Tanya Taylor (Q9292)
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Tanya Taylor is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Tanya Taylor |
Tanya Taylor is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Yeehaw! Tanya Taylor brings a Canadian eye to Americana for a pre-fall collection that nods to TikTok’s “farm girl” obsession. The most obvious riffs on the source are refreshingly abstracted bandana-style prints, and denim, which is used on a wear-forever A-line paneled skirt and used for patch pockets on cotton separates. Taylor also made use of apron silhouettes—see the blue-and-white striped dress with embellishment on the bodice layered over a charming white tee with striped bows at the shoulders.Layering is a theme that is repeated throughout the offering, as it’s an easy way to create a new look. Taylor says she’s seeing a return to dresses and responded accordingly: There are slip-style dresses, frocks featuring mixed prints and handkerchief hems, as well as voluminous dresses made of yards of fabric that swish around the body or can be tamed with a belt. The more fitted silhouettes, like a warm brown “tennis” dress; a one-piece that looks like two, featuring a tan button-front vest and pleated black skirt; and a balletic tank dress in tonal shades of persimmon commanded attention. If you are in the market for khakis, look no further than Taylor’s; at once sharp and slouchy, they feature wide legs, deep pleats, and sit easily on the hip bones, and possess a versatility that allows them to convey a down-home or downtown vibe.
3 December 2024
Tanya Taylor’s spring collection was based around her idea of a perfect day. For the designer and artist, that would involve painting and cruising between her studio and an art-supplies store on a skateboard. “When you’re in an art store, you feel like all your tools are around; you could create anything. And there’s something about someone on a skateboard that’s pure freedom. It’s like the wind in your hair and the control of where you’re going.” With all this in mind, Taylor’s goal was to create a day-off kind of feeling to the collection; she didn’t want things to look too polished or perfect. Styling a pretty pistachio satin dress with a twisted strap with slippers didn’t push the idea far enough; relaxed trousers in beige and apricot that you could wear with any number of cute tops, from a gingham bikini to tie-back peplum halters or a slouchy marinière sweater, did.As usual, Taylor created the prints for the season. The boldest was of tulips, printed on a T-shirt and on pleated skirts once they had been produced, so when you sit or move, the print would be interrupted. A gingham-front trench coat was fun; from the back, the only hint of what lay ahead was the checked collar. In terms of investments, you couldn’t go wrong with a long, sleeveless, scoop-neck denim column with corset seaming: It was flirty, fitted, and fab. Also strong was a LBD–tennis dress hybrid with buttons down the extended front that opened up into a fuller skirt. A white short top with cutouts edged in green and puffed sleeves could similarly be dressed up or down.This felt like a little-bit-of-everything collection; there was gingham, eyelet, stripes, knits, cutouts, denim, satin, beading, and more. This was in keeping with the theme, a free-pass-to-do-as-you-please day, yet the collection seemed tighter than the preceding ones. Taylor pointed out that the dress buyers gravitated to was Look 24, a butter yellow sheath with a full skirt with thin bands of black threaded eyelet at the princess sleeves, and wider ones at the side of the waist. It was a bit ’60s Lily/Jackie/Camelot and quite nostalgic. Which vibes with Taylor’s own effusive mood: “I love connecting back to what my youthful state of mind was,” she said. “And my youthful state of mind was always about freedom.” Let it ring.
14 September 2024
“Resort,” mused Tanya Taylor, “is one of those seasons that’s definitely between moods…it has to be a lot of things.” The opening look of her collection, a cheery explosion of texture, color, and graphics, does indeed embrace a sense of muchness. “I love mixing stripes, I love playful color combinations, and the spirit of resort feels like it’s starting there,” she said of an ensemble of spliced shirting cottons consisting of a pocketed shirt and pleated skirt.She followed this up with a reissue of the much-requested Marina balloon-sleeved blouse, paired with slightly high-waisted tailored denim that looks “a little bit more elongated and dressed up” than your usual pair of jeans. This slim line carries over to a fitted brown-stitched chalk-white denim midi dress with center-front zipper. Add a sweater and you can wear it all year round. “I feel a responsibility to design things that will make a customer’s life more beautiful, better, give them more confidence. And then I also want to surprise them. It’s balancing practical and fantasy,” she said. “I don’t feel successful if I design something that everyone loves in a lookbook, but nobody buys.”Hybrid looks, like a cotton/knit shirtdress or a one-piece-that-looks-like-two sweater-topped dress with pleats, continue Taylor’s interest in a kind of easy yet polished day “uniform.” Of a finer vintage is a slightly flared column dress with black sequin embroidery in a delicious color combination of fuchsia and merlot.
6 June 2024
“I’ve been so interested in how many brands are taking a more realistic perspective in making clothes for real people,” said Tanya Taylor on a walk-through of her fall collection. That approach is something that’s always appealed to her, and does so even more now that she has her own boutique and can track what people are reacting to. “I can’t put crazy clothes in my store,” she said. “I have real women with amazing jobs and low amounts of time walking in, and I have to sell them three to four pieces that make people unbelievably gorgeous, but not necessarily for an event.” Pretty printed party dresses were this brand’s first claim to fame. Taylor really has made strides broadening her offering in the hopes of creating a non-uniform uniform for busy and style-conscious women like herself.Moodboards and fantastical narratives aren’t part of Taylor’s approach to design, rather everything relates back to her own life and her take on styling. One of the designer’s aims this season was to reframe charcoal gray, a color she associates with her old school uniform and which is prominent in Wall Street-like menswear. She upended convention by pairing nicely tailored smoky pants with a pouf of a polka-dot jacquard top. That motif and shape (which was also used on short dresses) carries the fragrance of the ’80s, a popular touch point this season. Taylor’s main reference was her own work, however. Fall 2023’s fringed skirt was back as a dress (with a matching fringed purse), in part because customers asked for the former, as are a best-selling pair of stone washed jeans from six years ago that are still requested. The sequin-skirts (a different take on polka-dots) and jeweled obi-like treatments of pre-fall were also reimagined. “I feel like I’ve taken this Bandaid off of [the idea that] everything has to be new,” she said. That’s a realization many designers are coming to, and it’s a wise one. Here, it gave the collection a bit of a “piecey” vibe, though it did create a throughline of cohesion with the designer’s larger body of work.Taylor’s take on the ski-sweater, made in angora using multicolored space dyed yarns, was pretty and novel. Working with suede for the first time, she cut it into light forever coats. “To me, this felt like a love letter,” said Taylor of a dress and coat with a hand-embroidered floral that seemed to form a continuous picture. “I kept thinking, ‘where does novelty live?”’ The answer is in unexpected and unfussy details like these.
12 February 2024
Tanya Taylor’s use of orange in her pre-fall collection is like a visual shot of vitamin C for a wardrobe. A sleeveless pleated cotton midi-dress, a paillette-covered slip skirt, and a mini with the same discs applied over a blue-and-white shirting fabric visible at the waist and hem deliver that citrus color pop in venti, grande, and tall proportions, as it were.The designer is reveling in the feedback she’s been getting in her new Madison Avenue shop and also responding to it. “I’ve always wanted to create for real people,” Taylor said in a preview. “Having the store helped me build lanes of how we do denim, how we do playful and magical….” A great example of the former is a sailor-like top with buttoned sleeves reflective of her desire to “make pieces that feel more versatile with the opening of buttons, with tying, with the way you can style things more fun.” Most fanciful is a dress featuring one of Taylor’s own floral designs, with ribbon and fabric streamers cascading down from the shoulders.“No one’s typecasted,” said Taylor when asked what she has observed at the store. This is reflected in a balanced lineup in which there is room for a polished tropical wool pantsuit with a slightly cropped shirt jacket and a more casual-leaning Breton stripe, which is placed horizontally on a tunic dress and cute everyday top. All in all, a collection of relatable pieces that possess that elusive something extra. Once primarily known for her floral dresses, Taylor is growing as a designer.
8 December 2023
Having just opened her first store across the street from the Carlyle on Madison Avenue—a glossy space filled with temptations—Tanya Taylor now has both up- and downtown cred. She also has a spring collection that will work in many different zip codes.Once synonymous with pretty, somewhat ladylike printed dresses—which are, and will always remain, a core product for the brand—Taylor has convincingly evolved and expanded her offering. She arrived at this point by putting in the work: traveling to American cities, visiting stores, helping fit customers, and listening to and acting on their feedback. “I’m obsessed with asking about their lives,” the designer said. What she discovered is that the customer is interested in what she is as well, which is developing “a uniform in a creative way.” This type of uniform has nothing to do with brass buttons, epaulets, or conformity, but it is something that makes the wearer feel good and somehow right for the occasion. There might not be hard and fast rules in fashion today—Glamour’s Dos and Don’ts column is a thing of the past—but many women are still looking for guidance about how to put things together. (Hence, the power of influencers.)Taylor, who for the past few seasons has styled her look books, has started meeting that need by creating one-and-done pieces that look like they are separates. A great example of this for spring was a sleeveless striped knit (oriented on a slant) with an attached pleated skirt. Layering is another of the designer’s tricks; for spring she offered many lovely variations on the corset top. There were tube-shaped ones in denim (natural and indigo) that she showed over a print. There was a zip-front number that flared a bit at the hips; more extravagant were the beaded corselets (with and without straps) that could be hooked entirely or partially closed. As Taylor explained that she had incorporated impressions brought back from an art-filled trip to Japan, this viewer couldn’t help but read the lilac corselet in the first look as a relative of an obi.Refreshingly, the designer wasn’t literal with her inspirations. Everything “had an element of surprise in Japan,” she noted, “which brought out more of that in me. I spent a lot of time this season thinking about unexpected layering, but also how to bring out some embroideries and some details and some three-dimensionality in what we are creating, and then for color, just how to really keep it fresh and surprising and bright.
” This far-flung journey seems to have brought the designer, who wear tests her work, in even closer touch with her collection, and the customer is sure to sense that.
7 September 2023
How does your garden grow? It’s a question that is always relevant at Tanya Taylor; florals, many drawn or painted by the designer herself, are the heart and soul of this brand. For resort, there are woven jacquards with overblown flowers in what the brand calls “peony pink with brandy” and black and white and knit jacquard blooms on tank dresses with a compression-like fit. A black sweater boasts petals at the cuff. The idea, Taylor said, was that the sleeves should “feel like they’re dipped in a flower.”This dreamy idea has been translated into a piece that works in an everyday wardrobe. “I’ve been thinking, What is our uniform? Because our uniforms aren’t basic, right?” the designer mused. Her answer is a button-down with patchwork sleeves paired with a pleated skirt in a bright floral watercolor print, which combines workaday elements with romantic femininity. A washed-denim dress with a built-in bra-like detail does much the same, via a different route.Much of the collection iterated on familiar silhouettes—a classic trench was updated with gingham details, while openwork details embellished utilitarian khaki—but the takeaway here was the idea of building a uniform that’s anything but basic.
7 June 2023
Tanya Taylor has often translated her artwork into prints for her pretty dresses, but the expressiveness and the hand of her paintings seemed to exist only on canvas. Over the past few seasons the designer appears to have loosened up, and approached her collections with a freer hand. Fall’s collection was one of her most joyous and expansive yet; it should appeal to existing customers and attract new ones.Those pretty dresses haven’t gone anywhere. In addition to the season’s floral print there were hand-drawn stripes with a perfect imperfection. If a flamenco skirt were a sleeve, that would describe those on a fantastic over-printed lamé number that flashed gold. Monochrome dresses, some in what Taylor called a magic stretch scuba material, had twists and ties that shaped the silhouette. “I kept thinking about how my designs speak to a lot of different people,” said Taylor, who is serious about inclusive sizing.Though dresses are the brand signature, they had competition from wonderful knits (some in a cheery chartreuse) fluttering with feathers that would add a touch of luxury to any wardrobe. Also on the move was fringe. A skirt made from sparkling strands of the stuff was paired with a teddy-soft sweater. “I was obsessed with styling, thinking about how to make things feel like they’re cozy, but also with a sense of surprise,” Taylor said on a walkthrough. One unexpected touch is that the plaid on the skirt with a knit corselet was printed, which kept things light. In contrast, the checked mohair coat had a rich hand, as did an oversized herringbone coat.Speaking of her blazers with silver-thread fringe hanging from the lapel, the designer said, “I wanted to make sure they had a little bit of spontaneity to them, or that they felt like there was something delightful.” It’s an approach that she employed throughout the collection, on pieces like a twisted yarn sweater with fringe or a Poiret rose-patterned metallic evening coat with a warm golden glow.
9 February 2023
It would be going too far to say that pre-season collections are sequels to the main season ones, but generally speaking, they lean heavily toward the continuation and building upon existing ideas, while adding a bit of something new. Such was the case at Tanya Taylor. She knows that it just makes sense for her customer, who comes to her because they know they’ll find pretty printed or knitted dresses, no matter their size. (Kudos to the designer for her focus on inclusivity.)Some of the curvy shapes of last season’s separates were streamlined for resort; see a black-edged floral organza bralette top and skirt. There were innovations in knitwear, too: ripple edges added a feminine touch, and the designer worked on the idea of “almost replacing smocking with knitwear.” She continued, “It’s interesting thinking of how we can have these really detailed ribs that give that femininity and flutter, and still fit the body in a way that women are really wanting right now.”Stretch fabrics used alone, as in a comfortable but body-supporting scuba-crepe draped dress, or in combination with a woven, contributed to creating an easy-breezy resort feeling. Ditto the polka dots and the signature florals. A painter, Taylor creates her own patterns, and this season she experimented with digital drawing after taking a CFDA-offered course. “I went to Washington Square Park and started making all the prints and I felt like I was a student again,” she explained. “There’s something kind of fresh about thinking of two colors coming together in really vibrant ways, like cinnamon and turquoise. It felt a little more like abstract flowers, less detailed—I really wanted it to just be about color.”Taylor achieved that goal in the color blocked dress that closes the lookbook, a blue and pink column sliced asymmetrically with some float in the skirt. It’s unusual, but welcome, to see such clean, graphic lines from the designer, which perhaps we’ll see more of. “I started a new process for fall for how to think about color and outfits,” Taylor explained. “On my iPad, I just start to put three colors in strokes and say, ‘Okay, this is going to be our coat, this is going to be our pant,’ pre-styling things through a color lens.”
17 November 2022
Westbeth Artists Housing, a creative enclave in the West Village, served not only as the setting of Tanya Taylor’s spring look book but also as the inspiration for the collection in a multitude of ways. She translated the “graphicness” of the brick and concrete architecture, for example, into airy half-circle cutouts on a skirt, but the overall direction of the lineup came from the residents. “It’s inspiring how the people just are; there’s a freedom to what they’re creating,” said Taylor, a painter herself. Their “sense of spontaneous art felt like a place I wanted to start the collection.” And so the designer set about creating prints that conjured, in her words, “a beautiful mess.”There’s always been a dichotomy in Taylor’s work between her expressionistic art and the more traditionally feminine silhouettes she tends to design, and which customers who want to look pretty and appropriate have come to rely upon. Yet just as Westbeth feels like a city within a city, a sort of free space for Taylor, there are hints in her collection—and its styling—of things loosening up a bit and going off in positive new directions. That can be seen in the way some of the looks are constructed. “I love structure and fluid coming together,” enthused the designer, who showed several looks that combined knit and woven elements in a single garment. The layering of colors and separates seems to mimic how paint and shapes overlap and interact on canvas, and allows the wearer to make her own creations.Taylor was especially interested in a mix of textures for spring, and her fabrics included a light scuba crepe, nylon, and hammered silk. An eyelash bouclé was used for a polo-style cardigan that was paired with a leopard-print skirt, both in shades of softest green. It’s Taylor’s eye for color that evokes emotion in this collection. An open cable-knit sweater has yellow cuffs, as if dipped in paint, that match the pants its worn with. There’s a longline rib-knit merino dress with bra-like details and fullness at the hem in a deep persimmon-y hue. Elsewhere, the neutrality of khaki is alleviated with a poppy mandarin-orange top. Layering not only emphasized color, but in the case of a printed skirt paired with a striped sweater and a knit bra top, it revealed a welcome sense of playfulness. The world needs reasons to smile.
9 September 2022