Papa Nui Interview: A Conversation with John Tesoriero

• Interviews
• By Those That Know
• 30th November 2019
• 10 min read

Papa Nui began with a practical problem under the Australian sun. John Tesoriero was wearing an inexpensive reproduction Marine cover on the beach when he realised its abbreviated peak offered almost no protection from the glare. What he needed was a substantial, full-visored aviator-style cap, something he could “hunker under” for a full day on the sand. Form followed function, and the result was the Corsairs Cap: frogskin camouflage herringbone twill, an unmistakably long visor and the beginnings of an entire fictional world.

The cap became an immediate customer favourite because it took a familiar military form somewhere less expected. Its practicality mattered, but so did its atmosphere. Papa Nui has always been enamoured with the romance of the South Pacific, underpinned by the service of Tesoriero’s father in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands during the Second World War. With production handled in Japan by John Lofgren, the brand brought together imaginative storytelling, personal history and exacting manufacture.

That combination was decades in the making. Tesoriero’s education in vintage clothing began in London in 1982 or 1983, when he arrived at 19 and lived just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. His first job was with Billy Murphy’s American vintage shop, followed by a position at Robot footwear on Beaufort Street. Murphy had already made a considerable mark in the 1970s with the Emperor of Wyoming, his tribute to Americana, while the team at American Classics at World’s End offered another source of knowledge.

At Robot, working for Dave Fortune and Michael McManus, Tesoriero encountered vintage tailoring and worked alongside stylist and prototype tailor Mark Powell. Back in Australia, two English brothers, Chris and Michael Constantinou, continued that informal education. Chris, whose taste Tesoriero still describes as “sublime”, became a mentor. He considers himself fortunate to have had older collectors around him when he was young; by the time we spoke in 2019, he was trying to offer the same encouragement to a younger generation.

Those years coincided with a boom in American clothing stores, and his own collection expanded accordingly. Military pieces were at its core, but there were also Levi’s, Hawaiian shirts, Ricky and Ricardo jackets and western shirts, many later used as references for retail ideas. After a decade he moved into the surf industry and then Levi Strauss. A chance conversation with Levi’s Asia-Pacific general manager turned into a design job when Tesoriero demonstrated an unusually deep knowledge of the company and its products. Within days he was discussing regional changes with the product-development team; soon afterwards he was living in Tokyo, working in Ebisu as a senior menswear designer for South-east Asia.

Japan’s heritage scene was gathering momentum. The Real McCoy’s was still, in Tesoriero’s description, a hole-in-the-wall shop in Daikanyama, and he spent endless hours and dollars there. His own designs included a vintage-style slim western shirt that sold 81,000 units. After three years of working, buying and selling in Japan, he took a 12-month research and concept-development contract with The Real McCoy’s. Atsushi Yasui had recently taken charge of design, and each month Tesoriero supplied photographs and stories capable of sparking product ideas, from the Trading Post concept to Muroc Army Air Field and the meeting of military aviation with the birth of hot-rodding on the salt flats.

Then came what he calls his “wilderness years”: a difficult decade in which design work was scarce and a young family and mortgage made practicality essential. He worked on building sites, demolished bathrooms, laboured and painted houses, while selling pieces from his collection on eBay to make ends meet. It was there, by chance, that he met John Lofgren. Lofgren was selling part of his Japanese collection to finance his first shop; Tesoriero was selling his to put food on the table. The two began talking.

A move to another state, a return to his teenage obsession with surfing and a job back in retail helped clear the ground for what came next. Tesoriero used his first shop bonus of $345 to reopen the conversation with Lofgren, this time about making caps. Lofgren said he could help. “The rest? Well, that history I’m still making,” Tesoriero told us. Papa Nui could not have emerged without the whole, circuitous journey. It took nearly 40 years to find clarity, and the brand only gained momentum once he concentrated on what felt true to him rather than trying to mirror the rest of the market.

The first Corsairs run gave that clarity a physical form. Tesoriero describes himself as a romantic raised on Hollywood films; into the cap he poured the swagger of the South Pacific and the sense of living on a metaphorical atoll at the edge of the Coral Sea. His favourite book, Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, supplied part of the imaginative vocabulary. His father’s stories supplied something more personal and real. Together, myth, cinema and family history became the narrative voice of Papa Nui.

Customers did not simply buy the story; they joined it. Tesoriero began receiving messages from self-appointed “Captains” holding beachheads for the Papa around the world. That willingness to participate revealed what the Corsairs had achieved: it was not merely a reproduction of an existing military cap, but an invitation into a shared adventure.

The historical foundation came most powerfully from John Tesoriero Sr, who went to war at 18. By then Australian forces in New Guinea and American forces at Guadalcanal had begun pushing Japan onto the defensive. Serving with II Corps Signals, he landed at Lae shortly after dawn on 4 September 1943 alongside the Australian 7th and 9th Divisions. Some 8,500 Japanese troops remained in the area, harassing the perimeter despite being exhausted, sick and increasingly broken as a fighting force.

In December, his barge convoy sailed for Finschhafen but missed the harbour entrance at night and drifted towards a Japanese shore battery. Searchlights found the boats and the battery challenged them with a signal code that Tesoriero Sr recognised as hostile. At that moment a B-25 Mitchell rounded the headland almost at water level, drawing the guns as it ducked and turned. The aircraft passed so close that he could see its crew in the glow of the cockpit. In the confusion, the convoy changed direction and escaped. He always credited that B-25 with saving his life.

Stories like this filled his son’s childhood. The older Tesoriero becomes, the more he recognises his father in himself, and that influence now runs through the brand. His father was also an avid collector. Among the things that survived are his kitbag, webbing and helmets, a Japanese Marine helmet, boxes of badges, patches, cartridges and casings, a Union Jack battle flag and what may be an 1853 artillery officer’s sword. There had once been more, although Tesoriero suspects he and his brothers sacrificed a fair amount to childhood war games in the back garden.

Turning this abundance of ideas into a finished cap can take six months or more. Papa Nui uses some of Tokyo’s best facilities, which means joining a production queue occupied by much larger brands. Its runs are smaller and almost every design is different, so factories cannot settle into the rhythm of producing thousands of a single standard military pattern. With the original Corsairs, however, speed mattered: other reproduction and re-enactment labels used frogskin camouflage, but nobody had pushed the fabric through quite the same flight of imagination.

The first run sold quickly to followers of Tesoriero’s blog, attracting overseas retailers and making a second Lofgren-produced run possible. Frogskin became one of the most sought-after camouflage patterns and the Corsairs one of his most imitated ideas. Rather than repeat it indefinitely, he continued exploring the notion of field-made clothing. The Avenger and Devastator took herringbone twill in new directions, while their backstories became progressively more elaborate.

By 2019, the process had become a kind of binge design: one idea leading directly into another until 19 sampled caps were waiting in the wings. The constraint was no longer imagination but release rhythm. More than four styles arriving together could overwhelm retailers and customers, so tightly edited collections mattered.

The winter collection we discussed at the time demonstrates the range within that discipline. The PT-109’ers was a deeper four-panel aviator cap in 9oz indigo denim, with an extended visor for sun protection and a battleship-grey underside referencing the colour of Pacific torpedo boats. Its story involved John F. Kennedy and coconuts, while the design suggested the possibility of a matching jacket and trousers.

Another discovery, an Imperial Japanese medical officer’s boonie from the Second World War, became a close recreation, right down to the owner’s name stamp, Fujiwara Takeo. The far North Pacific inspired the Aleutians, a rugged winter cap with a wool outer and cotton-poplin lining. The Tailend Charlie revisited a small-batch style previously made with Troy O’Shea, its stingy visor framed as an advantage in the cramped confines of a ball turret. Its popularity persuaded Tesoriero to put it into Japanese production.

The collaboration with O’Shea has roots deeper than a shared interest in cap making. Tesoriero had been close friends with Troy’s uncle, Greg O’Shea, a man he remembers for extraordinary taste: Porsche sports cars, a WLA Harley, single-fin surfboards and a mid-century home furnished with pieces by Miller, Eames and Jacobsen. Greg died from a tumour, leaving a wife and two young daughters.

Years later, while looking for somebody to make his Velos to Victory cycling cap, Tesoriero heard Troy’s name. The two then recognised each other from Instagram while passing on opposite escalators in the city. They doubled back, met at the bottom and began talking about making caps. When Troy asked whether he had known Greg O’Shea, the connection became clear. To Tesoriero, the coincidence felt almost orchestrated.

They went on to make hundreds of caps. O’Shea’s small-batch flexibility allows Papa Nui to explore ideas that major Japanese factories would not take on, while his devotion to vintage baseball-cap construction brings rare technical skill. Tesoriero is enthusiastic about collaboration because it lets his conceptual imagination meet another maker’s talent, but he is equally clear about the need for momentum. Good ideas lose their impact when development drifts for too long.

Among the makers whose energy he admired were Red Rabbit, Horse and Anchor and Saner Lohvitee. The principle was simple: distinctive craft is essential, but so is the ability to deliver while an idea still feels alive.

The Atoll Rocket Riders collection showed what could happen when concept and timing aligned. Tesoriero had seen The Right Stuff at its premiere, then read Tom Wolfe’s book and Chuck Yeager’s autobiography. Decades later, Nucky began experimenting on Instagram with styling drawn from the film and the early space-race era. Their conversations produced the Atoll Rocket Riders name, around which Tesoriero built a coherent product line.

The Apollo, Yeager, Mercury and Superfort caps struck a chord and became some of his favourite work. Future ranges might not be as extensive, he said, but thematic collections remained appealing; the persistent difficulty was coordinating different products so they arrived at the same time.

Asked where Papa Nui might go next, Tesoriero admitted that the answer changed every day. He wanted to move further into garments, although their development demands far more capital than caps. His taste, refined over nearly 40 years, can also be deliberately quiet at a time when much of the market wants recognisable labels and membership of an obvious tribe. Tesoriero has always preferred the piece that makes somebody look twice.

Australia’s distance reinforces that independence. Tesoriero describes the country as a creative cocoon, removed from both the United States and Europe and rarely examined by the international heritage press. That isolation makes building recognition slow, but it also protects the freshness of the work. He remains optimistic and keeps cataloguing ideas, ready for circumstances to change.

His final thought captures Papa Nui better than any conventional mission statement: “There’s a time when you just have to move beyond a generic snapback. Fortunately for me, the majority of the competition keep churning that stuff out while I’m on a tangent a million miles away. I like it like that.”

This interview was conducted in 2019 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Explore the current Papa Nui collection at Those That Know.