ALD Parked A Helicopter For A Vest With A 1990s Name

Thirty pieces. GORE-TEX Mountain Jacket 2000. Reversible Pertex Nuptse. Heli Vest. Andes to SoHo. Second year with The North Face.

Aimé Leon Dore put a co-branded helicopter outside the New York flagship during its NYFW window. The machine was there for the Heli Vest, a late-1990s The North Face alpine piece brought back for FW26. The vest is named for the aircraft that used to drop climbers on snow. ALD made the name literal and parked the thing on a SoHo curb.

This is season two. Last year was the first chapter. This chapter is 30 pieces. GORE-TEX returns to a North Face connection for the first time since 2019, on the Mountain Jacket 2000 in seam-sealed three-layer cloth. The Pertex Nuptse comes back with a hood, a reversible build, and Cloud Down. Denali fleece is in the mix. A new Fleece Rugby and a Ballistic Tech Vest pull from 1990s TNF utility. The campaign film cuts the Andes against New York, with actor Keith W. Richards and Chilean mountaineer Cristián García-Huidobro in the frames.

The collection went live 17 September 2026 at 11:00 ET on aimeleondore.com, thenorthface.com, and select doors. By late September the launch is already a shop fact, not a teaser.

Signal. What happened: ALD and The North Face issued FW26 as a 30-piece second season and staged a helicopter at the NYC flagship. Exact product: Mountain Jacket 2000 3L GORE-TEX, reversible Pertex Nuptse with Cloud Down, Heli Vest, Denali, Fleece Rugby, Ballistic Tech Vest. When and where: 17 Sept, 11:00 ET, official sites. Source: brand rollout and campaign. Why it matters: the second year puts membrane and archive names back on a New York last.

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Fashion week in New York produces a lot of objects that never leave a lookbook. A helicopter on Crosby or wherever the flagship faces is not a lookbook. It is a machine that had to get permits, rotors, and a painted body. ALD tied it to one SKU: the Heli Vest. The joke is blunt. Vest named for a helicopter. Helicopter outside the shop. Once you see it, there is nothing left to explain, which is why it worked as a picture.

That picture is not the collection. The collection is cloth. The machine was a caption. Teddy Santis, founder and creative director, put the season in a shorter sentence than the rotor wash: respect for heritage, purpose, and the outdoors on both sides, then those foundations pushed through an ALD lens toward product that feels considered, functional, and built to live with you for a long time. David Whetstone, TNF’s director of collaborations, is the name on the outdoor side of the same handshake.

The campaign film does the geographic version of that handshake. Andes rock and ice. New York street. Richards and García-Huidobro as the two bodies that make the cut legal. One is an actor. One is a climber with a Chilean record. The clothes have to survive both frames or the edit falls apart.

A first collision can live on novelty. A second one has to live on repeat purchase and on the claim that the first year was not a one-off logo swap. Thirty pieces is a lot of SKUs for a “capsule.” It is closer to a winter wardrobe than to a four-jacket drop. That volume is how you tell whether the partnership is a season or a line.

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Mountain Jacket 2000. Seam-sealed three-layer GORE-TEX. First time that membrane has sat on an ALD x TNF object since 2019. The 2000 is a known TNF alpine shape. ALD’s job is proportion and the gold script that reads Aimé Leon Dore under The North Face. Script on a storm shell is the New York half. Tape on the seams is the mountain half.

Pertex Nuptse. Hood added. Reversible. Cloud Down inside. The Nuptse silhouette is already a street object. Reversibility is the change that makes it a two-look jacket without a second purchase. Pertex is the face fabric story. Cloud Down is the fill story. Together they keep the baffles familiar while changing how you wear the thing on a dry day.

Heli Vest. Late 1990s TNF alpine kit. Utility vest, not a fashion gilet. The helicopter stunt is married to this piece and to no other. If you buy one object because of the curb photo, this is the object. It will also be the piece that looks wrong if you treat it as a party layer. It was cut for a cold machine ride.

Denali. Fleece that TNF already taught the city to wear as a jacket. ALD’s version sits in the same family as the rest of the 30: color, stitch, a second logo.

Fleece Rugby and Ballistic Tech Vest. Newer names in the pairing. The rugby takes fleece into a collar that is not a zip-up mountain top. The ballistic vest points at 1990s utility gear without borrowing the Heli Vest’s exact cut. They exist so the collection is not only three famous silhouettes plus hats.

Hats, gloves, and knit sit in the campaign snow: fair-isle neck on a navy shell, fleece trapper, GORE-TEX cap with ear flaps. Those are the units that make a 30-piece count real. Coats get the photographs. Small goods get the cart.

Do not invent a full price list. The shops have the numbers. The honest catalog is the names above plus the rest of the 30 on the two official sites.

 

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TNF gets a New York customer that technical catalogs do not automatically reach. ALD gets membrane, down, and archive names that a Queens-to-SoHo label cannot invent. That trade only holds if the clothes work in rain and in a shop window. GORE-TEX on the Mountain Jacket 2000 is the proof object. If that shell is only a logo carrier, the 2019 gap was not worth closing.

Heritage is the shared lang because both companies already speak it. TNF’s late-1990s alpine rack (Heli, Nuptse, Denali) is a finished dialect. ALD’s whole look is finished dialect: old cars, old type, old rooms. The collide is not a surprise mash. It is two archives agreeing on a winter.

Santis’s last clause, built to live with you for a long time, is the argument against a 48-hour resale window. Whether that argument holds is a wear question, not a launch question. A helicopter does not prove longevity. A taped seam on a jacket you still own in 2029 would.

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The film’s Andes footage is not a claim that ALD customers are flying into Chilean ice. It is a claim that the cloth in the frame is the same family as the cloth that did. New York is where the helicopter sat. The mountain is where the vest got its name. FW26 is the season that tries to keep both sentences true in one rack of thirty.

Aimé Leon Dore x The North Face FW26. Second year. GORE-TEX back. Heli Vest back. The machine on the curb is already gone. The jackets are still on the sites.