Vacation
Vacation
Poolside Dressing, Head To Toe
One-pieces, sarongs, slides and sun care, priced from $40 to $425. What actually works between the lounger and lunch.
The Slip Dress Never Actually Left, It Just Changed Fabric
A slip dress started as literal underwear before nineties minimalists pulled it into eveningwear, and the bias-cut silhouette has been quietly present ever since. What changes between eras is the fabric, from cool satin to cotton and linen versions built for daytime. This roundup covers eight takes on the slip dress, from FARM Rio's printed cotton to Theory's structured satin.
Lido
Lido makes swimwear that treats the beach as a place for design, not just exposure. Founded by Daria Stankiewicz in Venice, the independent label takes its name from the lagoon island and produces its pieces in Northern Italy with Italian artisans. The shapes are clean, the color is deliberate, and the clothes look as good moving through a city as they do near the water.
Miguelina
Miguelina Gambaccini launched her namesake resortwear label after struggling to pack for her honeymoon. The brand grew from a cheesecloth experiment into a travel wardrobe of lace dresses, cover-ups and pieces meant to move from beach to dinner. Its best idea is still the original one: fewer clothes, more destinations.
Sara Cristina
Sara Cristina approaches beachwear as a complete language, from the first swim to the last drink after sunset. Founded on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast in 2015 by siblings Sara Cristina Villasmil and David De Lima, the brand pairs clean silhouettes with the color and craft of its coastal upbringing. Bikinis, kaftans and après-swim pieces are designed to move together without looking like a uniform.
Emporio Sirenuse
Emporio Sirenuse began in 1993 as the boutique expression of the Sersale family’s Le Sirenuse Hotel in Positano. Carla Sersale built the label around the colours and layered cultural references of the Amalfi Coast, later joined by designer Viola Parrocchetti. The clothes are made for warm air, long lunches and the particular confidence that comes from dressing like the holiday has already started.
lemlem
lemlem brings the easy rhythm of Ethiopian handweaving into modern resort clothes, with striped cotton, gauze and linen doing most of the talking. Liya Kebede founded the label in 2007 after seeing traditional weaving communities in Ethiopia lose work, and built the business around creating jobs for local artisans. The clothes are bright without being loud, made for sun, movement and a suitcase that can stay open.
Ay Que Calor
Ay Que Calor is a Colombian resortwear label designed by Maygel Coronel, who was born in Cartagena in 1987 and studied fashion in Bogotá, Cartagena and at the Accademia della Moda in Naples. It sits alongside her eponymous label and the pieces are handmade locally in Colombia.
Meridian Swimwear
Sisters Jordan LaGuardia and Terese Ostendorf LaGuardia launched Meridian Swimwear out of Brooklyn in 2022, bringing backgrounds in art direction and luxury womenswear design, including Terese's work at the label LESET, to a category they felt was missing their own point of view. The brand describes its look as relaxed minimalism crossed with retro nostalgia, filtered through the New York City sensibility where both sisters started their fashion careers.
JUILLET SWIMWEAR
Juillet Swimwear was co-founded by Whitney Wilkerson and Lindsay Rae Hofmann in Los Angeles in September 2017, after Hofmann's earlier work in brand consulting and celebrity dressing. The label has stayed narrow on purpose, contemporary swimwear cut with the kind of finishing usually reserved for eveningwear, which is presumably why it turns up on January Jones, Hailey Bieber and Bella Hadid rather than only in beach photos.
Matteau
Sisters Ilona Hamer and Peta Heinsen launched Matteau in Australia in 2015, after Hamer, then a Vogue Australia editor, complained she could not find a simple, unembellished black bikini and realized the gap was the business. The label started with a tightly edited swim range built as mix-and-match separates
Sea
Sean Monahan and Monica Paolini, childhood friends from Newburgh, New York, founded Sea in New York City in 2007, running the label out of a converted Canal Street factory that doubled as their apartment before it was ever a real office. Paolini brought design-director experience from Betsey Johnson and Jill Stuart, and that push-pull between her vintage-leaning eye and Monahan's cleaner, more modern instincts is still the label's defining dynamic.
SIR.
Nikki Campbell and Sophie Coote, two 24-year-old housemates in Bondi, started the label in 2014, launching an Instagram-only linen capsule that reportedly sold out within hours. The name is shorthand for separates, intimates and ready-to-wear, and the label has stuck to that trans-seasonal, resort-minded premise while growing from a digital-only project into wholesale stockists like Barneys, Harrods and Matches.
ROAME
Roame ounded by Hollie Sweet out of Melbourne, built around what its own brand copy calls a shared passion for travel and exploration.
Pucci
Emilio Pucci, a Florentine aristocrat, founded his namesake house in 1947 after a photograph of his own streamlined ski outfit reached Harper's Bazaar and got him commissioned to design for the magazine. He opened his first boutique on Capri around 1949 and built the label on lightweight silk jersey and swirling geometric prints that made him a fixture of 1960s jet-set style.
Tropic of C
Candice Swanepoel, a longtime Victoria's Secret Angel, launched Tropic of C in February 2018 with co-founder Daniela Manfredi, a former Victoria's Secret creative director, while on a break from modeling during her first pregnancy. The label built its name on the signature one-piece known as The C, cut from recycled and regenerated nylon and positioned as a sustainability-minded swim brand from its first collection onward.
La Porte
Johanna Davenport Calica started La Porte out of Chicago in the late 2010s, naming it for the French word for door as a nod to opening up who gets to define resort dressing. The label reworks swimwear as fluid, ready-to-wear-style pieces rather than treating it as a separate, lesser category, and it took her four rejected applications before her collection finally showed at Miami's Cabana trade show in 2023.
Onia
Carl Cunow and Nathan Romano, two native New Yorkers who met in high school, launched Onia in 2009 with just two styles of men's swim shorts made in New York. Barneys discovered the brand early, and Onia grew from a two-man swim operation into men's and women's resort wear built around fit and fabrication rather than the loudest print in the room
Éterne
Chloé Bartoli, a celebrity stylist who started as a boutique buyer at eighteen, founded Éterne with her partner Adam Bernhard in Los Angeles, launching the label in August 2020. The name, suggested by Bartoli's mother, means eternal, and the brand has stuck to that brief since, seasonless basics, ribbed tanks and baby tees built from proprietary fabrics the founders developed themselves.
Johanna Ortiz
Johanna Ortiz launched her namesake label in Cali, Colombia in 2003, starting with a small resort and swimwear collection before building it into a full ready-to-wear house. The brand still produces more than ninety percent of its pieces in-house in Cali, and its 2014 Moda Operandi debut is what first carried the ruffled, tropical-print silhouette out of Colombia and onto the global stage.
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Agua by Agua Bendita
Agua Bendita began in 2003 when Catalina Álvarez and Mariana Hinestroza, then fashion students in Medellín, started making swimsuits out of factory scraps on Álvarez's grandmother's sewing machine. In 2018 they launched Agua by Agua Bendita, the ready-to-wear line built around hand embroidery and crochet.
Baobab
Baobab began in Bogotá around 2015, when law student Isabella Espinosa started sewing bikinis from leftover fabric scraps between classes. The label's whole identity grew out of that scrappiness: asymmetrical cuts, bold color, and a packaging gimmick, the coconut-shell 'Coco Bag,' that turned beach waste into the thing people actually remembered.
Left On Friday
Laura Low Ah Kee and Shannon Savage, both longtime Lululemon product executives, launched Left On Friday out of Victoria, Canada and Venice, California in May 2018 after a hot-tub conversation about the lack of swimwear built to actually move in. They developed a proprietary Italian fabric, later expanding from swim into wider activewear, and went on to design uniforms for Canada's national beach volleyball team at the 2024 Paris Olympics.