Meet Mr John Moore, the man behind the coastal-inspired clothing for grown-ups.

Around the turn of the 21st century, Abercrombie & Fitch, with a huge assist from a young designer named Mr John Moore, stamped a silhouetted seagull heading to that place we all want to be – a beach, full of the young and beautiful – onto sweats, shorts, shirts and assorted activewear. It called that place Hollister.

Rarely has the California of our dreams been more succinctly and successfully incarnated. The brand was so successful that Mr Dave Eggers felt compelled to write a 6,000-word New Yorker piece examining the disconnect between the modest, inland burg of Hollister, about 100 miles south of San Francisco, and the Hollister of our imaginations.

That success is largely thanks to Mr Moore. But he didn’t stop there. After rising to director of global concept at A&F before he was 30, he walked, and went on to found Culver City-based consultancy The Pop Studio, revive heritage surf brand M.Nii (for which he was named one of GQ’s menswear designers of the year in 2014) and, more recently, in 2015, launch Outerknown, a sustainable, grown-up surf brand produced in partnership with surfing legend Mr Kelly Slater.

This month, Outerknown launches an exclusive capsule collection on MR PORTER, as part of our Made In California project, the central motif of which is a winking smiley face that appears as a print on T-shirts and as a felt patch across the collection’s hoodies, shorts and sweaters. “With Outerknown, our signature aesthetic is clean and coastal, and branding is kept to an absolute minimum,” says Mr Moore. “But we flipped the script for MR PORTER and designed a felt patch for this capsule that has a warm message from your friends in California. Literally a little wink and a smile from us to you.”

If Mr Moore has always had a knack for dressing the nation in a California state of mind, it’s because he himself came by his reach-the-beach aesthetics honestly. He grew up in Westlake Village, a sleepy outpost cum high-end celebrity sanctuary that lies just over the Santa Monica Mountains from the promised land of Malibu. When Mr Moore was a kid, Westlake was a cultural desert, even less cool than the neighbouring San Fernando Valley. “People talk about the Valley,” says Mr Moore. “The Valley had more pulse than we had. We had hills on all sides and we always thought there was something better going on over the hill.”

Mr Moore’s conviction that the surfing ethos could be as soulful as it is sunny seems to have found its font in Outerknown. The brand is both a maturation of his aesthetic and a culmination of nearly two decades in the design and branding trenches. “It’s really all those things combined that led to Outerknown,” says Mr Moore.

Outerknown started to come into focus a few years ago when Mr Slater approached Mr Moore with a simple question that became a call to action: “What are we wearing and where is it coming from?” Finding better answers to those questions has been their mission.

“It was a huge leap of faith on [Mr Slater’s] part,” says Mr Moore. “Part of what we wanted to do was break the formula and figure out new ways of building clothing and new ways of working.

“It was like learning to design all over again. We [designers] are selfish. We have a vision and we’ll do anything to bring that vision to life. That’s not the case if you are trying to do things responsibly. There were constant roadblocks.”

The challenges included sourcing eco-friendly raw materials, developing relationships with ethical manufacturers and factories and establishing the types of supply chains around the world they wanted to be in business with. “We are making clothes we want to wear with a process we believe in, making decisions with the highest regard for the environment and the people who are building our products,” says Mr Moore. “It’s painstaking, the level of detail we go into.”

Along with traditional foundations such as aesthetics and functionality, “sustainability is just a building block”, says Moore. “We convinced ourselves that it’s truly harder than it actually is. It just has to become your new MO and one of the ways you operate, and it’s one of those building blocks.”

The MR PORTER capsule collection is in some ways a sly nod to where this journey began. A smiling face has taken the place of a silhouetted seagull on clothes Hollister-wearing kids might grow into once they discover that California is, as Mr Moore says, as much about “how we live our lives and how we should conduct ourselves” as it is about endless summers. “I’m very proud of living in California and what we stand for,” says Mr Moore. “From our vantage point in California, we want to bring a little more positivity to the world.”