Meet Fashion's New Darling: Surfer & Menswear Designer Thaddeus O’Neil

A model wears Thaddeus O’Neil Spring/Summer 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Thaddeus O’Neil

You’ve come a long way, Spicoli. The Baja shirts and board shorts of Sean Penn’s iconic Fast Times character have made their way onto the runways and shops, courtesy of Frank Muytjens, Saturdays Surf and most recently and interestingly, Thaddeus O’Neil.

O’Neil, 39, is the über-newbie menswear designer of the moment, a position previously held by the likes of Ovadia & Sons and Public School. He was just nominated for an International Woolmark Prize, which honors up-and-coming labels. His backstory sounds like a game of biographical Mad Libs: The son of a gym teacher, he grew up on Fire Island, surfing and playing in the area’s relative nature; he disdained Manhattan and never went in. (Today, he lives there with his wife and two-year-old son and works out of a Soho loft.) Bruce Weber — as in the Bruce Weber — was a neighbor who started taking pictures of O’Neil’s handsome father, also a surfer. Fond of beachy beefcake then as now, Weber trained his lens on a teenage O’Neil, who promptly started modeling. He traveled the world and lived in Australia for eight years. He photo-assisted for Weber, then opted for university, where he got a master’s degree in aesthetics and philosophy. Staring down the barrel of an academic career, he bailed out to make things, inspired by his closet full of exotic clothes.

A model wears Thaddeus O’Neil Spring/Summer 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Thaddeus O’Neil

“Academia is a noble pursuit, but the ocean’s very important to me,” says O’Neil over coffee in Soho. “I don’t want to be stuck in a tenure position in Idaho. Nothing against Idaho. But I need to be near the ocean. I need to be able to control that aspect of my life spacially.”

Now O’Neil’s endless summers involve preparing for Fashion Week. January’s was his second, after which he drew hosannas from the likes of Vogue, GQ, and Urbandaddy. That’s partly because we’re riding the crest of the wave of “athleisure,” but O’Neil’s line intrigues because the worldly intellectual — or at least travel Instagrammer — mashes up against the oblivious beach bum in a way that somehow works without seeming like an exercise.

(Is it even possible to be a beach bum anymore? Everyone comes with footnotes now, yeah?)

O’Neil describes his output as “American luxury playwear.” “I’m really referencing an American sportswear tradition,” he says. “But I don’t like the term ‘sport’. It’s so rigid and so quantifiable. Play is sort of open-ended. It definitely comes from a beach-oriented surfing lifestyle. There’s this huge historical aesthetic that comes with surfing, from the imagery to the people—these guys were just beach hobos. All they cared about was being in water and playing all day and inventing, whether they were inventing new equipment or new surfboards. They were a bunch of tinkerers playing in nature, which is kind of really cool.”

Menswear designer Thaddeus O’Neil. Photo: Courtesy Thaddeus O’Neil

The level of detail in the line is exacting and unusual: In the current spring collection, there is a sweater in a lacelike knit and a tank top in a puffed rib, joggers in an ikat print and sweatpants and T-shirts in diagonally pieced stripes. A hoodie sweatshirt is cableknit cashmere in a non-traditionally masculine violet and lemon. A good sense of his priorities were his debut line’s “beach suits,” long, drapey, sleeveless V-necks over highlighter-colorblocked board shorts. It’s all more Public School than Saturdays Surf, all very “editorial.”

O’Neil’s logo is the upside-down symbol for female. “This is a very interesting way for me to pursue philosophy, through design,” he says, “ It’s a nice lens to go through things with.”

Well, besides that, his fall collection is, to use the strict terminology, killer. At his last NYFW show, the models wore jeweled masks and crowns. “I guess I’m a little bit demanding of the guys I ask to be in my shows,” he says, “because there’s always a performative element. It wouldn’t interest me to do a straight show. I want to tell a story, and I can’t tell that with guys just walking in clothes.” But the first thing you noticed was the clothes: A black-and-white Cowichan-inspired cardigan freshened up the Steve McQueen and Starsky staple; a long and unstructured peacoat did the same for that classic; shirts and cardigans in cool diamond and Aztec prints cleaned up those trends in black-and-white.

A model wears Thaddeus O’Neil Spring/Summer 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Thaddeus O’Neil

He’s released video lookbooks the last three seasons; the latest is titled “An Interview With Rimbaud” and stars the model and artist Michael Bailey Gates, whose shoulder-length hair and broad leonine cheekbones could make him O’Neil’s kid brother. He recites snippets of Rimbaud’s writing, which O’Neil pulled from various sources, while interviewed by O’Neil’s dog. “Just to add another layer of confounding weirdness,” O’Neil says.

The dog asks his opinion of fashion, and Gates, as Rimbaud, calls it “A monotony of pretty lives,” Does that feeling parallel O’Neil’s own? “I just thought that line was funny,” he says. “Although I think fashion can be that. So that’s where the interesting thing is for me, to try and make it something else. Not to be all high-minded and serious about it, but you can definitely fall prey to that quickly. Ask anyone about fashion who’s not imminently involved in it, and they’ll probably roll their eyes. But in doing that, you can also overlook some of the things that can be done with it.”

Right now he’s prepping the spring line for next year, with time set aside for surfing — “I better!” he says. “It’s my psychotherapy.” Today he’s finalizing yarns. He’s big into yarns. He works with mills in Scotland and Japan; at the latter he found a fiber woven from cashmere and a paper that samurai would use to line their uniforms because of its strength and breathability.

“I can totally geek out about it from an academic perspective,” he says. “Probably too much. I probably should have a more macro view of things, but I just can’t help it. I love the history of everything in fashion. Every fiber has its own history. The way they felt up wool. Guys in China wrapping it and pissing on it and pulling it through the fields on the back of their yaks or whatever—pounding and pressurizing it. Who comes up with that? It’s crazy! Garments, that’s our oldest technology. It’s the thing that really allowed us to set foot out into the world in an exploratory way. Otherwise we’d just be naked savages. I mean, honestly.”

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