Chloe Kim Discusses Launching First Signature Snowboarding Collection With ROXY

In 2019, when Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim signed with new snowboard sponsor ROXY after her longtime partnership with Burton ended, there was something in her new contract that caught her eye right away: she would have the opportunity to design her own signature snowboarding collection, a first in her career.

Kim has earned about every accolade a halfpipe snowboarder can earn: she’s won two Olympic gold medals and five X Games gold medals, has won every major international snowboarding competition you could name, from Dew Tour to the Laax Open to the Burton U.S. Open to U.S. Grand Prix to world championships.

But off the halfpipe, Kim has always had a driving goal: to pursue her other love, fashion, and to eventually design her first snowboarding line. As of Wednesday, that dream has been realized.

“It’s something I always wanted to do and it was such a dream of mine and for it to finally happen when I was 19, I was just so excited,” Kim, now 22, told me, recalling signing her contract with ROXY and the beginning stages of designing her collection.

“It’s just been such an incredible journey. I’ve loved partnering with ROXY, a brand for women by women. As a woman, that’s just the key to my heart right there.”

In the years she and the ROXY team have been working on her collection—which includes two pullover jackets, two full-zip jackets, two pairs of insulated snow pants, a pair of technical snow pants, a bib, a beanie and a fleece—Kim has gotten a rapid education in the world of apparel production. What surprised her the most, she said, was all the attention to detail that goes into the process.

“The things you don’t even think about, like what kind of zipper, how are we gonna do the inside of the jacket—you realize these are details you have paid attention to before that have been factors when you go shopping,” Kim said. “When you’re actually designing something you’re thinking, oh, you know what, the zipper size is very important, and the color is important and the way it sits on your shoulders is very important.”

At the beginning of the process, when the world was her oyster and she had to narrow down what pieces she wanted to create, Kim found herself somewhat paralyzed by indecision. “I was so fixated on what people would like versus what I would like,” she said.

But her good friend fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, who has her own ROXY collection, told Kim something that finally opened up the design floodgates: “Just make stuff that you would want to wear.”

“I took her advice very seriously and it became such a fun process after I made that switch,” Kim said. “Why do I care so much about what other people are gonna think? Everyone’s gonna have their own style.”

Kim has always prioritized style when she selects her outfits for competitions—even at the expense of comfort. (When we spoke about her collection when she was in the middle of the process, she said, “I’m definitely a fashion over function type gal. When I’m wearing stuff, if it’s cute, I’m okay with being uncomfortable for seven hours. It’s worth it to me.”)

So when her collection finally took shape, Kim surprised even herself with how much comfort and function won the day. “I think that now that I’m older and my back’s hurting, my knees are hurting, I just want to be comfortable,” Kim said with her trademark wry humor. “I decided, I’m gonna make it as comfortable as possible and as cute as I possibly can.”

Because no one on the team knows more about the features snowboarding gear needs to boast to be functional than Kim, she also used her collection to solve problems that she’s had with other apparel her entire snowboarding career.

One of the features she’s most proud of? Her ingenious solution to a common problem for non-male snowboarders.

“The bibs that are in my collection, there’s a zip in the booty area, so you can go to the bathroom and not have to take your entire bib off, which is something I was so thrilled about when we actually pulled it off,” she said with a laugh.

Reflecting back on the process now that the collection has launched, Kim is grateful that the process was so collaborative and that her ROXY team amplified her voice in the development stage. “It felt like such an amazing, beautiful, collaborative experience.”

Given how important fashion is to her—Kim feels like she competes better when she knows she looks good on her board—it was also important to her that when people bought items from her collection, they were also able to mix and match to find their perfect pieces.

“I really just feel like you can have fun with it and mix and match and go all out, and there’s a lot of things in ROXY’s main line that go really well with my collection so there’s a ton of options,” Kim said. “That was really exciting to me because the best part about shopping is finding a good fit.”

The line’s color story includes pastel purple—a shade very similar, but not exact, to Kim’s familiar Oakley goggles—Easter egg blue, soft pink, white and a bold splash of scarlet.

If she could describe the collection in three words, what would they be?

Picking a favorite item from the collection is a painful proposition and elicits much hand-wringing from Kim, but finally, she selects the lilac jacket and the pink bib. “I love my monochrome vibes, but I also love my fun, playful vibes,” she said.

“I will definitely pick a different fit depending on how I feel that day,” Kim said. “Sometimes I just want to be one with the snow, so I’ll wear the all white. Other days I’m like the sun is out, I’m feeling colorful and playful, I’m gonna grab the lilac jacket with the pink overall bib.”

And the pop of red in the otherwise pastel collection? Don’t underestimate the boldness beneath Kim’s sweet exterior. The red is akin to mindset she had at the Beijing Games, where her chances of winning the women’s halfpipe final never seemed in doubt, and yet she still continued to attempt to become the first woman to land a cab (switch fronside) 1260 in competition. She didn’t land it that day, but she’s put the competitive snowboarding world on notice.

“The red represents the blood, sweat, and tears that were shed leading into that day,” Kim acknowledged—joking…but also not joking.

To that end, Kim has decided to take the upcoming professional snowboarding season off. Heading into the lead-up to the Olympics, Kim didn’t compete for 22 months as she attended her first year of college at Princeton.

Upon her return, which began with the Laax Open in 2021, Kim’s winning streak went unchallenged: she finished first at that January 2021 Laax Open, as well as at X Games Aspen, the world championships, the Aspen Grand Prix and then at Dew Tour and again at Laax the following season right before the Beijing Games.

The transition initially sent her spiraling—before qualifiers at that 2021 Laax Open, she was “hunched over, crying” in the back away from the cameras, prompting her longtime coach to say, “I’ve never seen you like this.”

But when she secured that win, everything clicked back into place.

“I just needed to do this,” she told me. She felt more comfortable with taking another pause knowing that doing so doesn’t seem to adversely affect her competitive career.

“My cab 1080 before I went to school was a nightmare,” she said with a laugh. When she returned to training in the fall of 2020, it was dialed-in. “I think it might do more good than harm,” she said.

At 22 and having successfully defended her Olympic gold medal from the Pyeongchang 2018 Games, Kim has many years ahead of her in competitive snowboarding—so long as she wants them. But, “I think also there’s so much I want to do with my life outside of snowboarding,” she said.

“I want to get my personal life together and give myself this time to enjoy and celebrate and take it all in. I’m getting into acting these days and that’s been really fun, dipping my toes into things I’ve always been interested and passionate about…. I would love to have a family one day, I want to get married, want to travel the world. I’m definitely gonna be going back to snowboarding at the end of 2023.”

And the 2026 Games in Italy?

“I’ll probably do it, knowing me,” Kim said, adding that it was always a goal to compete in three Olympics (which she could have already accomplished, had there not been an age restriction in place for the Sochi 2014 Games, during which she was 13, two years shy of the minimum). “I like having a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

“I don’t know how much more time I have in the competitive space before I start getting more excited about those other things,” Kim said, but added that snowboarding will always be a part of her life.

“There’s gonna be a time when I stop doing 1260s in the halfpipe and I’m okay with that. Moving forward, I’m just gonna be grateful every time I get to put a bib on.”