets like Outside proclaiming that “we are not paid to cover the gear we write about.”

Still, the legacy publication, itself now part of a large conglomerate of similar outdoor sites, continues with a clarification. And an appeal to conformity: “When you purchase a product through a link on our website, we earn an affiliate commission. This is now a common media practice used by many notable sites, including Wirecutter, Gear Patrol, and Wired.”

Thus, the outdoor industry — and its media — have not only sought to profit from a consumerist subculture, continually pushing for purchases. From influencers to media, the outdoor world is now tilted more toward consumerism than ever before, even as innovation has reached less pronounced stages, as skis now have compared to the 90s. Often achieved with the constant touting of often minor upgrades to products, brands work to create an endless need to buy via ostensibly unbridled innovation and a mostly online social structure that reinforces that notion. 

“YOU DIE, WE SPLIT YOUR GEAR”

Author Rachel Gross, a historian and writer, dissects the outdoor consumerist culture in her 2024 book Shopping All The Way To The Woods. Detailing the rise (and historical ubiquity) of consumerism in the outdoors, Gross’ treatise begins with a narrative about a cheekily worded post-war guidebook that lampooned those who took hiking perhaps too seriously. Those hikers were christened with the title of ‘Hikers’ to differentiate from more lowly outdoor enthusiasts; lowercase–hikers.

“Above all, Hikers carried the right gear. Their peers, mere hikers, might find any old tent design acceptable,” writes Gross, paraphrasing the quippy old guidebook. “But for Hikers, the right gem of a tent, ideally from an obscure store, was the only way to be a ‘properly equipped member of the band.’” This anecdote, and its clear continuity to the present, is a deft example of the outdoor culture’s long obsession with gear. As Gross notes, a primary “element of the American outdoor identity is that it is deeply tied to material things: specifically, how consumers acquired their identities through the purchase of particular goods,” something as ingrained in the outdoor world as ever.

Thus gear determinism, hardly a new advent, stakes its claim in the psyche of the modern skier and outdoors person. But other innovations, namely the piercing nature of social media, and the modern outdoor industrial complex that has brought to market more gear innovations than ever before, have rendered the notion of gear-above-all-else as an unshakable modern tenet, inseparable from enjoying the outdoors itself. 

The basal nature of how we pine for gear may be nothing new, but the way in which we are marketed to certainly is, creating a brave new world for a wider outdoor culture that has long espoused transcendent experiences—not their implements—as the chief reason for being outdoors.

But that may ever be an idealistic perspective. From consumers to industry, the notion of gear determinism continues. Months ago, at an outdoor company sales meeting, one where myriad contracted reps gathered to learn what future offerings would be added to their quiver of wares to sell, one of the salesmen entered the meeting space wearing a shirt with a boisterous slogan that was at once an attempt at humor, but also perhaps a telling signal of where the outdoor industry had led itself.

Across his back, in all capitals, read a statement: 

YOU DIE, WE SPLIT YOUR GEAR

As Rachel Gross notes in Shopping All The Way To The Woods, while not every outdoor enthusiast is a gear determinist, “nonetheless, the tremendous growth of the outdoor industry in economic size, political impact, and geographic spread suggests that millions of Americans did buy into the notion that gear mattered deeply.”

And, perhaps, mattered more than anything else.

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Brave New World of Skiing’ column. Click below to read the previous column, ‘A Ski Town Torn By Affordable Housing: How a Huge Initiative Divided Steamboat And What Comes Next’.

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