THE DISHEVELED PREPSTER
The Disheveled Prepster
A Page High School alumni moonlights as a fashion designer
By Cassie Bustamante • Photographs By Anna Peeples
By day, Greensboro native Matt Healy works in HR for Ecolab, a global player in water treatment and other technologies aimed at protecting people. After work, he can be found hauling his kids to baseball games or basketball practice with his wife, Sarah, or coaching their soccer team. But when the office has been locked up for the day and the two boys tucked into bed, visions of bold, patterned dresses dance in his head.
Even as a preschooler in the early-’80s, Healy colored liberally on his clothes. His parents, worrying that something might be wrong, took him to see a child psychologist. The diagnosis? Their healthy, young child was simply telling them, “I have my own style.”
“My personal style has been pretty bold,” Healy says, then looks down at his black polo shirt and gray twill pants and chuckles. “This was just a very-exhausted-on-Monday look.”
By contrast, his brand’s instagram feed (@augustus_roark)features images of models wearing colorful bohemian skirts paired with vintage-style T-shirts — or patterned patchwork dresses — bringing to mind vintage vinyl album covers.
“I’ve always described the Augustus Roark brand, the look of it, as like a prep-school Deadhead or like the guy who listens to Joy Division at a fraternity party,” says Healy. “You’re in the scene, but you’re pushing it a little bit.”
While music inspires the Augustus Roark aesthetic, the company’s name was drawn from literature. “Augustus” pulls from the Lonesome Dove character, Augustus McCrae, and “Roark” from Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel, The Fountainhead. These two characters, says Healy, were both individualistic but heroic and went against the societal grain. “It sort of symbolizes, ‘Be an individual. Be who you want to be. Follow your own North Star.’”
Inspiration wasn’t far afield. His own father, though in finance, has always stretched the boundaries of the latest fashion. “He is always way better dressed than me,” says Healy. “He’s pretty bold.”
Of course, he’s quick to add that his mother, who “sold clothes for a time with her sister,” has also been an influence. “I don’t want to discredit my mom — she’s very fashionable,” he says, “but my dad is kind of the one that really has an eye for it.”
Though you might say that Healy’s fashion design career began with those original scribbles on his childhood garments, he admits that he didn’t take the leap into it until his mid-20s, a few years after earning a degree in history from UNC Chapel Hill.
While his mind is always swirling with designs, he started simply — with T-shirts. “The T-shirt was always just an entry point for me.”
But the T-shirt business has remained strong and steady. Some of his pieces can be found in shops across the Carolinas, California, Colorado, Texas, Tennessee and D.C. In fact, if you attended the 2024 N.C. Folk Festival, you perhaps perused or even purchased one of Healy’s designs — a bold graphic in red, purple, pink and blue with white block lettering on a navy background. With music often serving up style inspiration, Healy says it was “a natural fit.”
From his bootstrap and T-shirt beginnings, Healy segued into collared shirts and hats, followed by rugby shirts, and officially launched Augustus Roark in 2007.
His rugby shirt designs caught the eye of fellow UNC Tar Heel Alexander Julian, whose own father, Maurice S. Julian, opened Chapel Hill boutique Julian’s in 1942. Julian, known for designing the teal-and-purple Charlotte Hornets’ uniforms as well as Carolina argyle, met Healy as “kind of a mentor, kind of a family friend.”
Julian saw something special in Healy’s designs and asked him about creating rugby shirts for his own brand at the time. “I am so naive, I didn’t even realize he was asking me that until later!” Healy recalls with a laugh.
While Julian’s style might be described as preppy, akin to Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, “disheveled preppy” is the look Healy portrays. He also seems heavily influenced, especially in his women’s designs, by the hippie movement. Think flowing shifts, Indian and near-Eastern fabrics, often sheer, and plunging necklines.
“People say I remind them of James Spader all the time, especially when I was younger and trimmer,” he says. “The Brat Pack, you can’t beat that.” Healy wasn’t even born until 1980 and was just a child when Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald and their crew graced movie screens across America.
Yet, he’s a self-described old soul whose style icons include several from the 1950s through 1980s: Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Brigitte Bardot and “maybe a dash of River Phoenix.”
After four years of peddling tees, Healy was finally ready to make the leap into women’s fashion. “It took so long to figure out how to get fabric,” says Healy, who sources a lot of his textiles from India, Italy, Peru and Mexico. “And how to find a pattern maker.”
For a couple of years, Healy searched the world over for a pattern maker, and — lo and behold — she was in his backyard all along, right here in Greensboro. Cassidy Burel, who has her own line of couture gowns, freelances for Augustus Roark as both pattern maker and model. While both are designers, each comes at it from different angles. Healy’s jumping off point is always the bold fabric. “I am very driven by color combinations.”
And Cassidy? “She is the total opposite,” he says. “She comes at it from a shape. She likes very minimalistic — white or one color.” While their aesthetic is completely different, their working relationship produces bold results. Often, after completing a piece for Augustus Roark, “She will say, ‘I never thought this would work, but it does.’”
The first dress ever designed by Healy was named “the Sarah,” a maxi-dress with ruffled shoulders, a wide V-neckline and a long side slit in a white fabric that features emerald-green dragons, butterflies, birds and vines with pink berries. Healy insists that it was “absolutely 100 percent” designed with his greatest supporter and influence in mind, his wife. Sarah, who works as the director of strategic marketing and communications at Canterbury School, met Healy right around the time Augustus Roark was officially launching and can often be found wearing her husband’s creations. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, Sarah’s New England “hipster prepster” vibes echo throughout his designs.
Currently, most Augustus Roark dresses are one-offs or come in a single size run, which Healy says is “cool” because, if you own one, you’ve got a unique piece. But his goal is to be able to sell a fully running women’s line. Healy recalls his mentor, Julian, telling him that designing woman’s fashion was more fun because you could be really innovative. “He always wanted to do it, but he never took the leap,” he adds.
Healy hopes, like Julian’s own father did for him, to leave somewhat of a legacy for his two sons, just 9 and 12 now. “Gucci didn’t become Gucci until 40 years into Gucci,” he says, explaining that the brand didn’t explode into the iconic company it is today until generations later. Healy chuckles, “I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that I am like these brands,” but he’d love to see his kids run with it into the future one day. But for now, while Augustus Roark is still in his hands, he says, “I still have so much I want to do.”
At present, this full-time employee, dad and husband is happy with what he’s been able to accomplish as a simple fashion-designing moonlighter. “I created something out of nothing and that is what I am most proud of. And I am proud that it still exists.”
Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if someone like, say, Gwyneth Paltrow, would don one of his dresses. Rob Lowe, he adds, would be incredible, too. And who knows? You might even spy an Augustus Roark booth — or his T-shirt designs — at the 2025 N.C. Folk Fest.
“You’ll always look back and regret it if you didn’t try,” says Healy. “That’s what Augustus Roark symbolizes — be who you want to be.”