BEACH TO STREET
Sisters’ Letarte swimwear and cover-ups blend surf with sensuous
Boldly sensuous yet delicately feminine, with just enough of an edge to send it soaring above the pack, Letarte swimwear and clothing manages to strike a balance between surf and resort, a style cofounder and CEO Michele Letarte dubs “beach to street.”
That knack has led Letarte’s sweet and steamy print bikinis, crocheted creations, boho-chic poolside garb and cashmere coverups to adorn celebs ranging from Beyoncé to Cameron Diaz. They’ve also appeared on supermodels in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for more than a decade, including Heidi Klum in the 2014 edition and Kate Upton on the cover in 2013.
So it fits — like a sexy, skintight Letarte rash guard — that the Maui line was born with an uncanny sense of balance, caught between the wind and the waves, thanks to an impulsive decision by designer and co-founder Lisa Letarte Cabrinha, Michele’s sister. The then-sports model decided to drop everything on the way back from a catalog shoot in Japan’s Tateyama Mountains in the ’90s, flying to Maui with just a phone number of a friend’s brother and a fierce desire to windsurf.
“I’ve always been an adventurer,” a lighthearted Cabrinha says from Haiku, Maui. “I pretty much got hooked on windsurfing on Maui. It was so fun and so invigorating — the feeling of freedom and being in the water.”
The euphoria led her not only to meet and marry champion windsurfer, artist and entrepreneur Peter Cabrinha but also to start consulting on swimwear design. “You learn a lot,” she says, “when you wear the things and put them through the tests in the waves of Hawaii.”
Wanting to design her own swimwear, Cabrinha then turned to her sister, Michele Letarte, whose entrepreneurial zeal had her running her own business of hand-knit ski caps at age 12 and eventually led to a garment-industry career. The sample line they built for a trade show about 15 years ago has since led to eight freestanding stores, including the Maui flagship in Paia and boutiques in Newport Beach (Orange County) and Malibu (Los Angeles County), where paparazzifavored celebrities gravitate toward Letarte bikinis and cover-ups.
Michele is the “one who drives the train,” says Cabrinha. Based on the East Coast, where both sisters grew up, she’s ideally positioned to oversee Letarte’s financial side and New York-centered production, for which the company was inducted in 2012 into the Made in USA Hall of Fame. Cabrinha, meanwhile, hews to her island spirit and finds inspiration in items as unexpected as flea market trinkets for prints that might spin off vintage Hawaiian florals or tough-girl skull motifs.
“In the end, there’s no one I would ever trust more than Lisa,” says Michele Letarte. “She’s the lifestyle of the beach, and I have the lifestyle of the mountains and city. It’s the perfect blend.”
The response to the collections backs her up. “Anything that shows up on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is pretty exciting,” says Shelley Kekuna, executive director of the Kaanapali Beach Resort Association. “I think it was exciting for us, on Maui, to have one of our own, one of our local small businesses, be acknowledged.”
“The Maui mystique of the brand really transcends everything,” Michele Letarte says. “When you say the word ‘Maui,’ it brings up a vision and a feeling.”