Suited for the Mountain

Australian menswear brand M.J. Bale has gone alpine – partnering with Italy’s most storied skiwear specialist to make a parka and pants from some of the world’s finest single-source Merino wool. The result is the most interesting piece of ski kit to come out of Australia in years.

There’s a moment in every ski day – usually somewhere between the first chairlift and the second run – where you realise your gear either has it or it doesn’t. The right jacket doesn’t just keep you warm and dry. It moves with you, breathes with you, and looks good enough that you’re not embarrassed wearing it at lunch. That combination is rarer than it should be.

This is why the new M.J. Bale Alpine-Active collection is worth paying attention to. Not because M.J. Bale is a ski brand – they’re not, and they won’t pretend to be. They’re Australia’s most decorated sustainable menswear brand, sixteen years into building what has become the country’s most traceable natural fibre clothing company. But for their first foray into technical mountain outerwear, they’ve done something smart: they went straight to the people who know it best.

JAAM Italia – Just About A Minute, named for that single, crystalline minute at the top of the run before you push off – has been making serious ski outerwear in Trentino, Italy, since 2010. These are not fashion people who decided ski gear was on trend. JAAM is the official supplier of uniforms to FISI national ski instructors, the AMSI Italian Ski Instructors association, and the Trentino Ski Instructors – fourteen consecutive years of collaboration with the professionals who live in this gear every single day of the season. They pioneered full Cordura construction in technical skiwear. They were the first brand to bring Alcantara to the slopes. Their signature corduroy ski pants have a following among people who know the difference between a garment built for the mountain and a garment built for the mountain photo.

The technical specification is serious: 20,000mm waterproofing, sartorial finish, every product developed in Italian laboratories in direct collaboration with professional skiers. When JAAM builds a jacket, it goes through the hands of people whose livelihood depends on it performing in conditions that would humble most gear. That heritage is now embedded in the M.J. Bale Alpine-Active parka and pants.

What makes the collaboration genuinely interesting – and genuinely unusual in the ski world – is what’s inside the fabric. The wool used in both the jacket and pants comes from a single source: Lake Hāwea Station, a 6,500-hectare regenerative Merino farm in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. At elevations above 1,500 metres, 10,000 Merino sheep traverse high-altitude backcountry from October through to May, grazing native tussock, snow daisies, and lichen across some of the most demanding terrain in the Southern Hemisphere. That environment produces an ultra-fine 16-18 micron clip – ZQ Merino certified, single source, fully traceable – that is then woven into technical fabric by Reda, the Biella-based mill that has been producing fine wool cloth in Piedmont since 1885.

It is a supply chain that runs from the Southern Alps of New Zealand to the Italian Alps, with an obsession over natural fibre at every stage. And for anyone who has spent time in both synthetic-heavy ski gear and properly constructed Merino outerwear, the difference is not subtle. Merino breathes in a way that synthetic fibres don’t. It manages moisture without trapping it. It regulates temperature across conditions that swing from groomer to lift queue to lodge and back again. For a day on the mountain, there is a strong argument that it is the most intelligent fibre you can be wearing.

Lake Hāwea Station is not just a premium wool source. It is one of the most remarkable farming enterprises in the Southern Hemisphere – the world’s first B Corp-certified sheep farm and Australasia’s first certified carbon zero farming operation, currently sequestering 2.5 times more carbon than it emits. Owner Geoff Ross – former CEO, founder of 42 Below, and now one of New Zealand’s most quietly influential environmental advocates – has planted 30,000 native trees on the station since 2018, fenced off seven kilometres of lakefront, and turned what was conventional high-country farming into a functioning conservation project. The station shelters over 300 species, including the kārearea (New Zealand’s native falcon) and the last known wild population of critically endangered Western Grand skinks on earth.

M.J. Bale’s partnership with Lake Hāwea Station is built around a regenerative commerce model: a percentage of every Alpine-Active sale returns directly to the farm, funding the habitat restoration and predator control that keeps that ecosystem alive. It follows the same store-to-farm rebate structure the brand pioneered with their Kingston Farm partnership in Tasmania – a program that has returned more than AUD$500,000 to that farm to date. Buy the jacket. Fund the skinks. It’s a genuinely new idea in skiwear.

The Alpine-Active collection – a 100% Merino ski jacket and ski pants, as well as fleeces, gilets and 100% Merino base layers – is available this June through M.J. Bale stores nationwide and online. For Australians heading to the snowfields this season, it is, quite possibly, the most considered piece of kit you’ll find at any price point: Italian-made, New Zealand-grown, and built on a supply chain you can actually trace back to the paddock. Or in this case, the backcountry at 1,500 metres, where the sheep that grew it are probably still roaming.

The M.J. Bale x Lake Hāwea Station Alpine-Active parka and pants. Made by JAAM Italia. Woven by Reda. Grown at Lake Hāwea Station, New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

RRP: Cervinia Merino Ski Jacket, $1500.00
https://www.mjbale.com/products/cervinia-merino-ski-jacket-navy?objectID=42316160335952

RRP: Cervinia Merino Ski Pant, $1100.00
https://www.mjbale.com/products/cervinia-merino-ski-pant-navy?objectID=42316165185616

RRP: Livigno Merino Fleece Gilet, $800.00
https://www.mjbale.com/products/livigno-merino-fleece-gilet-greymel?objectID=42315589943376

RRP: Cortina Merino Half-Zip Base Layer, $199.00
https://www.mjbale.com/products/cortina-merino-half-zip-charcalmel?objectID=42142203019344

Photo Credits: M.J. Bale