Pattie Gonia vs. Patagonia: A Drag Queen and a Bad Romance
On paper, they seemed like natural allies: a love of the outdoors, a deep commitment to their causes, and a shared belief that adventure can change the world. On one side, Pattie Gonia, the drag queen of the hiking trail. On the other, Patagonia, the outdoor brand that set out to save the planet. Then one thing came between them: a name. How did two apparent allies end up at odds?
An article produced in collaboration with our friends at Climax.
Deep in the Swiss Alps, the village of Göschenen is known for its steep river gorges and challenging hiking trails. In late August 2026, it becomes home to Alpine Hearts, a climbing festival for women, queer climbers, and the broader LGBTQIA+ community. Alongside the climbing, the schedule includes panel discussions and film screenings. The setting is everything you'd expect from Switzerland: wooden houses, turquoise lakes, and mountains as far as the eye can see. And one tent looks particularly at home in this picture-perfect landscape.
Its understated mountain logo gives it away: the tent belongs to Patagonia. Inside, a clothing repair station is doing brisk business, with festivalgoers dropping off pants and jackets to be patched up. But the California-based brand is doing far more than fixing clothes at Alpine Hearts. It's the festival's original and largest sponsor. Without Patagonia's support, the third edition would likely struggle to offer its roughly 100 participants from around the world everything from multi-pitch climbing outings, on routes that require several rope lengths to complete, to inclusion workshops, queer film screenings, and self-defense classes.
The Drag Game
For now, though, it's raining. After the previous night's opening ceremony and documentary screening, festivalgoers have little choice but to linger over breakfast. Conversation turns to the upcoming schedule, politics, and activism. Less than two cappuccinos in, Jenny* brings up the controversy that erupted that spring, one that takes on particular significance here at Alpine Hearts. In May, American drag queen Pattie Gonia posted a video accusing Patagonia of "erasing an activist." Viewed nearly six million times on Instagram, the video was intended to draw attention to her dispute with the brand, which had demanded that she stop selling merchandise under the name "Pattie Gonia." "I think the timing is a little strange, actually," Jenny says. "It's pretty suspicious." Jenny is from Seattle. She's watched the political landscape shift since Donald Trump returned to the White House. She's also noticed that, in this climate, brands have become increasingly reluctant to publicly support the LGBTQIA+ community. And yet Patagonia appears to be standing by its inclusion commitments, as its sponsorship of Alpine Hearts demonstrates. Still, Jenny believes the California company has "abandoned one of the country's leading activists." "Like she wasn't making them money anymore. Like she wasn't useful to them anymore," she adds.
Across the table, Hélène, who is French, is more skeptical. "It's still a business," she says. "To survive, they have to play by the rules of capitalism." Beside her, her friend Solène is sketching on a sheet of paper. Without looking up from her drawing, she says she's "just disappointed." "It's a shame. It would have been nice if they'd done a collaboration," she says quietly. Here, in the middle of the Swiss mountains at an LGBTQIA+ festival, her words carry particular weight. Because maybe that's the real question: How did two such influential figures in the environmental movement end up in one of the year's biggest feuds?
To understand what happened, we need to untangle a story that's more complicated than it first appears.
The Making of Pattie Gonia
Flash back to February 2018, on the California coast. A 25-year-old photographer has been invited to speak at Yeah Field Trip, a festival devoted to photography and visual creativity.
Raised amid the wide-open plains of Nebraska, he worked his way up through the Boy Scouts to become an Eagle Scout, the organization's highest rank. Barely 4 percent of Scouts achieve it. Neil Armstrong and Steven Spielberg are among those who have. He's there to talk about his career in photography. But that evening, the former Scout undergoes a transformation. Wearing a flamboyant wig, carefully applied makeup, and high heels, Wyn Wiley takes the stage for his first public drag performance, under the name Ginger Snap.
Photos of the performance quickly circulate and make their way back to Lincoln, Nebraska, his hometown. The reaction is vicious. The next day, rocks are thrown at his house, friends disappear from his life, and clients cancel their contracts. Wiley puts his heels away and retreats "back into the closet, even though I'd already come out."
Within a week, he has more than 12,000 followers. Less than a year later, that number has climbed past 150,000. A queen has been born in the mountains. And she has a name: Pattie Gonia.
By early October, the setting has changed. Wiley heads into the Colorado mountains for a hike and, almost on instinct, slips a pair of six-inch heels into his backpack. He figures he'll put them on at the summit. But once he's out there, he starts pulling them on whenever the group stops for a break, striking poses along the way. Back home, he creates an Instagram account and posts his first video. In it, he eats Cheetos, dances to Fergie, and declares himself "the world's first backpacking queen." Within a week, he has more than 12,000 followers. Less than a year later, that number has climbed past 150,000. A queen has been born in the mountains. And she has a name: Pattie Gonia. The name started as an inside joke from a friend while they were brainstorming drag names. It's obviously a play on Patagonia, the famous California outdoor brand. Wiley loves it. So much so that just two weeks later, he posts a series of photos of himself outside a Patagonia store. The caption reads: "The queen visited the motherland today." Another two weeks pass, and a new post features a parody of the Patagonia logo. The caption: "Some of you may be wondering where Pattie came from."
Pattie Gonia isn't trying to pass herself off as Patagonia. She's playing with the brand. Its identity becomes part of her costume, and parody becomes part of the performance. It's a familiar drag tradition: borrowing the symbols of power to turn them on their heads.
Long before Patagonia took issue with her name, Pattie Gonia had a complicated relationship with outdoor brands. She's long argued that dressing in technical outdoor gear is, in a sense, its own form of drag. "When we put on our $500 hiking outfits, that's our way of dressing up as adventurers," she explained in an interview with Sierra, the Sierra Club's magazine.
In April 2019, she announced on Instagram that she had turned down more than $10,000 worth of free gear offered by brands. She found the whole influencer economy absurd: the people who already have plenty are the ones who keep getting more, for free. Instead, she proposed a different arrangement. Rather than sending equipment to her, brands could donate it to hiking groups. Some agreed. Others stopped responding. What did Patagonia do? We don't know. One consequence of this deliberate distance from brands is that Pattie Gonia is rarely seen wearing Patagonia clothing. One notable exception is a Patagonia fanny pack repurposed as a bra, with styling credited to independent designer Nicole McLaughlin.
That doesn't mean Pattie has sworn off brand partnerships altogether. In 2022, and again in 2023, she became the face of The North Face's "Summer of Pride" tour.
But brand relationships are only one small part of Pattie Gonia's busy career. Art and activism occupy most of her time. In 2022, she co-founded The Outdoorist Oath, an inclusive organization devoted to outdoor education. She's raised more than $3.7 million for environmental and social causes and filmed a music video with Yo-Yo Ma in front of a melting glacier in Alaska. Pattie Gonia isn't simply "a drag queen who likes hiking." She's a character who makes visible a community that American outdoor culture, shaped by decades of macho scouting traditions, had largely ignored. "I always imagine I'm talking to a queer 14-year-old who's still in the closet, like I was," she once told Sierra. "Someone who needed somebody to be honest about what they'd been through." Her exact income today isn't public, but the rest of her résumé speaks for itself: talks and performances at Yale and NASA, brand collaborations, recognition as a TIME Next Generation Leader and National Geographic Traveler of the Year, a solo performance tour, and, of course, merchandise.
But we'll come back to that.
Once Upon a Time in Patagonia
Half a century earlier, another free spirit was finding his own way to live outdoors. Yvon Chouinard discovered climbing almost by accident in 1953, at age 14, through the Southern California Falconry Club, where teenagers learned to train falcons and other birds of prey.
To observe nests high on cliffs, the young members learned to rappel down rock faces using ropes. Chouinard was hooked. Climbing would become a lifelong obsession. He started forging his own pitons, metal spikes hammered into cracks in the rock for protection, because he couldn't find climbing gear he liked. Other climbers began asking him to make pitons for them. What started as a small side business became Chouinard Equipment, formally founded with a partner in 1965. The company quickly built a reputation and became the leading supplier of climbing equipment in the United States. In 1972, it dropped traditional metal pitons from its catalog because they caused lasting damage to rock. Instead, it promoted reusable aluminum chocks, pieces of protection wedged into cracks and removed after a climb. The decision helped usher in a new approach known as "clean climbing," which aimed to minimize damage to the rock.
"I always imagine I'm talking to a queer 14-year-old who's still in the closet, like I was," she once told Sierra. "Someone who needed somebody to be honest about what they'd been through."
Pattie Gonia in the pages of the American magazine Sierra
The clothing business, meanwhile, happened almost by accident. During a trip to Scotland, Chouinard picked up a rugby shirt. Its sturdy collar helped protect his neck from abrasion caused by climbing ropes. His climbing buddies wanted one, too. So he began importing the shirts and selling them from his store north of Los Angeles. In 1973, the clothing side of the business took off under a name of its own: Patagonia. The name was directly inspired by the South American region Chouinard had fallen in love with during his expeditions. He explains the decision himself on the company's website. He didn't want to put his own name on the clothing line, partly because he feared diluting the identity of his climbing equipment business, and partly because he didn't want the clothes to be associated exclusively with climbing. Patagonia, he reasoned, sounded as remote and mythical to most people as Timbuktu or Shangri-La. It conjured up "romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, windswept peaks, gauchos, and condors."
It was the beginning of a remarkably effective brand story. Patagonia would strengthen that identity over the following decades by rejecting traditional advertising, fighting the Trump administration over protections for public lands, and, in 2022, transferring ownership of the company to entities designed to fund environmental protection and efforts to address the climate crisis. The brand made its refusal to behave like an ordinary brand one of its strongest selling points. Patagonia also committed itself to diversity and inclusion. It signed the "Count Us In" pledge opposing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in American states and earned some of the highest scores in the Human Rights Campaign's corporate rankings.
But that record never entirely convinced Pattie Gonia. In a 2021 interview with Outside, she explained that Patagonia had approached her before without offering what she considered a meaningful partnership capable of making a real impact. She wasn't interested in settling for token gestures. She said she'd be much more inclined to collaborate once she saw diversity reflected all the way up to the company's executive leadership. Then, in 2023, Patagonia found itself facing troubling allegations when independent news outlet Follow the Money published an investigation reporting that the company was exploiting garment workers in Sri Lankan fast-fashion factories.
Drag Race, Lawsuits, and the Money Trail
For eight years, Pattie Gonia and Patagonia occupied the same outdoor world without a public showdown. But the first signs of trouble had appeared back in 2022. That year, Hydro Flask, an American company known for its insulated water bottles and containers, was discussing a fundraising partnership with Pattie Gonia. Before moving forward, Hydro Flask contacted Patagonia to make sure the use of Pattie's name wouldn't create a trademark problem. What began as a simple inquiry led to several meetings, eventually prompting Patagonia to put its position in writing. In a series of emails dated February 2022, the company spelled out the conditions: Pattie Gonia agreed not to use or display Patagonia's logos or any "substantially similar" designs, not to use its proprietary Belwe typeface, and never to put the name "Pattie Gonia" on a product in any form. Wiley agreed. Everyone seemed satisfied. Except that in late 2024, Pattie Gonia filed to register pattiegoniamerch.com as a trademark and began selling "Pattie Gonia Hiking Club" T-shirts under her own name. She also offered stickers parodying Patagonia's logo in exchange for donations.
The irony is hard to miss: each is accusing the other of doing something remarkably similar to what it did itself, just one step further down the line.
In February 2025, Patagonia contacted Pattie again, asking her to honor the 2022 agreement and stop selling the merchandise. Pattie pushed back. According to her, the 2022 understanding concerned something other than the name "Pattie Gonia" itself. That name, she pointed out, was inspired by the South American region, just like Patagonia's. As for any references to Patagonia's typeface or logo, she maintained that they were simply fan art and had never been sold. In October 2025, for example, Pattie celebrated reaching a follower milestone by posing in gloves bearing a parody of the Patagonia logo. Then, in November, at a gala hosted by Out Magazine, she appeared in a dress made from a trans pride flag, featuring another version of the logo with the words "Pattie Gonia." But the clothing she actually sold on her website had about as much in common with Patagonia's aesthetic as a drag queen in six-inch heels has with an alpine mountain guide. Her online store, now empty, was filled with nature-themed T-shirts and unapologetic slogans: "Promote lesbianism" and "Feral Bisexual," among others.
In September 2025, Pattie Gonia had also filed an application to register her own trademark.
Her goal wasn't to take a shot at Patagonia. It was to protect herself. Just a month earlier, she'd watched a friend, RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Clair Barnes, better known as Lexi Love, receive a cease-and-desist letter from a former adult film actress who used the same stage name. The dispute had threatened Barnes's career just as it was taking off. But however understandable Pattie's intentions, the trademark application set off a much bigger fight.
Four months later, Patagonia filed a federal trademark infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The company sought a symbolic $1 in damages, plus legal fees that Wiley himself estimated could exceed $1 million. In its complaint, Patagonia argued that the trademark application marked a turning point. Pattie Gonia, it claimed, had gone from using her character in a relatively limited way to advance activism to building a sprawling commercial enterprise under the same name.
There's an odd financial twist to this supposedly money-driven dispute: neither side seems particularly interested in keeping the money for itself. On Pattie's side, much of the money raised goes straight back out to charitable causes. Her 100-mile charity hike in drag, "The $1M Dollar Backpacking Trip," generated more than $1.19 million for organizations working to make outdoor spaces more equitable for queer people and people of color. Her annual fundraiser, "A Fundraiser that's not a Drag," raised $300,000 in 2024. All told, she's helped redistribute several million dollars since the beginning of her career. Patagonia operates differently, but the underlying idea is similar. A family-controlled entity holds just 2 percent of the company's shares. The remaining 98 percent belong to the Holdfast Collective, which receives dividends to fund environmental causes. Patagonia estimates that this arrangement could generate around $100 million a year for those causes, depending on the company's financial performance. In other words, much of the money ends up supporting similar causes on both sides. Which makes the legal battle all the more bitter.
From Jack Daniel's to "Barbie Girl"
On May 27, Pattie Gonia delivered a line in a video that would rack up millions of views and spread rapidly through America's queer and outdoor media. This wasn't a trademark dispute, she argued. It was a company trying "to erase an activist." Patagonia, meanwhile, stuck to a position that was legally straightforward but emotionally chilling: if the company failed to consistently enforce its trademark rights, it risked losing the ability to defend them altogether, even when the alleged infringer shared its values.
And that's what makes this case so frustrating. The logic of American trademark enforcement leaves little room for nuance. As brands see it, they either pursue everyone who infringes on their trademarks or risk losing control of them. A New York intellectual property attorney quoted by GQ summed up the underlying problem with a certain weary amusement: brands, by their very nature, don't have much of a sense of humor. She pointed to a long history of similar disputes. In the 1970s, Coca-Cola took action to stop the use of posters bearing the slogan "Enjoy Cocaine." Mattel sued the Danish-Norwegian pop group Aqua over its hit "Barbie Girl." And Jack Daniel's fought a legal battle over a parody dog toy that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Going after parodists, it seems, is practically a national pastime for American corporate lawyers, regardless of the target's politics.
Patagonia's own complaint makes no attempt to hide that history. The company lists several imitators it has pursued over the years: Fratagonia, Catagonia, Petagonia, Gatagonia, and even Petrogonia, a pro-oil parody. There's also a graphic that turns Patagonia's familiar mountain logo into an assault rifle, associated with paramilitary organizations. So Pattie Gonia's case now finds itself filed alongside a cat-food brand and a fascist gun sticker.
"The lawyers had a lot to say to us at first. A little less now. But with the case underway, it'll probably drag on for years."
A Patagonia brand manager
In late May, Wiley made a public attempt to de-escalate the conflict. He offered to withdraw his trademark application if Patagonia agreed to drop the lawsuit. "Now you're saying the trademark is the problem," he said. "I'm willing to drop it. And if I do, you drop the lawsuit."
A few hours later, Patagonia issued a statement that sounded conciliatory but maintained its nonnegotiable conditions: Pattie Gonia had to stop selling and promoting merchandise under that name. In exchange, the company promised she could continue using Pattie Gonia as a performer and activist. Wiley refused. He insisted that his online store had never used Patagonia's logo, typeface, or any other element of its visual identity. With no settlement in sight, Wiley requested a jury trial. On June 8, 2026, the judge overseeing the case nevertheless ordered mediation, offering both sides one last opportunity to reach an agreement before the dispute became a prolonged courtroom battle. As things stand, the case remains unresolved. Both sides are holding firm, and the media continues to cover every Instagram exchange as if it were the latest episode of a television drama.
It's a drama that has attracted plenty of attention, but it hasn't exactly been good for Patagonia. Many experts are already describing the dispute as one of the most serious blows to the company's reputation. Patagonia employees, meanwhile, have been particularly shaken by the controversy. "It hurt us in May and June, but things are better now," says a Patagonia manager attending Alpine Hearts in Switzerland, who asked to remain anonymous.
Standing at a festival her company helps make possible, she sees evidence that Patagonia hasn't abandoned its identity. "I'm not worried, because we're staying true to our values," she says. "That's why we're here. We know what we stand for." In her view, the real difficulty lies in the legal dimension of the dispute, which has escalated in the American political climate.
"The lawyers had a lot to say to us at first," she explains. "A little less now. But with the case underway, it'll probably drag on for years."
Before Patagonia became a brand suing a drag queen over the use of a name, it had itself borrowed a name from somewhere else. Patagonia is, after all, a region covering roughly one million square kilometers (about 386,000 square miles), whose romantic image was appropriated to sell fleece jackets in California. Type "Patagonia" into a search engine. The first result isn't a page about the region. It's the company's online store. Patagonia borrowed the name of a territory without asking anyone's permission. Pattie Gonia borrowed Patagonia's name without asking for its permission. The irony is hard to miss: each is accusing the other of doing something remarkably similar to what it did itself, just one step further down the line. But there is one fundamental distinction between them, and it lies at the heart of the entire dispute. Pattie Gonia does business, certainly. She sells merchandise, performs shows, and signs brand partnerships. But she makes her living primarily as an artist and activist. Her community and her cause came before the business. Patagonia is the reverse.
For all its environmental commitments, it's first and foremost a company that makes its money selling products, with shareholders to answer to, even if those shareholders are supposed to represent the planet itself. Patagonia wants to save the planet, but first it protects its logo. Pattie Gonia wants to borrow the language of advertising to subvert it, only to become a brand that she now has to defend herself. And maybe the real loser in this whole saga is the one thing nobody seems to be talking about anymore: the environment, which both sides are so determined to protect. The ultimate irony of a story that should have been about mountains, but ended up being fought entirely in court.
First name has been changed.
