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A second connection lands with a raw leather yoke built to age, alongside a returning black colorway.
Pre-orders open on Friday, September 4, 2026 and run through Sunday, October 4, at IL BISONTE‘s Omotesando store and a handful of others, marking the second meeting between the Florence leather house and Rocky Mountain Featherbed, the Wyoming down brand whose western-yoke vests have become a fixture of Japanese outerwear racks. The unisex down vest carries a price of 121,000 yen, arrives in S (38), M (42), and L (46), and ships to buyers in mid-November 2026 as a quantity-limited release.
The natural shearling collar and vachetta leather yoke carry a co-branded tag marking the collaboration.
IL BISONTE was founded in 1970 in Florence by Wanny Di Filippo, building its name on vegetable-tanned leather that darkens and softens with handling rather than staying static off the shelf. Rocky Mountain Featherbed traces back further, to the late 1960s in Wyoming, where its down vests and parkas were built for cattle country winters; the brand went dormant in the late 1980s before a Japanese apparel company revived it in 2005, carrying its original western-yoke silhouette into a new generation of collaborations with labels from WAREHOUSE & CO. to WILDSIDE YOHJI YAMAMOTO.
The two brands first paired up in 2025, building the vest on Rocky Mountain Featherbed’s Christy Vest, the brand’s signature one-piece leather yoke silhouette. That version ran a vachetta leather yoke, black snap buttons, a natural mouton collar, and a side pin tag, and it sold through a reservation preview across ten IL BISONTE stores nationwide before its November 14, 2025 release at 110,000 yen. This second outing keeps the same bones and the same collaborative logic, but changes the palette.
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The headline addition this season is a beige colorway, built around a soft, heritage-toned body that both brands’ design teams describe as reflecting their shared history. The western yoke covering the shoulders uses nume leather, tanned through IL BISONTE’s traditional vachetta process, the same vegetable-tanning method behind the brand’s raw-edged bags and wallets. Vachetta leather is prized specifically because it doesn’t stay put visually: oils from handling, sun exposure, and simple time deepen its color and texture, so the vest is designed to look different a year from now than it does on delivery day. Pairing that undyed, naturally toned leather against the beige nylon body sharpens the contrast between the two materials rather than blending them, which is the point: the yoke is meant to read as its own aging object sitting on top of a comparatively stable base.
That detail lines up with how IL BISONTE talks about its leather elsewhere. The brand has run entire campaigns, including an Instagram-only initiative asking longtime customers to share photos of their own aged nume leather pieces, built around the idea that the material’s changeability is the product, not a flaw to be engineered around. Bringing that philosophy into a Rocky Mountain Featherbed shape, a brand whose own collectors prize decades-old vests for the same reason, gives the collaboration a clearer throughline than a straightforward palette-and-logo exercise would.
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Alongside the new beige option, the collaboration brings back the black colorway that debuted in the first release, pairing a black nylon body with the same leather yoke treatment for a noticeably more subdued finish than its new counterpart. Running the original color again rather than retiring it after one season suggests both brands are treating this as an ongoing line rather than a one-off capsule, closer to how Rocky Mountain Featherbed has long operated with other Japanese collaborators who keep favorite base models in continuous rotation and vary the materials each season instead of starting over with a new silhouette. It also gives buyers who missed last November’s release, or who prefer black to bright colorways, a second chance at the same base construction without waiting for a wholly different collaboration to come around.
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Reservations open sequentially rather than all at once, running from September 4 through October 4, 2026 at IL BISONTE’s Omotesando store, its Nagoya and Abeno locations, its VIORO store, and the brand’s official online store, with each location opening its own booking window inside that stretch. Buyers who reserve should expect delivery around mid-November 2026, matching the timeline of the first collaboration’s own November release last year. Given the quantity-limited framing carried over from round one, where several store windows sold out within their preview days, earlier reservation dates are likely to see less competition for exact sizes. IL BISONTE has not published country-specific ordering details for its official online store, and this second collaboration’s rollout, like the first, appears limited to Japan.
From the DRIFT archive: DAVID CATALÁN Fall/Winter 2025 Campaign — Industrial Warmth, Urban, And The New Iberian Silhouette · Essential Layers: Levi’s Fall/Winter 2025 Outerwear Guide
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