It’s New York Fashion Week, and all is quiet on the western front of Brooklyn, where a warehouse is thrumming with TikTok royalty. There is the artist Chloe Wise, the musician (and Celine model) Angel Prost, the #IndieSleaze proto-muse Cory Kennedy, and the actress Katerina Tannenbaum, whose recent turn on And Just Like That has made her the type of approachable-but-interstellar “It Girl” we thought had gone extinct. Pace Gallery’s new associate director Kimberly Drew is getting photographed; Rowan Blanchard sits in a makeup chair while her breasts are bedazzled with tiny crystals.
At the eye of this cultural storm is Hillary Taymour, the creative director of Collina Strada. She has the twisty long hair of a TV teen witch, the attention of celebrities like Rihanna and Lorde, and the nerve to make phenomenal cosmic clothes with an itty-bitty carbon footprint. “We come up with a lot of design ideas that never get made,” Taymour explains, “Because if we can’t do it with integrity, then we’ve lost the reason to do it at all. It’s the only way a fashion collection should happen. But god, it’s fucking exhausting.” We laugh because it’s true, not because it’s funny.
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Back in 2009, when Collina Strada began, Taymour seemed inexhaustible. Fresh from a degree at FIDM, she began making handmade accessories like leather and quartz harnesses for rock stars, art world scions, and (according to The New York Times) people who would literally buy the clothes off Taymour’s back on the New York City subway. “I knew what we were doing was the thing,” she says. “Still, I had to beg to get just one cool model on our casting board.”
But the brand’s rise coincided with the ascent of social media, and soon, she was bypassing traditional modeling agents in favor of DMs, and casting misfit beauties like Reese and Molly Blutstein (aka @Double3xposure) and Israeli LGBTQ+ activist Stav Strashko. Last season’s show included two models in wheelchairs and several over 50; along with Gucci, she’s one of the first designers to debut a full outfit in the metaverse before manifesting it (on pop star Kim Petras) IRL.
In fact, looking back on Taymour’s 14-year archive, she’s been maddeningly ahead of the curve, not just on harnesses (which peaked on Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton runway in 2019) but Crocs (Taymour bedazzled them in 2015; Christopher Kane followed in 2017; Balenciaga in 2018 ), and the ‘90s slip-dress-over-Hanes-tank revival. (Taymour: 2017; every designer with a Paris atelier: Now.) Taymour’s also been on the frontlines of “slow fashion,” insisting all denim is deadstock (often with help from Levi’s) and all manufacturing is “ethical enough that I would feel good about making the fabric myself, or having any one of my friends make the fabric. Actually, sometimes, they do.”
Taymour admits with a focus on truly slow fashion, she sometimes can’t roll with the now-now-now landscape of retail. “Stores are like, ‘We want 200 of this jacket.’ And I’m like, ‘We only made 40. We can’t ethically make more, or literally it’s deadstock fabric and there is no more.’ A lot of buyers and stores aren’t used to being told ‘no,’ which has helped us and hurt us… The other thing we hear from retailers sometimes is, ‘It looks too much like last season.’ Well, look, if someone buys a dress from me in 2018 and they still want to wear Collina in 2022, they shouldn’t have to buy another dress! This is the meaning of slow fashion. If retailers hear this from many brands, and shoppers hear this from many people they admire and follow, people will change how they think about shopping. They’ll change how they think about fashion. They’ll change. The change is the point.”
But Taymour knows change can’t happen alone. “We’re a small brand and we’re showing people what’s possible. I can’t implement systemic change in my own system, you know? I want to be in charge of $100 million, and figure out where materials are coming from and what we’re doing on the planet. That’s what needs to be next.” She says she’s been in talks with several big European fashion houses. “I keep hearing, ‘It’s not the right time, or it’s not the right timing.’ And that’s fair enough, although it’s also… I mean, I think it’s also incorrect!” She laughs. “Labels are also less flexible than I’d like. They’ll say, ‘We love what you do so much. Would you do it for us?’ And then they’ll have a shearling quota… New leather. New fur. Obviously, that’s not happening.”
Taymour’s frustrations seem to echo the early years of another eco-pioneer, Stella McCartney, who had to prove—again and again—that her more sustainable designs could sell just as well (if not even better) than traditional minks and polyester fabrics with toxic byproducts. “I feel like if I were a dude, there would be a lot less of this,” says Taymour. “Some executives have been extremely condescending to me. Then they look at my sales numbers, and the brand reach, and they realize this isn’t some hobby I do in my bedroom after school. I thought it would fade away as I got older, but even in my 30s now, it’s amazing the way I’m sometimes talked down to. I do think if I were a man, I would have been given the same opportunities as Demna”—the creative force behind Balenciaga whose jagged mix-and-morph approach to fashion does share some parallels with Taymour’s vast vision of what clothes can be.
“There’s also still a shocking amount of anti-gay bigotry in the industry,” she adds. “I was going to rent a space [in Soho]… When the owners realized [there were LGBTQ+ community members] involved, they told me, to my face, that my store might be ‘too gay’ for them. This isn’t in 1990. This is recent.”
More recent: Collina Strada’s first fashion film, a spoof on The Hills starring Tommy Dorfman as a clueless intern who (gasp) uses a reusable coffee cup in the office. The mini-movie showcases a new focus on outerwear, as well as pouf gowns drenched in hot pink, and crochet bags shaped like frogs that will be the “get” of the Lower East Side by summer.
Taymour also has a trip to Paris planned for March, where she’ll continue meeting with big brands until she’s given the reins she deserves. “It will happen,” she says. “I want to be able to be the voice of reason in this insanity that is the current fashion industry. What does it look like?”
For starters, it looks like this:
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Hillary Taymour Wants to Save the World. When Will Someone Let Her?
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