Willy Bogner and the Revolution in Ski Fashion: From Stretch Trousers to Jet-Set Style

The name on the label is Willy Bogner's, but the garment that made it famous was cut by his wife. The history of Bogner is a family story in two generations, and it begins not with clothes but with an import business for skis.

A ski importer in Munich

In 1932 Willy Bogner, a Nordic combined skier who had won eleven German championships in the discipline, set up a company in Munich with a friend to import Norwegian skis, ski accessories and knitwear. It was a trading concern for a sport that was still finding its public, and its first goods came from Scandinavia rather than from a Bavarian workshop.

The design side of the business came with Maria Lux, born in Cologne in 1914, an athletic woman who joined the company and married Willy Bogner in 1937. According to the company's own history, a windbreaker designed by her was worn by the German national team in 1936, and Bogner has outfitted German national skiers ever since. Accounts of the firm describe the division of labour in the same terms: her talent for design, his competence in production and selling.

The stretch trouser

Before the 1950s, skiwear was largely a matter of baggy wool trousers, knitted sweaters and a heavy outer layer. The FIDM Museum describes the change that followed as the arrival of a form-fitting ski trouser in wool and a newly developed nylon fibre called Helanca, introduced by Maria Bogner in 1952. The cloth stretched and recovered, and it allowed the trouser to follow the leg closely while still letting the skier move.

The date is given differently in some later company material, which places a first stretch trouser in 1948. The contemporary record supports 1952. In February 1961 Sports Illustrated reported that when Bogner first introduced stretch pants in 1952, skiers laughed, and that at first hardly anyone bought them. The magazine credited Willy Bogner; later histories, including Skiing History magazine and the FIDM Museum, credit Maria with the cut. Skiing History also notes that the look was arguably more an evolution than a revolution, and that its American breakthrough came in November 1955, when SKI magazine put Maria Bogner in a stretch suit on its cover.

The trousers cost about twice as much as conventional ski trousers. By the mid-1950s they were made in bright colours, and the FIDM Museum quotes Ski magazine as naming Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman and the Shah of Iran among those who wore them. Bogner's own site states that "Bogners" entered the German dictionary as a word for women's ski trousers.

Maria Bogner also designed the "B" zip pull, a small piece of hardware that became the house's emblem, long before printed logos became the usual way of marking skiwear.

The second generation

Willy Bogner Jr., born in 1942, was first an athlete. He skied for the United Team of Germany at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, where he led the slalom after the first run before falling in the second, and he competed again in 1964.

He then turned to the camera. His ski films, beginning with Ski Fascination and followed by a documentary on the 1968 Grenoble Olympics, led to an invitation from the producer Albert R. Broccoli. Bogner filmed the ski action for On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) and returned for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and A View to a Kill (1985). He took over the company after his father's death in 1977.

From the slope to the resort

The "jet-set" Bogner of the 1960s and 1970s rested on these two strands: a garment that made a skier look composed at speed, and a family whose own skiing and filming placed the clothes in front of a wide audience. It was a reputation built on cloth, cut and the sport itself.