Osklen Brand Guidelines: The Rio Label Built Around Pirarucu Leather and E-Fabrics

A doctor’s sportswear label.

Osklen was founded by Oskar Metsavaht, a doctor who trained as an orthopaedic surgeon before turning to fashion. Sources differ on the year: FashionUnited gave 1988 in May 2019, while English Wikipedia gives 1989. English Wikipedia says Metsavaht, who comes from Caxias do Sul in southern Brazil, taught himself design and that the label began by making winter sportswear; Hypebeast wrote in February 2026 that his approach to clothing is shaped by his background in sports medicine and orthopaedics.

The company is based in Rio de Janeiro, and its legal name is Terras de Aventura Indústria de Artigos Esportivos, the name Mercado & Consumo used for it in April 2022. Its collections cover men’s and women’s clothing, shoes and accessories. At Rio Fashion Week in April 2026, ELLE Brasil reported, the brand showed tailoring and beachwear in linen, raffia and jute, alongside sportswear in neoprene and jackets in pirarucu leather.

Materials are central to the way Osklen presents itself. FashionUnited reported that it began using organic cotton in 1998, and English Wikipedia says that in the same year it adopted sustainability principles summed up in the phrase “as sustainable as possible, as soon as possible.” The company calls the materials it develops “e-fabrics”; in 2019 Metsavaht told FashionUnited that its collections mixed these with traditional materials, and that not every new material could yet be produced at scale. Among them is pirarucu leather, made from the skin of a large Amazonian freshwater fish that the food industry usually discards. English Wikipedia also names Amazonian jute, latex and silk straw fibres among the materials the label uses, and, quoting WhiteWall magazine, says that in 2018 47 percent of the pieces in an Osklen collection were classed as sustainable, drawn from 38 suppliers the company had developed over 20 years. ELLE Brasil described the graphic, functional design of its clothes as the label’s signature.

Instituto-e, Alpargatas and DASS.

Much of the materials research runs through a separate organisation. After an early-2000s collection called E-Brigade, which FashionUnited says carried prints quoting the Kyoto Protocol and Agenda 21, Metsavaht set up Instituto-e, a non-profit that researches and develops e-fabrics for Osklen and for other brands; English Wikipedia dates the institute to 2006. In 2011 UNESCO named Metsavaht a Goodwill Ambassador in Brazil, English Wikipedia says.

Osklen was owned by its founder until 2012. In October that year FashionUnited reported that Alpargatas, the maker of Havaianas, had bought a 30 percent stake after talks that began in January, with an option on a further 30 percent, and that Metsavaht would stay in the creative team. By 2019, FashionUnited said, Alpargatas held 60 percent. Under that ownership Osklen, then led by chief executive Leandro Medeiros, opened a new store format at BarraShopping in Rio in November 2019, with screens linked to online stock, payment at any point in the shop and collection of online orders; Mercado & Consumo described it as part of a digital programme across Alpargatas’ brands.

In November 2021 Brazil Journal reported that the DASS group — a footwear and apparel maker from Santa Catarina that produces for sports brands and holds the Fila licence in Latin America — had agreed to buy Alpargatas’ 60 percent, with Metsavaht keeping his 40 percent under shared governance. Metsavaht had brought the deal about himself, the paper said, after meeting DASS about a year earlier. The buyer was founded in 1980 in the small town of Saudade, where it began by making sports shorts, and has held a licence for Umbro in parts of South America since 1999. When the sale closed, Alpargatas said the move was in line with its strategy of expanding Havaianas into new categories. Alpargatas completed the sale on 19 April 2022, according to Mercado & Consumo, which cited the company’s filing to Brazil’s securities regulator. Accounts of what followed differ: ELLE Brasil wrote in April 2026 that in 2022 Metsavaht decided to take back control of the brand and bought back the shares he had sold.

Brazilian fashion and footwear.

Brazil’s fashion and footwear brands cover a wide range: rubber flip-flops and plastic jelly shoes, women’s shoes and handbags, beachwear and printed dresses, and men’s basics and denim. Many of them sit inside a small number of listed groups, and their corporate pages set out founders, owners and stock-market listings alongside the product ranges.

Footwear is led by large manufacturers. Alpargatas, founded in São Paulo in 1907, has made Havaianas since 1962, and Portuguese Wikipedia describes it as an Itaúsa company since its 2017 change of ownership. Grendene, founded in Farroupilha in 1971 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange since 2004, makes Melissa, Ipanema and Rider, with plants in the north-eastern states of Ceará and Bahia, according to Portuguese Wikipedia.

Clothing and women’s shoes have consolidated too. Portuguese Wikipedia says Azzas 2154 was formed in 2024 from the merger of Arezzo&Co, the Belo Horizonte shoe group behind Arezzo and Schutz, and Grupo Soma, the Rio de Janeiro group built on Animale and Farm, which had bought Cia. Hering in 2021. Ownership in the sector changes often, so each guide in this series states its brand’s owner as a dated fact.

These brands present themselves through campaigns with well-known faces, collaborations with foreign labels and their own stores and brand spaces, from Galeria Melissa in São Paulo to Casa Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Stores, runways and a return to Rio.

Store counts give a sense of the brand’s reach at different dates. In May 2019 FashionUnited counted more than 80 retail spaces in Brazil, two in the United States and one each in Uruguay and Greece. In November 2021 Brazil Journal reported 48 company-owned stores and 27 franchises, and said the brand was sold through about 500 multibrand shops in Brazil’s main states.

The brand has also gone back to the runway. Osklen opened Rio Fashion Week in April 2026, ELLE Brasil reported; its previous show had been in 2018, and its previous one in Rio in 2016. The collection drew on Ipanema and on the label’s own archive, and the opening looks were white tailoring with a black flat sandal. Two months earlier, Hypebeast reported that Metsavaht had worked with Moncler on the opening-ceremony uniforms for Brazil’s team at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, built largely in white.

For a design guide, Osklen shows how a brand can build its identity around the materials it chooses and the places they come from, with plain, functional shapes and a palette close to natural fibres. Compare Farm Rio, another Rio label with a print-led look, and Havaianas, its former stablemate at Alpargatas. For this guide we use sand, jute brown, off-white and an ink black with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Osklen’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.