The mixture of ingredients that makes up Andrea Roso’s Myar—a label of zero-waste menswear built on a foundation of vintage militaria—is becoming more complex and effective. Yet as he progresses Rosso is finding that this apparently peaceful and positive project is part of a semantic conflict. As he noted on a call: “Sustainability is getting me stressed! I’m finding it’s a bit like politics—you think there is a parliament with everyone working towards the same principle, but there is a right-side way of thinking and a left-side way of thinking.”
What seems so unsustainable about ‘sustainability’ is the looseness of its meaning, and the carelessness—or cynicism—with which it is often applied in fashion and beyond. In Myar’s case, however, Rosso is both realistic about the inherent ambiguities of the cause and happy to accept scrutiny and debate around his attempts to further it.
This season was the first in which Myar combined two deadstock ingredients, a nylon and down, to create the zigzag quilted section of his red and green rendering of the US military L-2A flight jacket. There was a great deal of fleece in the collection, sometimes cut into the knee supports on vintage Swiss camo combat pants, sometimes used to line beautiful Dutch surplus parka liners, and sometimes used to create sweatpants worn with an all fleece recreation of the 1942-vintage USAAF B-3 flight jacket. The attractive cords, which like all the non-vintage fabrics here were cut in ReLiveTex certified deadstock fabrics, were based on a pocketless design made for female British munitions workers in the 1940s.
Fast-forwarding half a century, 1990s vintage Swedish rubber raincoats came in long and short variations, the short pimped with a pocket designed originally for canteens, the long with a pocket designed originally for skis. These were a few of the most eye-catching maneuvers in a collection that bristled with thoughtful upgrades and hybridizations, and which more straightforwardly often looked cool: Patagonia meets Pearl Harbor.
Said Rosso: “There is always a mix of the vintage, used-stuff with the new stuff. And the new stuff comes from the deadstock because my goal is not to produce any new raw material—it’s more a case of cleaning up old raw material. But the collection cannot always be made that way, because otherwise I’m talking bullshit, right?” Not talking bullshit? That strongly suggests that you’re not into selling it, either.