Spare Jeans: How a rebel tailor went from selling cigarettes in Manila to sewing Montreal’s coolest jeans

The compact atelier of Spare Jeans is bursting at the seams with personality. Stacks of raw denim reach for the ceiling. Half-finished projects fan out across a massive cutting table. Swatches and snapshots decorate the walls, while a shower curtain rod doubles as a coat rack for custom jean jackets.

The man behind Spare Jeans Prospero Rey is no less a character. The ambitious teenager from a tiny island in the Philippines relied on charisma, quick wit, and a touch of kismet to make it to Montreal, and to make it in Montreal.

Love at first stitch

“I started sewing when I was fourteen-and-a-half,” Prospero recounts. “I didn’t like being told what to do. I was very much a rebel. I wanted to decide my own future, which is wrong in my culture, but that’s my personality.”