Supreme x The North Face Collaboration History: 40+ Drops Since 2007

How Supreme and The North Face Built Streetwear's Longest-Running Partnership

Most brand collaborations are announced with considerable fanfare, produce a capsule or two, and quietly disappear. The Supreme x The North Face partnership is the structural opposite of that. It started without a press release and has continued almost uninterrupted ever since, season after season, with each drop reworking a different technical reference point from The North Face's archive.

What made it work from the start was the logic of the pairing. The North Face, founded in San Francisco in 1966, had always sat at the intersection of serious mountaineering and street-facing style. Their Summit Series gear was functional by design but visually distinctive in a way that translated well outside Alpine contexts. Supreme in the mid-2000s was already past its early New York skate-shop phase and was building toward something wider. The collab gave Supreme a route into technical outerwear credibility it hadn't earned on its own. It gave The North Face a direct line into a culture that was, at that point, setting the terms for what came next in menswear. Both parties got exactly what they needed.

Longer than Supreme x Nike. Longer than any other single partnership in the brand's catalogue. By any measure, the most sustained collab relationship in streetwear history.

FW07-FW08: The Summit Jacket Era

Khaki, black, a couple of accent tones. The first drop, widely attributed to FW07, centred on the Summit Jacket and kept its ambitions visibly contained: Supreme branding on a recognisable North Face technical silhouette, in colourways that felt considered rather than screamed. The construction was serious, taped seams, technical nylon, North Face's actual outdoor specs, which meant these weren't fashion objects pretending to be outerwear. They were the real thing, with a Box Logo on them.

FW08 introduced the first experiments with the Denali fleece format and early expedition-weight pieces. At this stage, the collab was still building its own grammar. The collector pressure around these early runs wasn't what it became later, but the people who bought them knew what they were getting.

FW08-SS10: The Denali & Expedition Phase

Through 2009 and into 2010, the collaboration expanded its silhouette range. The Denali fleece is a North Face standard that's been in production in various forms since the 1980s, a kind of load-bearing wall in their catalogue. Supreme's version kept the structure and added their own colourways and co-branding. The Expedition pieces from this period were heavier, more technical, aimed at serious cold-weather layering rather than street wear.

These drops are now among the harder pieces to source cleanly. They existed before the resale market fully professionalised, which means a lot of them were actually worn, often heavily. Finding one in good condition requires patience, the kind you'd need scrolling through an auction catalogue at 2am. If you're actively looking, explore more archive pieces in our Secondhand Streetwear Zürich collection for context on why this era of the collab commands a premium.

The Leopard Print Era (2011-2014)

Somewhere around 2011, the collaboration changed key entirely. The Leopard Print Nuptse jacket from that period was the first real signal that Supreme and The North Face were willing to apply bold all-over print to technical formats, and the effect was jarring in the best possible way: a puffer jacket designed for serious mountain use, covered in leopard print, absolutely unambiguous about what it was doing. No hedging. No irony cushion.

The 2014 Bandana Mountain Jacket continued in the same direction. Paisley bandana print across the full outer shell, the kind of maximalist move that reads as obvious in retrospect but was genuinely unexpected at the time. These pieces established the print-on-technical formula that would later produce the SS18 snakeskin run. They're also now among the most reproduced fakes in the entire Supreme archive, which is worth knowing before you buy anything from this era from a private seller. Learn how to spot authentic vintage pieces before committing to anything from this stretch of the collaboration in particular.

The Snake-Print Moment: Why SS18 Mattered

Zürich's vintage streetwear hunters know this already: the hardest TNF x Supreme pieces to source aren't always the most recent drops. They're the archive runs that hit at exactly the right cultural moment, that specific intersection where desirability and scarcity haven't yet fully calcified into impossibility. SS18 is that sweet spot: genuinely sought-after and still occasionally findable, if you're in the right place at the right time.

The Snakeskin Taped Seam Coaches Jacket in Context

Cut from waterproof, breathable nylon in an all-over green and yellow python print. Front snap closure, zip hand pockets, elasticised cuffs, drawstring hem, white suede interior lining. The taped seams are a functional detail carried over from North Face's actual technical outerwear specs, not a decorative one. The coaches jacket silhouette itself is lighter than the puffer and expedition formats the collaboration had leaned on heavily through its first decade. It's a spring/summer piece built for actual use, not just display.

The unit currently at Bloc Magasin is graded at 9.5/10, described as excellent vintage condition with minimal signs of use. One size: S. One unit. At CHF 290, it sits well below what comparable pieces from this season typically fetch on the major resale platforms when they surface at all.

The Supreme x The North Face Snakeskin Taped Seam Coaches Jacket is available now.

What Made SS18 Different

Versace's influence was running through the culture in spring 2018, like a bassline everyone could hear but not quite identify. Palace was doing its own versions of pattern overload. Supreme chose python. Applied to a coaches jacket format, the result was less aggressive than the leopard Nuptse but more directional than anything the TNF collab had done in the immediately preceding seasons. That specific green and yellow colourway wasn't trying to blend in anywhere. It was competing for attention in a market that had learned to reward exactly that confidence.

SS18 also landed at the moment when the coaches jacket format was peaking as a silhouette across the whole market. Not the heavy expedition gear that defined the collab's early identity. Not the Nuptse puffer that would continue cycling back in. It occupied a middle space: functional, wearable across three seasons with the right layering underneath, and visually distinct enough to read clearly without becoming unwearable in daily contexts. That range is rare.

Summit Series Revival: Steep Tech Returns (2016-2020)

Parallel to the print-forward direction of the mid-2010s, Supreme and The North Face were also reviving Steep Tech references from North Face's 1990s mountaineering sub-line. These pieces had originally been designed for technical climbing use, with pronounced articulated construction and a visual language that was aggressive and functional in equal measure, like something a competitive alpinist might wear on a film set. Supreme's revival of the format, starting around 2016, brought them back in updated colourways with co-branding. Collectors received them as some of the most technically serious pieces the collaboration had done since the original Summit Series runs.

The Statue of Liberty Baltoro & Monument Series

The 2019 Statue of Liberty Baltoro jacket is probably the single most discussed piece in the entire collaboration's history. The Baltoro is North Face's high-end down puffer, designed for extreme cold environments. Supreme's version added a Statue of Liberty graphic in a format that read simultaneously as patriotic, ironic, and genuinely impressive in scale. The Monument series from the same general period followed a similar logic: recognisable North Face technical formats with large-scale graphic treatments that pushed the collaboration toward something closer to wearable art than outerwear. Whether or not that framing holds up under scrutiny is a separate question. The jackets hold up regardless.

S Logo Expedition & The 2020s Turn

Quieter. The S Logo Expedition pieces from 2020 onward marked a deliberate step back from maximalism: cleaner colourways, the Supreme S mark replacing the full Box Logo in some versions, a return to something closer to the understated approach of the earliest drops. Whether that signals a new phase or just a periodic reset is hard to say. The collaboration has oscillated between loud and quiet since 2011 and shows no signs of settling permanently in either direction, which is arguably what keeps it interesting after seventeen years.

Why Archive Pieces Still Matter Today

The Supreme x The North Face collaboration has multiple distinct eras now, each with its own logic and its own collector community. Early Summit pieces attract people interested in the collab's founding grammar. The print runs from 2011 to 2018 attract people who want something visually definitive, a piece that announces its own provenance the moment someone who knows sees it. The Steep Tech and Baltoro pieces attract people drawn to the technical mountaineering references. None of these communities is wrong about what they value. They're just looking at different parts of the same archive.

For buyers, understanding which era a piece comes from matters practically. Condition varies significantly by age. Faking has tracked most heavily on the most culturally prominent pieces, specifically the leopard and snakeskin print runs. Knowing what you're looking at before you buy is the baseline. For a clear breakdown of how condition is assessed and communicated in secondhand streetwear, the guide on condition grading for streetwear resale is worth reading before committing to any archive piece.

Shop Supreme x The North Face at Bloc Magasin Zürich

The SS18 Snakeskin Taped Seam Coaches Jacket is a pre-owned piece, sourced and sold as vintage resale stock. It's not new. It's not a current season drop. It's a specific object from a specific moment in the collaboration's history, in a condition that makes it genuinely usable rather than shelf-only, which is a distinction worth caring about. One unit, size S, CHF 290. If that size and that piece works for you, it's there now. If you're looking for other pieces from the collab's archive, browse the full Supreme collection or check The North Face collection at Bloc Magasin for what's currently in.

Bloc Magasin is at Flüelastrasse 16, 8048 Zürich-West. If you'd like to come in and see the piece in person, contact us first to arrange a private shopping appointment. Follow @blocmagasin on Instagram for new archive drops, vintage finds, and first looks at incoming stock before it goes online.