If you haven’t heard of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, just wait. You will. There’s always a new neighborhood in New York—in America, in the world—and on the day we visited Pop-In Goes Poolside swimwear designer Malia Mills way out in this west-facing burg, this one seemed to have as good a chance as any—Berlin’s Kreuzberg? Fox Hills in L.A.?—at being The Next Big Place.
The area’s 100-and-some-odd-years-old former shipping and manufacturing lofts are getting infused with face-lifting food and retail capital, and the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets are, as we speak, transforming a 70,000-square-foot warehouse into a factory for dunks and rebounds. The stacks of gridded windows and rows of high ceilings are prime real estate, but for the record: this cool lady was here before all that. Mills has West Brooklyn pioneer status.
Malia Mills outside her Brooklyn workspace; image by Kirby Calvin
Actually, one suspects upon meeting her that Mills, with her elegant punk hair and Mad Max style, was born a pioneer. And then you learn that she was born in Hawaii, where the uniform of entrepreneurs and daredevils is a bathing suit. Does that make Mills a born beach pioneer? We think so, yes.
In advance of the just-launched Poolside Pop-In, stylist and photographer Kirby Calvin and I visited the Malia Mills studio and talked with her about blazing trails in bikinis, in Brooklyn, with women and their bodies, and beyond.
First things first. As we stood in the crosswind of spring breezes inside her doors-open loft, I asked Mills what made her apply her La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne education to swimwear.
“I thought it was super f*&^%$ up that women were stressed out about buying bathing suits.”
This simple observation is how Mills became a forerunner of girl-powered, body-positive design: by first recognizing that the system is broken—that it’s super messed up that the onset of swim season makes women break out in hives and/or embark on crash diets and spin out in self-esteem spirals.
Malia Mills makes swimwear for real girls; image by Kirby Calvin
“Can you imagine if we had to buy our underwear that way?” she asked rhetorically, referring to the packaged-set mentality in the world of bikinis.
So way back in 1993 or so, after stints with Jessica McClintock and lots of sewing machine hours logged alone in her apartment, Mills started to change the conversation by making and marketing bra-sized à la carte-style suits to fit every body. At first she visited established design houses that didn’t sell swimwear, thinking she could get hired on to launch the category for them, but the person she sat down with at DKNY encouraged her to strike out on her own. So she did it solo.
But even if she was the first to do it, it wouldn’t have been enough to simply offer bottoms and tops separately if they didn’t look good—and if they weren’t well built and interestingly fabricated. Mills drew on memories of the beautifully worn-in look of her sisters’ suits back in the day and began using non-trad swim materials that she knew would fade well but last long, like men’s shirting and woven cotton.
Image by Kirby Calvin
Soft black satin straps with gentle lingerie “hardware” are additional hallmarks of the Malia Mills look. The pieces don’t just fit like really well made French lingerie, they allude to that aesthetic in subtle and overt ways.
Today, inside the high romance of this urban industrial ideal, Mills and her sister Carol steer a team of about 20 experts in customer service, fit, sample-making, textiles and more. Although the Mills sisters first set off to do the traditional sold-in-stores model via wholesale, they soon found that unless their retail partners were ordering full runs of suits and sets with cups from AA to DD, their brand wasn’t really able to, well, cover the needs of every woman out there. Eventually, they brought the bulk of the retail back into their own company, weaning themselves out of boutiques, opening a small and mighty fleet of Malia Mills flagships and juggling in a mix of pop-up shops and custom orders.
Image by Kirby Calvin
The Malia Mills Brooklyn workspace; image by Kirby Calvin
All of which makes us feel pretty darn good about offering the Malia Mills line this month. Though we can’t call it exclusive (the brand has maintained a few select and limited wholesale relationships), it’s very cool to be able to carry these body-loving, Brooklyn-designed, American-made suits. The Mills sisters reported feeling pretty pleased too; they both have the Nordstrom name on their résumés.
The Malia Mills answer to life in general gets affixed to just about everything that goes out the door; image by Kirby Calvin
As we wrapped up our in-studio chat, Malia walked us outside and down the street to the artisan-filled Industry City Food Hall; on the way we talked about swimming—what else?—and got stories of teenaged cliff-jumping and more recent visits to gorgeous stone pools near Nice, France.
And then, before we reached the new-world foodie court that the New York Times calls the “Soho of Sunset Park,” our bikini pioneer pointed out a humble Mexican joint called La Famiglia.
“Usually we just go there and fill up on rice and beans,” she told us. Spoken like a real frontierswoman, always loyal to what drew her out to begin with.
Prime real estate in Sunset Park; image by Kirby Calvin
Shop: Malia Mills swimwear | Pop-In Goes Poolside
—Laura Cassidy
via The Thread Fashion Blog http://ift.tt/1RFe380
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