With her brand Collina Strada, designer Hillary Taymour operates less like a fashion label and more like a gonzo art project. Her clothes are wildly expressive, sometimes veering toward aggressively offbeat and even psychedelic. She often has one foot in the animal kingdom (frogs are a common motif) and the other in some fantasy realm entirely.

Taymour’s main collaborator is the multidisciplinary creative Charlie Engman, who has made a name for himself as kind of an art photographer in the fashion realm. He serves as the brand’s art director. Meanwhile Collina Strada shows have become outlandish theatrical displays, more akin to arch, winking performance art than overly serious catwalk saunters.

The designer Hillary Taymour. Courtesy of Collina Strada.

“People always think our brand is too much, or ask, Why is this brand trying to do some gimmick?” Taymour said recently, laying in bed after a long day of showing her collection to store buyers in Paris. “They’re literally called fashion shows. It’s a show! It’s supposed to be a creative moment and make you think.”

Take her fall 2024 collection, cheekily titled “Collina’s Gym,” which humorously took on the idea of female strength and literalized it with quilted or draped muscles sewn into knit tops or floaty dresses. Models with ripped physiques flexed at the end of the runway, and some held dumbbells fashioned from squashes, a nod to Taymour’s affinity for nature. The cast included pregnant women, plus-size, and older models, the actress Gina Gershon, and Taymour’s longtime muse, the artist Aaron Rose Philip in a motorized wheelchair, as well as Engman’s mother, a frequent catwalk guest. Medieval voices and mangled Spice Girl’s “Girl Power” anthems blended with caustic techno beats while, overhead, a large screen suspended over the catwalk was filled with hallucinatory images of frogs and flowers, other Collina hallmarks.

Fall 2024 backstage looks. Photos: Soraya Zaman, courtesy of Collina Strada.

Was it a send-up of gym culture or the corporatized wellness industry? A punk roar against oppression? Or just poking the fashion industry cliche of putting shoulder pads on some pin-thin teenager and deeming them ‘strong’ or ‘empowered’?

“Female strength is overused, usually by people who don’t know what it means,” Taymour explained. “But I wanted to dive in and explore, what’s our gladiator uniform to take on what’s happening in the world today?” Later she laid out her intentions more bluntly: “We need women in leadership so men can’t make laws about our bodies.” Indeed, Taymour demonstrates that, with bravado, a fashion show—like an art exhibition—can be rife with cultural meaning and thought-provoking subtext, in addition to some sick clothes, of course.

Looks from Fall 2024. Photos: Charlie Engman, courtesy of Collina Strada.

After the fashion show Taymour barreled right on to her project, this time with the New York Botanical Garden. Titled The Orchid Show: Florals in Fashion, it reconsidered one of the most well-tread inspirations of the industry—flowers. Here the designer drained out all their saccharine sweetness and approached them as strange, alien, and otherworldly, which, in fact, they often are. “I didn’t want to do, like, that Netflix show where they have people make dresses out of flowers,” she said. So, instead she created gowns of exploding orchids, dressed a frog-headed mannequin in pants made of blooming succulents, while an alien-like figure wore shrouds of tulle with green blooms peeking through.

Taymour’s creature peers out from a melange of orchids. Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden

With all this, Taymour has perhaps become one of the leading voices in the scrappy downtown New York fashion scene of 2024, alongside brands like Eckhaus Latta and Vaquera, the conceptual label that shows in Paris. They are a riposte to the shiny commercial juggernauts typically associated with the city—names like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger—or the stiff-lipped uptown elegance offered by Carolina Herrera or Oscar de la Renta. From her love of performance, to the clothing’s witty eccentricity, to her deep commitment to sustainability (Collina Strada is often made from deadstock fabric, i.e. premade yet previously unused textiles, or upcycled materials which which were once used and now repurposed), she operates more as a polymathic art project than anything else.

Taymour conjures a fierce orchid warrior carrying a carnivorous handbag for her New York Botanical Garden contribution. Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.

Taymour grew up just outside of Los Angeles, in San Pedro, and went to a traditional university before withdrawing (after almost getting kicked out) to study at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. She began her company in L.A. in 2008 and moved to New York two years later where she first made accessories, like handmade harnesses, before expanding into clothing design. Her maximalist psychedelic shows are increasingly bonkers and have been critical and commercial hits: one was a video send-up of Bravo’s “Housewives” shows, one look book featured models morphing into reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and monkeys. She owned the fall 2023 season by sending out a menagerie of models outfitted in intricate prosthetics and makeup, making them into human/ animal hybrids (the models behaved like they were possessed by these spirit animals). In October, a compendium I Care a Lotta, I Wear Collina Strada was released through Rizzoli.

Fall 2023 backstage looks. Photos: Soraya Zaman, courtesy of Collina Strada.

Taymour, for her part, has been savvy about balancing business with creativity, in an industry that’s notoriously fickle, and where corporate behemoths can crowd out smaller labels. “We’ve had some spikes, but overall we’ve had this continuous, slow growth,” she said, “And that’s helped us create relationships with factories, who make our clothes, and stores, who sell them. I’m basically the only brand making things at these two factories in midtown, so these families rely on me. That’s an amazing thing to be able to say.” She notes that she could easily produce her clothes in Asia for far less and make more profit, but it feels antithetical to her brand’s mission. Collaborations with Uggs and Desigual will be released this month.

You can see a whiff of Taymour’s 90s SoCal upbringing in her baggy cargo pants, corset tops and her dresses in straightforward cuts — yet her versions with Engman are on acid: the cargos are pink velvet, for instance, the corset looks like a football wide receiver’s shoulder pads, but in a pink watercolor print, and her dress is black, lace, and see-through.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 13: Hillary Taymour and Kim Petras attend The 2021 Met Gala Celebrating In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion at Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by John Shearer/WireImage)

“We’re both kind of maximalists by nature,” said Engman, who met Taymour in 2011 responding to an ad on Craigslist (when that was still a thing). “She is more than me, but I’m right behind her.” While Engman has his own varied practice, a lot of Collina Strada’s visual universe sprouts from their ongoing dialogue (during our Zoom, a dizzying array of strange and delightful images sat just beyond Engman’s shoulder on a mood board.)

“We’re not trying to do quiet luxury that everyone can wear because it’s beige,” Engman said with a laugh. his creative partner concurs.

“Clothes are so personal,” Taymour says. “But it’s about connecting to people in a way that feels refreshing, and new, and consistent.”

“But I got one of the best compliments ever this weekend,” she added. “This fashion editor said that when we look back at 2020s fashion, people are going to remember Collina Strada, it’s the epitome of the era. We won’t remember the quiet luxury of it all, Collina Strada is what all the kids were wearing. And I was like, ‘What?’ I had never really thought of that. But, then I was like, “I guess maybe you’re right!’”