Amor Montis grew from a lifelong connection with the mountains.

From an early age, mountains were a significant part of my life. My father was an expedition leader whose travels took him to some of the world’s most remote landscapes: the Arctic and Antarctic, Alaska, Patagonia, British Colombia, Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, Outer Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia and many more.

Closer to home, some of my strongest childhood memories were formed in the mountains of Britain: walking and climbing in North Wales, the Peak District and Scotland.

When I was three years old, my father took me up Tryfan in North Wales. The story goes that I walked all the way to the summit myself, promptly fell asleep when I got there, and my father carried me down.

More than three decades later, my father was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. His medical notes stated palliative care only, and with no certainty over how much time we had left together, those mountains and the memories attached to them took on a different significance. We made a conscious decision to revisit the places that had shaped our lives and to make as many new memories as we could.

And so we returned to Tryfan.

By then, my father was on his sixth round of chemotherapy and was extremely weak. Nevertheless, he made it to the summit - neither of us had stood on its summit together since that day.

This time, I all but carried him down.

When we returned to camp that evening, I found myself reflecting on the day and on the people we had passed along the way: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, couples, groups of friends, lone walkers, seasoned mountaineers, families introducing children to the hills, military personnel on group exercises, and people returning to mountains they had known for years.

It occurred to me that we couldn’t be the only ones who had forged an emotional connection to these peaks. Everyone who climbs a mountain takes something different from it, but for many, its significance goes far beyond simply reaching the summit. A mountain can become tied to a person, a friendship, a challenge, an achievement, a particular moment in life, or the memory of someone who once stood there beside you.

That evening, the idea behind Amor Montis was born: to create something that represents not simply a mountain, but the memories and experiences we attach to it.

Together with my business partner, Toby, who shares the same affinity with the mountains and whose own connection to them has similarly been shaped by a lifetime of experiences and memories, that idea developed into a clothing brand built around something simple:
the mountains that have meaning for us.

Each design begins with a real mountain or ridgeline. Its distinctive topography is reduced to clean line artwork, creating something understated and immediately recognisable to those who know it. The location on the reverse connects the design back to the actual place that inspired it.

It is not simply about depicting a mountain. It is about representing the memories, challenges and experiences attached to it.

Rupert Thompson