In streetwear, sometimes the “hype” is in the detail. Take Balenciaga’s Track sneakers, the highly-anticipated successor to the brand’s era-defining Triple S shoe. It’s reassuringly chunky and fugly, right? But pay attention to the details, especially that bit of technical-looking mesh on the side, and an interesting style story begins to emerge.

The Track takes its design references from resolutely unfashionable trek and outdoors shoes by brands such as ROA and Salomon. If you’re looking for what’s hype in men’s fashion, increasingly, you will find it in clothes originally designed for wearing while clambering up mountains. Ponchos, cagoules, anoraks, multi-pocketed gilets, bucket hats and the aforementioned trek shoes now grace both the catwalk and the sidewalk, as streetwear yet again collides with high fashion.

The origins of outdoor clothes as fashion are varied and disparate. It encompasses everyone from Japanese streetwear pioneers such as visvim’s Mr Hiroki Nakamura and his brand’s hiking boot, British football casuals in the 1980s and 1990s in cagoules and anoraks by Stone Island and The North Face, their Italian equivalents the Paninaro boys in Moncler gilets, London grime rappers in Arc’teryx, hip-hop hustlers in puffa jackets by Polo Ralph Lauren, dubbed the “Lo’ goose”. In fact, there are more twists and turns to trek and outdoors fashion than a Game Of Thrones episode.

Patagonia, one of the first practical brands to find fashion favour within this new outdoors movement in menswear, is proudly nicknamed “Patagucci” by its most ardent fans. The company recently made worldwide headlines when it refused to sell its signature fleece vest to oil and mining companies. The said vest is also beloved of finance and tech bros, which in a strange way makes Patagonia even more hype-worthy, as this is exactly the kind of dour corporate merchandise that has been made ironically fashionable by Mr Demna Gvasalia of Vetements and Balenciaga. The Patagonia vest, dubbed the “power vest” by The Wall Street Journal, also channels that other fashion trend du jour, “dad style”, which in itself is an adjunct of “normcore”. (Do keep up.)

The adoption of functional details and fabrication on the chassis (yes, that’s what the upper of an outdoors shoe is sometimes called) of the Balenciaga Track sneaker marks the entry of the outdoors and hiking trend into the fashion mainstream. Expect to see clothes and shoes with performance capabilities way in excess of what any regular city-dwelling office worker would ever require in a pub near you very soon.

The world of men’s fashion can be a strange place, and is currently engaged in an arms race to “fashion-ify” the weirdest, ugliest clothes possible. Seemingly disparate trends merge and mix with one another in peculiar ways to create the new cool. It’ll take a rapper or two to fully weaponise Mr Gvasalia’s trek shoes look, but watch this space.

It allows Mr Gvasalia to indulge a hypebeast’s most obsessive-compulsive character traits. In the upper reaches of outdoor clothing, technical specifications are turned up to 11, fabrication pushed to the outer limits of endurance and, as is the case with ROA shoes, made from the same stuff as bulletproof vests.

Football casuals, Japanese streetwear, normcore, dad style, hip-hop. Trek and outdoors fashion references all this and more in a thoroughly post-modern, slightly daft, and totally contradictory way. Gentleman, welcome to the world of hype in 2019. See you at the top of the mountain.