Carabiners at dawn
Issue 56: Patagonia vs Pattie Gonia
We split the office in two and made them argue about a drag queen, a $US1 lawsuit, and the most beloved purpose brand on the planet. Nobody changed their mind. Everybody had a wonderful time. NERDS.
Two parties are in a fight neither of them can afford to be seen winning. One is a billion-dollar outdoor brand that gave itself away to save the Earth and would now very much like someone to stop selling rainbow t-shirts with a logo that looks a bit (or a lot, depending on your point of view) like theirs. The other is a drag queen in hiking boots and carabiner earrings who has raised the better part of $US4 million for the planet and would now very much like you to know she is being crushed by a big corporation that is built on doing good. They agree on most things, but they are suing each other anyway.
Patagonia, the brand, is taking Pattie Gonia, the drag queen, to court.
*chaos ensues*
Accordingly, we decided to get a little novel with it, y’know mix up the format or whatever. We split the table(s) down the middle, gave each half one side of the argument, banned them from reading the other side’s evidence (no one stuck to that rule) and went for it. The brief was simple: forget who would win in a courtroom and work out who is winning the argument, live, in public, right now, while the lawyers pretend the whole thing is sub judice.
The next 42 minutes saw four grown adults and Neil bickering about trademark dilution, cheese sandwiches and whether you are supposed to want to take a drag queen out for a nice dinner. Pity the reader. Pity us. Let’s get into it.
First, who you’re dealing with.
Pattie Gonia is the drag persona of Wyn Wiley, a photographer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who put on heels in the backcountry in 2018 and went viral doing it. Since then the character has become a serious force: co-founder of the environmental not-for-profit The Outdoorist Oath, $US3.7 million raised for environmental and social-justice causes, a TIME Next Generation Leader, more than two million followers, and a 100-mile trek in full drag last December that pulled in $US1.1 million. The name is a pun. The boots are real. The carabiners are, as Andrew put it, “clearly leveraging the brand”, which is sort of the whole point of a pun.
Patagonia is the company you know, or you think you do. Yvon Chouinard started it because he was annoyed that his climbing gear kept breaking. In 2022 he gave the entire thing away – roughly a $US3 billion company – to a trust and a not-for-profit so that all profit goes to fighting climate change. “Earth is now our only shareholder,” the media release said and everyone in comms filed it away as the single best purpose brand move of the decade.
Pattie had a 2022 understanding with Patagonia about how the name could be used. In late 2024 she started selling “Pattie Gonia”-branded merch, some of it using versions of the Patagonia logo. In September 2025 she filed a trademark application to lock in exclusive rights to “Pattie Gonia” across clothing, apparel, activism and endorsements. In January 2026 Patagonia sued, for the grand sum of $US1 plus legal fees, citing the “near-copy” name as a “long-term threat”. Late last month, both of them took the fight to social media.
Right. Corners, please.
In the rainbow corner: Neil, Tess and Sam, for the queen. In the blue corner: Andrew and Eliza, for the brand. Neil opened and didn’t bother warming up.
“This was never purely a trademark issue,” he said. “Patagonia is hiding behind the infringement. They just want Pattie Gonia to stop using anything that relates to their brand.” He’d grant them exactly one point – “stop using their logos, that’s fair” – and torched the rest as “completely over the top”. Patagonia, he insisted, wanted to stop the Pattie Gonia brand stone cold.
Andrew understood the concept of parody but argued the timing: “She has a completely valid point that the spirit of drag is pun and parody, and she’s a card-carrying climate activist. But she’s now trying to leverage off a brand that isn’t hers, regardless of intent, to make money.” The tell, for him, is that 2022 understanding. Pattie says it “wasn’t a broad agreement about my future”. Fine, Andrew said, but it proves the brand knew exactly what she was doing for years and let her run, right up until she filed to trademark their name and sell products under it. “That’s a very different thing.”
So Team Pattie stopped defending the trademark and went after the optics, which is where the brand is soft. “The glaring thing for me,” said Sam, who had spent the morning reading about drag queens, “is why the hell are you suing an environmental activist?”. Patagonia has a habit of going corporate and silent the second it’s in a crisis – which can be a very American business approach – as it did when its own climate reporting got picked apart. It’s the purpose brand. It’s being handed a fight against a queer climate activist in the first week of Pride in the US. Why on Earth would it take it on?
Tess had the timeline down pat: suit filed, the public statement from Patagonia landing bang on 1 June, which presents, if you squint, like the worst possible week to be a giant corporation pointing lawyers at a drag queen. She’d also been Googling and reckoned – and we’re filing this as Tess’s mid-debate discovery, not gospel – that the firm acting for Pattie also acts for House Republicans and oil companies, the kind of detail that wins a Reddit thread and loses a friendship.
Andrew swotted the Pride angle away as spin. “That’s her making them look Machiavellian. They’d already filed in January. The June statement just happened to land at the start of Pride Month. She went to sell products and they moved to stop her.”
Eliza had been collecting Pattie’s own words, and they weren’t helping the activist. She’d clocked the line about refusing to “stop giving them free PR” and read it as pure projection. “Her brain is wired for PR and parody, so she knows precisely how much free PR she’s pulling out of this.” The message was argued to be inconsistent: first the defence is I’m a climate activist, then I’m a parody artist, then I’m not even named after the brand, I’m named after the country. You can’t be all things at once. You certainly can’t be a new thing every time the last one stops working.
Neil wasn’t letting the channel slide, because the channel was his strongest card. He pointed out that Pattie Gonia has always lived on TikTok; it’s her native platform, not some war room she sprinted to the moment she was sued. She hosted the brand’s CEO speaking at a conference on TikTok, filmed it, and now allegedly takes his points apart one by one for an audience already in her grandstand. Patagonia, meanwhile, put a statement on Instagram, which is roughly as fun to read as a parking notice. “She knows how to whip up support,” Neil said. “They’ve engaged with none of it.”
This is the exact point where Andrew stopped relitigating and got to the guts of his team’s argument: channel selection exposes the intent behind the whole thing: “You don’t manage a crisis on TikTok. She’s on TikTok because she’s getting the message out fast and getting views. Even if TikTok is her native audience, if you wanted to settle things you wouldn’t keep adding oxygen where the fire is raging. You would speak to more sensible, independent outlets and actually make efforts to put this to bed.”
Then came the bit that made the room go silent (for a second): “Think about how people get to the bottom of something now. They’ve stopped Googling what’s going on with Patagonia versus Pattie Gonia and started asking an LLM for the breakdown. And the LLM goes to earned media – the Time piece, the wire copy – which is exactly where Patagonia has played. Pattie owns the feed, Patagonia owns the record. Instead of solving the problem she’s using it for content as long as she can.” It ultimately depends what either party considers victory: win the lawsuit or win a couple million new views and keep the spotlight rolling?
Which brings us to the question neither team could answer: why did Pattie launch products in the first place? Neil, who was distracted by now, said: “She can be an activist, she can post on TikTok, she can raise awareness of myriad environmental issues. She was doing all of that already. So why the merch?” Nobody on the brand side had a clean answer, because there isn’t one that fits on a placard.
Eliza, who knew the world of drag queens better than any of us (except for maybe Sam as of that morning), laid out how other queens walked the same tightrope without falling off. Trixie Mattel riffs on Mattel and has never once dressed her business in Barbie’s branding: she built Trixie Cosmetics, trademarked them, and Mattel never had a reason to call. JanSport went by “Jan” on RuPaul’s Drag Race to dodge the backpack brand, then collaborated with JanSport for real in 2024. “There was a miss on Pattie’s part,” Eliza said. “She could have extended this into working with Patagonia.”
That handed Andrew his closer and yet another opportunity to not shut up about Nathan Fielder, specifically Dumb Starbucks.
In 2014 Fielder opened a fully functioning coffee shop that cloned a Starbucks with the word “Dumb” bolted on the front, on the theory that US parody law let him use the branding so long as the coffee was technically “art”. It went viral precisely because it was so dumb and so glaring, and it folded almost immediately. The health department got him before the lawyers could. “Even Fielder knew it was a stunt,” said Andrew. “There’s a loophole, and I wonder if she’s seen it and gone, ‘I’ll do the same thing’.” Parody is a real defence, but the courts can also tell the difference between making fun of a brand and becoming one.
And Neil landed the most sensible thing anyone said all day. The fix, he reckoned, is almost embarrassingly simple: “They sit down over a nice cheese sandwich and make Pattie Gonia a Patagonia brand ambassador.” Bring her inside the tent. Stop fighting one of the single most on-brand activists. “There’s got to be a resolution. She’s not going to go away. She’s big on TikTok, she’s getting bigger, and the statement they put out is not going to do anything good. It’s hard to argue Pattie isn’t winning the debate right now.”
He’s right that she’s winning the week. He’s also right that she isn’t going anywhere. But the debate format was built to expose one thing, and it did: both sides are right, and both sides are blowing it.
Patagonia is sitting on one of the deepest goodwill banks in the category but spending it like it will never run dry. This is the brand that gave itself to the Earth, now demanding a climate activist stop activism-adjacent commerce, in a statement so legally cautious it had to bolt on an apology – “We want to acknowledge any hurt it has caused, especially in the LGBTQ+ community” – which is what you write when your own lawyers have walked you somewhere your values would never have gone. The fix was sitting right there: drop the corporate register, bring it back to the climber whose gear broke and the family that gave the company away. We’re not a faceless corporation. We’re protecting a name our founder built, because we give a fuck about all this too. Patagonia has the best founder story in retail and chose to send a trademark lawyer instead. CEO Ryan Gellert says they won’t drop it. Hope the $US1 was worth it.
Pattie, meanwhile, is winning the week and losing the plot. The moment she filed that trademark she stopped being a pun and started being a competing apparel business, and the story keeps shifting because the honest version – I’d like to sell product under a name that rhymes with the most trusted brand in my space – doesn’t fit on a placard either. The cheese sandwich was always on the table. She ordered the lawsuit, because the lawsuit gets millions of views and the sandwich gets none.
We are back at the only tenet that all of us at SKMG really argue at the core of our strategies: is your product good and are you taking the right actions? Patagonia’s product and actions are, on the whole, extraordinary. They forgot to sound like the humans who made them. Pattie’s cause is real, but she framed a commercial decision as a civil rights one and is betting you won’t read to the end.
You probably won’t. That’s the business we’re all in.
Eliza, for the record, spent the back half defending Trixie Mattel’s branding and then confessed, “I am a massive Trixie fan, sorry, maybe I’m biased”. Neil announced he didn’t find Trixie attractive and would not be taking her for a nice fondue meal. Eliza won on points. Tess got back to doing some real work 20 minutes before the debate wrapped. Andrew declared it a draw, which is what the person whose side is losing always declares.
We learned nothing.
What do you reckon? Is Patagonia protecting 50 years of brand equity or punching down on Pride, and would you have sent the lawyer or the founder? Hit reply. The office is still arguing.
What we’re currently obsessed with
Eliza
Vybe. A Sydney local who has been on the scene for 13 years. You can catch Vybe hosting at Universal, Stonewall and elsewhere. Vybe was runner-up in RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under, walking away with a few stand-out partnerships with high-profile companies, including Qantas, Disney and PlayStation (without a trademark scandal).
Tess
My favourite drag queen is Hedda Lettuce, who I used to see perform when I lived in New York. Beyond the impeccable lettuce-themed branding (her latest show is called Romaine Calm, which is objectively brilliant), Hedda is one of the funniest performers I’ve ever seen. I used to see her host movie screenings where she’d provide live commentary throughout the film, which was insanely funny and somehow got even funnier the more you drank.
Neil
Actor, singer and one of the first drag queens to break into the mainstream, Divine was unforgettable and more than a little scary. Not in an Insidious jump scare way, but you knew there was no messing with her. Check out the video for her biggest hit and see what I mean. Then watch her in John Waters’ 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, in which she played “the filthiest person alive”. It’s shocking and shockingly riveting. She wasn’t a great actor or singer, but boy, did she leave a mark.
Andrew
I know the purists will say this doesn’t count, but fuck it, JOHN TRAVOLTA’S EDNA TURNBLAD.
Sam
Icesis Couture. It’s all in the name, really, given that I’m not well-versed in the whole drag universe (aside from the morning of the debate). But I did my homework and settled on this Canadian superstar. If anyone on Reddit is to be believed, Icesis could have (and should have) won all episodes she competed in on Canada’s Drag Race: Canada vs. the World. She was head and shoulders above everyone else!!