Ryan Morrow is on the move. It’s a Friday afternoon when I get on the phone with the Sydney-based designer, which means he’s heading out of the city and up Australia’s eastern coast for the weekend. As well as the coast, he’s been heading to the bush for years since moving to the harbor city from his native Northern Rivers, near Byron Bay.
It was afternoons like these when he was P. Johnson’s head of design, leaving the city in a beautiful suit to then go and set up a tent, that gave him the idea for his eponymous label: clothes that reflect and comfortably serve both spaces.
Some of the clothes you’ll find in his weekend bag are also what populated his first collection (or Capsule), which launched the brand last year. He checks off them off as solutions: “I’ll pack one rain jacket” — the Dry Jacket — “or something light and breathable I can throw on when it rains” — the crisp Fly Anorak – “and what am I gonna put on for a nice dinner that night when I’ve still got sea salt on the skin?” — the breezy Screen Shirt.
“Considering each piece I’d pack in my bag for a weekend away, I like that idea of making them the best they can be.” With this modular framework, his archetypal shapes are already starting to emerge.
I first encountered the brand at one of Morrow’s pop-up installations in a concrete gallery showroom where I tried his Dry Jacket on for size. With its raglan sleeves and storm flaps, it hung off my shoulders like a tent would, I imagine; its drape came from the treated polyester that gave off the polished fuzz of a peach.
It’s since evolved in his sophomore collection, released this past Australian winter, into a cotton/nylon blend, keeping that drape but with a sturdier handfeel. There’s also its beefier sibling in the Loft Jacket, made in Italian cotton canvas and filled with Australian and New Zealand wadding. After Morrow’s years at P. Johnson, outerwear, he admits, is a category he wants the brand to excel in.
In a city, you’re safe to throw either on without it reading as the incongruity some people approached with the Barbour jacket a few seasons back — which, here, is performative by comparison.
Not bearing the weight of a heavy wax cotton, say, which is to know you’re about to go outside and do something, is how Morrow likes it. He traces this attitude back to his upbringing enamored by the surf brands that dominated the late-90s and early-2000s. “In the surfing culture I grew up in, it was about how you carried yourself and how you performed, not about how you talk,” he says. “I kind of carry that in the way I design where I want to have a nonchalance and an ease to things, but have this coolness that is authentic and it comes down to the fact that it’s real.”
Working in his palette of natural colors — with names like Bark, Mud, Fern — is shorthand for his intended environment, yes, but one immediately favored by those in the overlapping circles of fashion, design and architecture — who also have a penchant for weekend-trips. But the clothes have found their way in other trades, too. Builders and carpenters have DM’d Morrow to tell him about the compliments they’ve received wearing their Dry Jackets on shift. An unexpected client, perhaps, but one that gets closer to his original idea: treating clothes like tools and equipment.
With his eponymous label only a year old, Morrow is keeping it small and slow, packing his single yearly collections with updates to fabrics and forms. “It’s almost like I don’t love clothes enough just to make heaps of it,” he says.
In terms of where he plans on taking the brand next, he’s think about what actual tools can fit in the Morrow world, namely through collaborations with makers of his camp equipment. First up, a folding pocketknife. “I’m looking at the objects in my life that articulate this niche and what I’m trying to do with the brand,” he says. “It’s for someone who thinks about the objects they put in their lives.”
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