Fashion Mogul #3: The Snow Bunny

The term “Snow Bunny” is an unshakeable part of ski culture and ski history.

While the exact definition of a snow bunny changes depending on who you ask, the general idea behind the term is a beginner or intermediate skier (woman) who wears flashy clothing on and off the resort snow.

An English as a second language website helps non-native speakers navigating this slang term. The lesson explains that “snow bunny” is an idiom originating in the 1950s, “when it was first used to describe a woman on the slopes. Bunny was already being used as a word to describe a pretty woman and snow was added to signify the enjoyment of the woman spending a lot of time on slopes with snow.”

This definition devolved as slang does, dramatically, over the coming years, with associations to drug use and other inappropriate messages we will not publish in POWDER .

Despite the negative connotations, the snow bunny character made appearances in films, pages of magazines, and ads used to sell the romanticization of skiing to both women and men by objectifying women in a fast-growing sport.

Appearances in history include the 1965 film Ski Party , where a group of college friends embark on a ski trip and the male main characters look for girlfriends. Watch for the glamorous ski bunnies below.

Decades later, the 2001 Hollywood film Chalet Girl , featuring a skateboarding female protagonist, similarly clothes the lead in posh winter gear to turn her into a dazzling beauty at the ski resort.

Even while the terminology has come to mean many different things over the years, “snow bunnies” are hardly a thing of the past.

In 2014, Condé Nast Traveller published a piece titled “ Snow Bunny Style: Ski Gear for St. Moritz or Aspen ” detailing which pieces skiers should buy if they want to achieve the snow bunny aesthetic at various highfaluting resorts.

Their recommendations include suede earmuffs, a specific pair of skis based solely on their color, white boots, a fur vest, and fingerless gloves. Practical? No. Fun and dressy for an activity that often does not prioritize style due to weather? Sure thing.

I would be remiss to not touch on the sexist implications of this term. Yes, it’s low-hanging fruit. It still deserves our, albeit brief, attention. This column's purpose is to explore how fashion and skiing go hand and hand, or, in this case, bedazzled, fur-lined mitten and mitten. Somehow, however, it seems that men can use fashion as a way to separate or elevate their celebrity personas, while women are penalized for “taking fashion too seriously.”

Or perhaps this is simply another issue under the umbrella of large-scale industry sexism. Flip through an issue of POWDER just 20 years ago. The January 2004 issue's first photo of a female was on page 30, in the form of an ad depicting a woman with only a bra on, which was actively being undone by male hands. What was the ad selling? Skiing at Whistler Blackcomb . The caption? "Feels like the first time."

Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that when women are included in skiing, if they are not one of the top few pro athletes, their contribution will be to and for the male gaze.

Snow bunnies are for the male gaze, through and through. This is a point that can simply be explored by asking oneself, “is this a trend for which there is an opposite-gendered counterpart?” In this case, I had a hard time coming up with the male version of the snow bunny.

Moreover, the gendered streetwear sites HypeBeast and HypeBae both boast ski apparel that can be used to make fashion statements . However, while many of the items listed on HypeBae would turn the skier into a walking snow bunny, those same items worn on a male skier would probably go without a catchy term to pigeonhole the person wearing that item.

In other words: when a woman wears an expensive, impractical ski coat, she is a snow bunny. She is shallow and unskilled at the activity we “should” base our opinions off, and considered a consumerist.

When a man wears an expensive, impractical ski coat, he is assumed to be rich, and simply using his buying power to exhibit his success, as opposed to being a victim of the behavior, as the woman is portrayed to be.

The guardrail of humor also seems to serve one, but not the other gender.

A comedy-in-development found on IMDb titled "Snow Bunnies" depicts three bikini-clad women holding skis, with the slogan "steep, deep, and cheap."

On the other hand, historically, men have been able to wear ludicrous outfits, even on POWDER covers, while still displaying their skiing prowess.

A POWDER from 1982 highlights a highly impractical outfit of a striped shirt and what appears to be jeans. This outfit is at worst a joke where we are laughing with the skier, as opposed to at him. See below.

The other unfortunate implication of the term snow bunny, besides the immediate judgement of a skier’s looks above their performance, is the sexualization it not only allowed, but encouraged in skiing. Men and women have been skiing side-by-side for over a century: The Ladies’ Ski Club, the oldest women’s alpine ski club in the world, was founded in 1923.

However, with the introduction of the term snow bunny (among other things) women once again became easily categorized by physical appearance, even within the bounds of participating in a sport.

Interestingly, there are athletes who have seemingly reclaimed the snow bunny style without receiving the negative implications of the term. Lindsey Vonn, for example, displays her world-class skiing often in shiny, tight, or otherwise ostentatious outfits. The responses match the audience, which is stoked and impressed.

The term snow bunny is, largely, a sexist and outdated term to describe stylish or fashion-forward women in the ski world. All of this being said, there is a chance for the future of snow bunny style to be reclaimed.

More and more, we are seeing that intentional clothing styles, and dressing in a feminine way, do not exist inversely to athletic talent. The two can, and do, coexist.

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