Hillary Taymour named her new show The World Is a Vampire, and who’s going to argue with her? Certainly nobody in the crowd of Collina Strada girlies she assembled tonight, many of whom were wearing her bug-eye sunglasses inside—never mind that it was already dark outside. Taymour, like Paris’s Marine Serre, who emerged around the same time with similar sustainable fashion goals, is a clever brand builder. From those bug-eye sunglasses to collectible enamel rings (also buggy) to shoe collaborations with Puma, Vans, and Ugg, she’s built a whole Collina Stradaverse. It’s wild and weird, and, crucially, identifiable. Backstage she reported that her business is up 95% at Shopify.
If she was amping up the witchy, gothic vibes with Dracula ruffs, Victorian puffed sleeves, and exaggerated trains, as befits the “soul sucking” mood of the current moment, as she called it, Taymour also made a point of building out the lineup with the dreamy sheer floral dresses and little peekaboo slips that she sells so many of. “It’s almost wedding season and we want them to come into the store and buy the dresses,” she said. “I really just want to pound in the fact that, you see it on the runway, you can come get it from us.” (Taymour opened a Collina Strada shop on Canal Street early last year.)
The runway-to-real world pipeline is straighter here than at a lot of the bigger brands on the New York schedule for whom fashion shows are more marketing exercise than anything else. That might be the reason J.Crew chose Taymour as one of its collaborators on a recent rollneck sweater revival project. Keeping up her commitment to responsible design on her home turf, Taymour used bio fluff, an innovative biodegradable fur made of recycled hemp, viscose, and Tencel, in what she claimed was a New York fashion week first. “You bury it and it will die,” she noted. That means it will decompose, which beats what happens with the plastic stuff that’s been proliferating amidst the industry’s fur-free pledges. Stay weird, Hillary.
