We're Not Buying Canada Goose's Heritage Fantasy
How a jacket made for actual work became another luxury brand's manufactured mythology
We need to talk about what happens when a jacket designed for survival gets repackaged as lifestyle content. Canada Goose's latest campaign for the Chilliwack Bomber wants us to believe we're witnessing "heritage in motion," but what strikes us instead is how thoroughly a piece of working gear has been absorbed into the luxury fashion machine.
The original story is compelling enough: bush pilots in northern Canada needed something that could handle freezing airstrips without restricting movement in tight cockpits. The 1980s Chilliwack was born from genuine necessity, its cropped fit and storm flaps serving real functions for people doing dangerous work. That jacket had purpose.
But walk into any downtown core today and count how many Chilliwacks you see on bodies that have never been within a hundred miles of a runway. What we're looking at now isn't heritage, it's heritage branding. The difference matters.
The campaign itself reveals this tension beautifully. Shot in a Cambridge hangar filled with vintage aircraft, the whole production feels like a museum installation about work rather than an celebration of it. Charlieandcharlie's documentary-style photography captures models "walking through the hangar, brushing against wings, checking instruments, adjusting collars." It's performance, not practice.
We see the appeal. There's something seductive about wearing the uniform of competence, about carrying the visual weight of serious function. The Chilliwack's ribbed cuffs and heavy-duty hood still read as authentic even when they're protecting someone from nothing more threatening than a Toronto winter.
But let's be clear about what's happening here: Canada Goose has successfully transformed a tool into a symbol. The 2025 versions feature "modern fabrics and tailored cuts" that speak more to urban aesthetics than Arctic necessity. The brand describes this as creating "a dialogue between past and present," but what we hear is the sound of function being replaced by fashion.
This isn't necessarily critique of the people buying these jackets. We all participate in these systems of meaning-making through objects. The question is whether we're honest about what we're actually purchasing. Are you buying protection from the elements, or are you buying membership in an idea about ruggedness and preparedness?
The campaign's styling tells the real story: "flight uniforms" accessorized with goggles, belts and gloves that "hinted at early aviator gear." Every detail is historically informed but contextually empty. It's cosplay for a job that no longer requires the jacket that defined it.
What frustrates us isn't that functional clothing evolves into fashion (that's inevitable), but the way brands like Canada Goose monetize both the original function and its absence. They sell you the mythology of the bush pilot while producing jackets increasingly divorced from that reality. It's having it both ways: the credibility of authentic work wear and the margins of luxury fashion.
The hangar setting makes this contradiction visible. These vintage aircraft from the early 1900s exist now as museum pieces, beautiful but static. They've been preserved precisely because they no longer serve their original purpose. The Chilliwack is heading in the same direction: a functional object becoming a cultural artifact, its meaning shifting from what it does to what it represents.
We're not saying there's no place for this kind of evolution. But we are saying it's worth questioning what we lose when working clothes become lifestyle brands. The bush pilots who needed the original Chilliwack weren't thinking about heritage or dialogue between past and present. They were thinking about staying warm while doing their jobs.
That clarity of purpose, that direct relationship between need and solution, is what actually made the Chilliwack worth celebrating. Everything else is just marketing.
