Uncharted Waters
Josia Lamberto-Egan '00 left his upstart fashion company, Trovata, just after it hit the big time. What's next? He's still trying to figure that out.

By Mark Kendall

Josia Lamberto-Egan ’00 doesn’t have a job. He has a hammock—and quite a life. He devotes his days to exercising, cooking elaborate meals and fixing up the house. New to Seattle, he plans to spend a lot of time boating on the waters east and west of this town. At 28, when many young people are getting more and more serious about their careers, Lamberto-Egan just gave his up. And this was no run-of-the-mill gig.

Just out of college, Lamberto-Egan co-founded the fashion brand, Trovata, which quickly made a splash in the apparel industry. Described by Rolling Stone as “prepster-meets-surfer-dude,” the clothing line made it into Barneys New York, American Rag and other upscale retailers. From the Los Angeles Times to New York magazine, the press loved the story of four surfer guys with no formal fashion design experience finding success. So did the fashion world: the Trovata team bagged a $200,000 prize to help them launch their brand. Based in a converted boathouse in ritzy Newport Beach, Calif., the Trovata crew was producing clothes through contractors in seven countries, from China to Peru, and had hired a dozen or so employees of their own. “It happened so quickly,” says Lamberto-Egan.

In June, the tuxedo-clad Trovata four found themselves rubbing elbows with supermodels and celebrities at the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s annual awards, the fashion biz’s equivalent of the Oscars. On that limos-and-red-carpet night in New York City, Lamberto-Egan and his three colleagues took home the award for emerging talent in menswear. Singers Alicia Keys and John Legend presented them with the statuette. Backstage, the Trovata guys half-jokingly pitched a movie idea to producer Harvey Weinstein (Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love). After the show, they celebrated at rap mogul P. Diddy’s party.

And then Lamberto-Egan left Trovata. Only days after that swanky ceremony, he was packing up his stuff and preparing to set off for Seattle. He had his reason—a good one.

Besides, Lamberto-Egan has always navigated an unusual course. He was a teen math whiz, silver medalist in the 1993 North Carolina Mathematics League competition, before banking over to the social sciences. He was the surfer dude who went away to an elite boarding school, by his own choice. Though he was accepted to Stanford University, he first took a year off to work in the Merchant Marine, cooking the chow and swabbing decks on a tugboat. After a year at Stanford, his dream school, he transferred to Pomona College.

As he wrote in Stanford’s alumni magazine before leaving that school: “In the first year of what I hoped would be a half-decade of romantically expanding horizons, I have seen
people’s visions of their unlimited futures narrowed to cutting points. I fear that we are being trained too rapidly for careers and success.”

JOSIA RIVERS Lamberto-Egan spent most of his youth in Dare County on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a series of windswept barrier islands home to shipwrecks, pirate lore and the “Lost Colony,” an English settlement that mysteriously disappeared in the 1580s. His father is a tugboat captain who ran away from home as a teen to go out to sea. A quiet man who everyone calls “Boss Mike,” Michael Egan also is a self-taught philosopher who “knows more about history than pretty much anyone I know,” says Josia. His mom, Lucille Lamberto, is a nurse midwife and former ’60s hippie who brought a teenaged Josia to Woodstock ’94, at the 25th anniversary of the original, so he could experience the vibe. She’s an effusive, high-energy sort. “I love your mom” is what people always tell him—five minutes after they meet her.

Josia is the oldest of five children; Laffite, Oceana, Seawind and Skyla are his siblings. They grew up sleeping in ship’s quarters-style bunks in the home their father built. From an early age, they were read stories of exploration and adventure on the high seas. Josia couldn’t get enough. “It takes a certain spirit to be like, ‘if I don’t come back from the voyage, if I find the Promised Land or if I fall off the edge and land in hell or anywhere in between, that’s cool, that’s fine with me because I’m just about finding out what’s out there,’” says Lamberto-Egan, who sometimes wears the longish beard of a sea captain. “When you’re 12 years old and you’re reading about Captain Cook and he’s discovering islands nobody knew existed at the time, it’s pretty hard to beat that.”

But can a 21st-century guy still follow those old explorer maps, the ones where the boundaries are rough—and often wrong—and where you just might fall off the edge of the Earth? Lamberto-Egan is quick to say he wouldn’t want to endure life aboard one of those clipper ships of yore. He has read enough history (Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s classic Two Years Before the Mast is one of his favorite tomes) to know of the misery below deck on those voyages. And he has spent enough time at sea himself to know not to romanticize today’s nautical life either. Once you’ve been rousted from bed at 2 a.m. a few times to go chip ice off the deck of a tugboat to keep it from capsizing, college starts to look real good, he notes.

Still, Lamberto-Egan is just as wary of today’s precisely calculated career paths and the landlocked lives they lead people into. He is taken with the idea of discovering new things, whether at sea or on land. “I think there was a period of time … where you could be sort of a gentleman, an English gentleman, and it was implied that you didn’t do any one thing in particular but did many things and did many things well.”

“I guess you can’t introduce yourself as a gentleman—people would think you’re pretentious’’ he says, chuckling. “But I like that idea. There was a time period when guys could be masters of many things, not just dabblers, but really be into the stuff they were into. They were expected to speak multiple languages … ride horses, know how to sword-fight, sail a boat or grow things in your garden.”

TROVATA (Italian for “found”) was launched in that go-try-it spirit. At Pomona, Lamberto-Egan took a costume-design class and had been altering thrift-shop clothes in his dorm room, using his grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine. He became friends with a Claremont McKenna student, John Whitledge, another fan of thrift-shop threads. They started coming up with their own designs, and managed to land a meeting with Barneys New York. This led to a small order for their shirts—quite a score. Through Whitledge, Jeff Halmos and Sam Shipley came on board.

After graduation, they decided to make a go of it. The foursome had to handle all aspects of running a fashion business, from inseams to invoices. Lamberto-Egan started off designing clothes but in time shifted to overseeing the production end of their business, dealing with sewing contractors around the world. He also was the writer, helping to craft the elaborate, tongue-in-cheek back stories used to help market their fashion lines. Stuffy aristocrats, surfers and a bizarre murder have all been part of those yarns. “He’s got a really sarcastic sense of humor, and he’s an unbelievable writer,” says Halmos. “We would always laugh about the stuff he would come up with. He was kind of in charge of adding the quirkiness to the line.”

The Trovata crew didn’t take themselves too seriously. That was part of their appeal.
At the same time, they were logging 10-hour work days, meaning these four surfer guys didn’t have much time for fun at the beach. But it wasn’t the desire for more leisure time or a new adventure that ultimately pulled Lamberto-Egan away from Newport Beach.
Lamberto-Egan left Trovata to be with his girlfriend. He and Maria Matijasevic have been together for 11 years.

THEY MET IN PARIS, while they were still in high school. Both were studying abroad for a semester as students of Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite prep school in Connecticut. He was a year older and wore trench coats, mutton-chop sideburns and long hair. “He made me so nervous I couldn’t even talk to him,” says Matijasevic. But she made the first move, intentionally floating the rumor that she had a crush on him, knowing it would get around—and back to him. She remembers him talking and talking to her about something—she can’t remember what—when she finally leaned over and kissed him. After high school, he set off for Panama with his dad on a surfing trip before starting in the Merchant Marine. They thought they would never see each other again, and the pair had a tearful parting.

He made the next surprise move. Arriving home from Panama via New York’s JFK airport, he took a cab to her family home in the Bronx and knocked on her door at 2 a.m., looking sunburned and scraggly after losing 20 pounds in Panama. She was leaving the next day to tour colleges on the East Coast, and he wound up going along with Matijasevic and her family on the trip.

Now they were a couple. He worked two-weeks on, two-weeks off in the Merchant Marine, allowing him plenty of time to drive up to Connecticut to see her. When he left for Stanford, she followed him to California. When Matijasevic was accepted to Pitzer College, Lamberto-Egan transferred to Pomona. Matijasevic went on to UC Irvine for medical school, while Trovata found its home in nearby Newport Beach—no problem there. Then came time for Matijasevic’s medical residency, and she landed a plum one at the highly-regarded Swedish Medical Center in Seattle.

Lamberto-Egan says he followed her to Seattle with no regrets. He points out that it’s too easy to put career and other interests over relationships. His mate was more important to him than his job. “I think I have a clear vision of what makes me happy,” he says. “The greatest cause of distress is when people don’t have any clue what makes them happy.”

Sure, it was hard to leave behind a creative business he helped start. But he never planned on staying in the fashion world for good—the longest he had ever held a job before that was his year in the Merchant Marine. And he realized that success can have its own subtle undertow. “It gets to the point where even if you want to go away and do something different, there’s just enormous pressure—internal and external—to stick around and say ‘you can’t leave now. This is something people dream about doing. You can’t walk away from that,’” he says. “Maria getting her residency made it much easier, made it concrete, set a deadline.”

Staying on the coast was a big bonus. The couple was relieved that Matijasevic landed in seaside Seattle, a mix of sailor brawn and Bill-Gates brains. They are living in a funky-shabby, baby-blue, century-old home in a gentrifying neighborhood near downtown. They got a great deal on rent because the place is supposed to be torn down in a few months to make room for town homes. This has given him free reign to experiment: The kitchen cabinets are now purple; a wall in the entryway is painted orange.

Friends call him the househusband as he backs up Matijasevic through her 12-hour days of medical residency. “I do the cooking and cleaning, the house painting and the home improvement,” he says. “I’m sort of picturing myself as a more macho version of the househusband. I can bake but I can also handle power tools.” He’s hardly housebound, though. Lamberto-Egan jetted to Germany to catch a few World Cup games before settling into Seattle. And more and more, he has been finding his way to the water, which is easy in this city, with Puget Sound to the west and Lake Washington to the east. Kayaking, rowing, sailing—all sorts of nautical adventures beckon.

Part old-time explorer, part postmodern househusband, Lamberto-Egan is navigating uncharted waters once again. He’s not sure where he and Matijasevic will wind up after she finishes her residency. He eventually will need to go back to work, but he doesn’t know what he’ll do. His only real plans are to stay with Matijasevic—and close to the ocean.

Text Meets Textile
The Trovata fashion team spins yarns as they design clothes

The written word, as much as fabric and thread, helps hold Trovata’s fashion lines together. Early on, the fashion foursome discovered that creating a back story helped them focus their efforts and added texture to their collections.

The stories started simple. Mulling plans for an early collection, one of the Trovata guys suggested they imagine the person they were designing the clothing for. In their collective mind, he turned out to be a California surfer kid sent off to boarding school back East. “Deviant Prep” was only a few paragraphs long, but it set the tone of Trovata’s overarching punk-meets-preppie aesthetic.

Next came “Blue-Collar Caribbean,” the story of a young island guy hired as a deckhand on a New England yacht for the summer. To add depth to the tale, their research pulled from sources ranging from reggae lyrics to posters from the Grenada revolution. The story didn’t completely dictate the clothing, but it did help set parameters. If there were five colors to choose from, Josia Lamberto-Egan ’00 says they would choose the two that most evoked the Caribbean.

“Von Campbell’s Last Crusade” was about a clueless amateur adventurer trying—over and over—to gain admittance to a prestigious geographic society. This led to a collection that ranged from “dashing overcoats to woven button-ups with quirky buttons.”

Lamberto-Egan was Trovata’s primary scribe, and the tales became more and more involved. But he wound up turning to a freelance writer to churn out their most elaborate story, “A Mountain Spelled Murder,” involving a fondue-fork killing at a chateau. They handed out that 50-page noir detective tale at their first runway show in New York.

Though Lamberto-Egan has since left Trovata, his influence carries on in their next story. It involves a husband-and-wife scuba diving team, a tugboat, a search for treasure and … well, that’s all we can tell you.