66°North marks 100 years by raiding its own wardrobe. Co-owner Bjarney Harðardóttir takes us through a century of dressing Iceland.
There are easier places to build a fashion industry than an island where getting dressed has historically been less about self-expression than avoiding hypothermia.
When 66°North began making clothes for Icelandic fishermen in Suðureyri in the West Fjords in 1926, nobody was talking about gorpcore. A century later, technical outerwear has conquered fashion, Björk has long since made the kuldagalli cool, and clothing designed to withstand Icelandic weather looks perfectly at home on the streets of Reykjavík, Copenhagen or London.
For its centenary, 66°North have gone digging through their archives.
The result is a new capsule collection called 10 Decades, 10 Styles, which tells a hundred years of the company through ten garments, beginning with the fisherman’s anorak and ending with the highly technical Snæfell shell. Rather than simply reproducing pieces from the archive, the design team asked what those garments might look like if they were designed today.
“Choosing just ten pieces from 100 years was a challenge,” explains Bjarney Harðardóttir, chief brand officer and co-owner of 66°North. “We wanted each style to tell a story about its decade and represent an important moment in the evolution of 66°North.”
Designs that are still relevant today
The collection begins where 66°North did: with the ocean. The Slippurinn Anorak reaches back to the protective clothing made for fishermen in the 1920s. From there, the archive traces not only changing technology, but a changing idea of what protective clothing could be.
By the late 1960s, function was already flirting with fashion. The Ægissíða Rain Coat dates from the period when 66°North was beginning to move into more lifestyle-oriented weatherwear. Reborn for 2026 in black, it is long, severe and unexpectedly glamorous with a funnel neck and a military-meets-Saint Laurent feel.
And then comes the kuldagalli, the all-in-one “cold suit” familiar to generations of Icelanders.
In the form of the Greni Overall, this supremely practical piece of winter armour somehow became cool. By the 1980s it was approaching uniform status among Icelandic teenagers and young people; a young Björk was among its more influential wearers. The anniversary version even revives archive embroidery featuring the old KRAFT and 66°N logo.
For Bjarney, that emotional relationship with certain garments helps explain why some of them refuse to disappear.
“These aren’t simply fashion pieces,” she says. “They have become part of people’s lives, which is why they can outlast trends.”
The archive is also a reminder that fashion has a habit of coming back around. The Kría shell revisits the exuberant colour blocking of the late ’80s and early ’90s, including the outerwear worn by Icelandic athletes around the 1994 Winter Olympics. “What surprised me most was how relevant so many of the original ideas and designs still feel today,” Bjarney says. “The 1980s, for example, had such strong colour blocking, and the Kría Colourblock Shell feels surprisingly contemporary today.”
Weather doesn’t give you a choice
Perhaps the most Icelandic story running through the collection is the gradual collapse of the distinction between technical clothing and ordinary clothes. Gear designed to keep fishermen alive becomes something you wear to the supermarket. Mountain clothing ends up in the city. Protection from the weather becomes simply part of getting dressed.
“In Iceland, function has always been very important because the weather doesn’t really give you a choice,” Bjarney explains. “As society changed, people began wearing clothing originally designed for fishing, work and extreme weather in everyday life.”
Few pieces illustrate that better than the Þórsmörk Parka. Introduced in 2006 and designed by Bergþóra “Bebba” Guðnadóttir, now head designer at Farmer’s Market, specifically for Icelandic weather, it went on to become an everyday winter staple.
“When something genuinely works, people keep coming back to it,” says Bjarney.
For the centenary collection, however, looking backwards did not mean making museum pieces.
“We didn’t want to simply copy the originals,” she explains. “We wanted to ask what they would look like if they were designed today, while still keeping their identity.”
So the Slippurinn fisherman’s anorak reappears in the Gore-Tex Windstopper, GORE-TEX; archive silhouettes are rebuilt using contemporary construction and technical fabrics; old details and logos resurface in unexpected places. Each piece carries a specially woven label explaining its history and the decade it represents.
And after ten decades, the collection ends almost exactly where it started.
Representing 2016–2026 is the Snæfell Shell, made from Polartec Power Shield Pro: waterproof, breathable and technologically a world away from the protective clothing of 1926. Yet the anniversary version comes in a distinctive orange chosen as a direct nod to the original 66°North fisherman’s coat.
For Bjarney, it is the Slippurinn and Snæfell together that best tell the story of those hundred years.
“The technology has changed enormously,” she says, “but the purpose remains the same: making protective clothing that is made to last.”
Because after a century of new fabrics and changing silhouettes, 66°North finds itself confronting essentially the same problem it did in 1926. Iceland still hasn’t fixed its weather.