The ‘Real Housewives’ of the sustainable fashion industry
NEW YORK — The eye doesn’t always know where to settle.
On the purple-and-orange wicker purse in the shape of a frog? On the rhinestone horns stuck to the tops of lime-green sneakers? On the protruding, heart-shaped hips of a pink velvet gown, formed by old-fashioned side hoops?
Visiting the set of a Collina Strada shoot is not unlike being greeted by a delegation from another planet. The models, in their layers of mismatched candy-colored clothing, are a new species, bred from Goth mall rats and granola girls. They don’t strut and pose. They frolic and stomp.
On this Monday in February, they have been plucked from their grungy fantasyland and dropped into a rented film studio in South Brooklyn. Here, the brand is working on a project bridging our world and theirs: a parody of the mid-2000s reality show “The Hills” (Collina translates to “hill” in Italian) with some “Real Housewives” energy.
“The Collinas,” which debuted recently at New York Fashion Week, is not the company’s first fashion film. In September 2020, when the pandemic forced labels to swap their runway shows for online presentations, it released a video titled “Change Is Cute.”
This season, Collina Strada decided to continue its world-building through video. (After “Change Is Cute” came Collina Land, a video game funded by Gucci as part of its platform for emerging designers, and “Collina-mals,” a project that enlisted David Mattingly, the artist behind the science fantasy series
“Animorphs.”) The difference this time is that the film is scripted.
Hillary Taymour, the 34-year-old founder and creative director of Collina Strada, said she wanted to make a “pure fashion comedy.”
Although she founded Collina Strada in 2009, the brand’s visual identity didn’t crystallize until about 2019, she said. That was the year she was named a finalist for the CFDA/ Vogue Fashion Fund, a prestigious award for emerging American designers.
Just as the first episode of “The Hills” revolves around its star, Lauren Conrad, embarking on a fashion internship, “The Collinas” tells the story of a new intern starting at Collina Strada. That intern is played by Tommy Dorfman, whom Taymour had in mind when she wrote the script. Dorfman is an actor and filmmaker who, last September, became a front-row fixture and guest of honor at runway shows and parties. In a process she likened to dating fashion designers, Dorfman was experimenting with clothes after clarifying her identity as a trans woman.In the original script for “The Collinas,” Dorfman’s character charges naïvely into the
New York fashion world, showing little interest in actual work. Her reaction, in an early version of the script, to getting the job: “Sustainability is so hot!” The other employees of Collina Strada are snobbish, judging her, for example, for not toting her own crystal-encrusted refillable water bottle (a real product made by the brand).
The joke seems to be on any fashion brand that considers itself sustainable, including Collina Strada, which takes the position that there actually is no such thing.
“If you can’t make fun of yourself, who can make fun of ?” Taymour said on the phone a few days after filming. “Fashion takes itself so seriously. Like, ‘I used 50% less water in this one garment, this one time.’ Come on, guys. We can care about things and do our part, but no fashion brand is saving the world. I don’t care what they say in the press. They’re not.”
This season some new cargo pants were dyed using sprinkles. While she was dyeing them, “sitting in the studio, heating sprinkles up with a hair dryer,” Taymour realized, she said, “I’m, like, actually a psychopath right now.
“It looks cool,” she said. “But how do you scale hot sprinkles?”