Yvon Chouinard – the ‘existential dirtbag’ who founded and gifted Patagonia

The publication of a magazine article in 2017 “really, really pissed off” Yvon Chouinard, the mountain climber turned reluctant businessman and founder of outdoor clothing company Patagonia., Forbes crowned Chouinard as a billionaire and added him to its list of the world’s richest people. While many people daydream of achieving a nine-zero fortune, for Chouinard it was a sign he had failed in his life’s mission to make the world a better and fairer place.

He is a businessperson, but very much by accident, and finds the descriptor offensive. He once told a journalist fromduring a multi-day climbing trip up Mount Arrowhead, in Wyoming, that he would prefer to be referred to as a “dirtbag”. Refusing to let it go, the reporter tried again saying Chouinard was a “very successful businessman” and “somewhere along the way you must have wanted to be a businessman”. Chouinard exploded back: “Never! All I ever wanted to be was a craftsman.”

“I’d often climb for half a day at Stoney Point in Chatsworth, then go up to Rincon [to surf] the evening glass, [and] after I’d free-dive for lobsters and abalone on the coast between Zuma and the county line,”. “I almost always got my limit of 10 lobsters and five abalone.”

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