Even though The North Face is adored for its fashionable designs, it is primarily an outdoors recreation and activewear company. Finding its beginnings in San Francisco, Douglas Tompkins founded the company in 1968, and just two years later sold it to Kenneth Klopp. For the first 20 years of its existence, The North Face mostly served the outdoors community, creating high quality weatherproof products for a range of activities such as skiing, hiking, and camping.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that The North Face began to take a foothold in mainstream fashion. Adoption of The North Face by celebrities and popular rappers such as the Wu-Tang Clan helped give the brand streetwear credibility. This mainstream appeal drew attention to the exceptional quality of The North Face, and how resistant they were to even the coldest and wettest of days. Since then, The North Face has capitalised on its brand and pushed further into the realm of fashion design, collaborating with high end and streetwear brands such as Gucci, Comme Des Garcons, Vans and Supreme. Currently The North Face is owned by the VF Corporation, which owns other known brands such as Timberland, JanSport and Eastpak.

Y2K North Face Extreme Sports Montage

How to tell if North Face is vintage from the Logo

The North Face logo was inspired by Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, with the emblem being a stylized silhouette of the granite dome. Designers at The North Face believed so strongly in promoting the brand logo, they put one on the chest and another on the shoulder of nearly all upper body items so that the logo could be seen even if someone wearing The North Face was climbing. Such a strong link to the emblem and its foundations in the brand are reflected by the lack of change in the North Face logo over the years. However, a subtle change to a lot of the marketing materials and logos on The North Face items can be seen that helps us predate them before 2010.

1968 to 2010 The North Face logo

• The North Face logo has a simple structure of text on the left side and the emblem on the right
• It is black on white and uses bold text that gives it a striking image
• The text is aligned with each break in the emblem

2010 to now The North Face logo

• In 2010 the logo in its basic form didn’t change, the design is still the same
• The colour scheme was however updated, with white on an orange background
• The most significant change is the box that the logo is set in, and the practice of setting the logo in a box for both designs and tags began here, which means many designs which have a North Face logo in a box are modern

How to tell if The North Face is vintage from the Neck Tags

As the logo of The North Face has changed so little over the last 50 years, we can only really use it to determine if an item of clothing is from before 2010, and that doesn’t quite meet the threshold of vintage for most. Fortunately for identification, The North Face has not been so unwavering in its design of neck tags for its products, which have frequently been updated over the decades. So hopefully by finding your tag or one like yours you’ll be able to work out when your North Face is from.

One general rule that can be applied to most vintage clothing, including The North Face, is that items that were made in the USA or North America are typically from the 1980s or earlier. Offshore manufacturing did not start becoming common practice until the late 1980s, meaning that North Face made in the USA is over 30 years old. It should also be noted that finding information on the tags used by the North Face is very difficult, so not every tag is listed here, however looking for design similarities between yours and the ones below should help. Ps. If your vintage North Face is starting to show some loose stitches, you can learn how to fix them with our guide here.

Struggling to see your tags? Submit them on our vintage clothing identification page, and we’ll help you pinpoint those vintage labels!

1960s vintage North Face tags

• The North Face tags were large fabric rectangles at this time
• They have a letter sizing tab
• And they state the country of manufacture as the USA

1970s vintage North Face tags

• At this time fabric tags that stick out were introduced in conjunction with older tags
• They too stated the country of manufacture as the USA, and the repetition of this really demonstrates the pride in manufacturing in a country associated with high quality production
• Sizing information on some of these tags is included on a smaller tab behind the main neck tag

1980s vintage North Face tags

• Many of the tags from the 1980s reverted to designs from the 1960s, so whilst they are useful to compare to find out if the item is from before the 1990s, they don’t help us determine if it’s from the 1960s or 1980s (more help on this can be found below)

1990s vintage North Face tags

• The 1990s saw one of the most significant changes in tag branding
• Some of the older rectangular tags were still in circulation at this time, but did not include country of manufacture as production began to be offshored
• Most of the tags from the 1990s began using a black square tag, which was particularly common on North Face jackets like Nupste 700s, and Mountain Jackets
• In recent times The North Face has reused this tag design, causing some confusion for identification, however using the wash tag method below, you should be able to determine which are vintage from new
• The sizing information would be included on an extra tab
• And a lot of care and quality information was attached to the tag

2000s vintage North Face tags

• In the 2000s, The North Face began using folded tags a lot more, either for the whole tag or to include sizing information
• Using a combination of languages and including the gender of the item became a lot more common

2010s vintage North Face tags

• After the North Face shifted the emphasis of its logo and became more fashion forward, the logo on tags was often set in a box to reflect the new logo
• Thinner, shiny materials became more common as tags
• The amount of extra information on all the tags increased significantly at this time, detailing a whole host of care instructions and disclaimers

How to tell if The North Face is vintage from the wash tags

By now you should have compared the logo, design, and neck tags of your vintage North Face against the information provided and, fingers crossed, narrowed down the decade of production. However very small and infrequent changes in both the logo and tags make this process difficult, so the final method that can be used is reading the production codes on the wash tags. Production dates only began being included on wash tags in 1985.

If you look at the tags below, the last two numbers of the production code are indications of the month and year of production. So based of the 31, we can determine that the month and year of production is 03/1991. Generally, this is the format that items produced in the USA follow, whereas models manufactured offshore included two numbers isolated at the bottom, in the case below ‘35’, indicating a production month and year of 03/1995.

Annoyingly this rule cannot always be applied as some items produced offshore didn’t include these codes, however, would include the date of production on the inside of the button as shown below as ‘83’ represents 08/1993.