Planet Aspen: Where Gravity Meets Philosophy.

Matthew Day Jackson has never been one for staying inside the lines - of a canvas or a contour map. The Brooklyn-based artist, long fascinated by the twin forces of creation and destruction in American mythmaking, has now taken his inquiry to the slopes. His latest collaboration with Aspen’s performance luxury brand Aztech Mountain, titled Planet Aspen, is not so much a skiwear line as it is an existential statement rendered in Gore-Tex and pigment.

Aztech Mountain, founded in 2013 by David Roth and Heifara Rutgers, has always occupied that rare air where craftsmanship, utility, and aesthetics overlap. Based in Aspen but built for the world, the brand designs gear that’s technically uncompromising and sartorially assured. Their collections are guided by Head of Design Casey Cadwallader - yes, the same boundary-bending creative behind Mugler’s sculptural silhouettes - and supported by Olympic legend Bode Miller, who joined the team in 2016. The result: clothes that don’t just move with you down a mountain, but say something about how you move through the world.

When your jacket says “Pace Gallery” but your lift pass says “expert only.”

Enter Jackson, an artist whose career spans painting, sculpture, and what he once described as the architecture of hope. Once a Hauser & Wirth stalwart and now part of Pace Gallery’s roster, Jackson mines the visual DNA of Americana – from LIFE magazine idealism and Apollo-era bravado to frontier folklore and the gleaming delusions of the atomic age. Through materials like scorched wood, Formica laminate, and molten lead, he dissects the fine line between beauty and annihilation - the same tension that defines skiing’s allure.

In Planet Aspen, Jackson contributed ten artworks translated across 23 pieces of performance skiwear - jackets, pants, and base layers priced between $101 and $1,850. The prints evoke something otherworldly: alien terrain meeting alpine chic, a dialogue between earthbound struggle and cosmic wonder. They feel both vintage and futuristic, like NASA mission patches reimagined by Joseph Beuys after a long day in the backcountry.

The collaboration captures movement, presence, and beauty while reflecting Aspen’s peculiar magnetism - a place where miners, modernists, and moguls have long collided in pursuit of elevation, both literal and metaphysical. Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke envisioned the town in the 1940s as a sanctuary for mind, body, and spirit, an idea that Jackson and Aztech subtly echo here. Their project nods to Aspen’s cultural legacy while reframing it for a generation that seeks transcendence in both form and function.

Jackson’s history of working across disciplines adds further resonance. His 2023 collaboration with Finnish design brand Made by Choice - a kaleidoscopic lounge chair made of rainbow-hued plywood - showed his aptitude for turning everyday design into meditations on identity and artifice. Planet Aspen continues that trajectory, transforming performance apparel into a kind of wearable philosophy. The laser-etched motifs and layered materials call to mind the artist’s experiments with semi-autonomous processes, where human intention and machine precision intertwine - like skier and slope.

There’s also something deeply American about the collection’s premise. Skiing, after all, embodies the paradox Jackson often explores: mastery through surrender, control through chaos, motion as meditation. The pieces in Planet Aspen don’t just protect the body; they provoke the mind, inviting wearers to question why they’re drawn to landscapes that remain indifferent to their existence.

Aztech’s tagline, “At any elevation,” takes on new resonance here. With Planet Aspen, the brand ascends into conceptual territory without losing grip on performance. It’s luxury skiwear for those who understand that carving turns on a mountainside can be as much an act of rebellion as a work of art.

Because when you’re 10,000 feet up, surrounded by snow that will soon melt into memory, perhaps the only thing left to do - the only thing that ever mattered - is to leave a mark that disappears.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Aztech Mountain.