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CFDA: Published by Rizzoli recently, “I Care a Lotta, I Wear Collina Strada” is an archival collage of the art of conscious fashion. The book chronicles more than a decade of collaboration between Collina Strada founder Hillary Taymour and art director Charlie Engman, and provides a vivid blender of mind-opening color, fashion activism, and design advocacy.
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Collina Strada’s mission itself is an odyssey – “a platform for climate and social awareness, change, and self-expression,” sometimes dressed in upcycled upholstery and printed deadstock. Poetry by writer, curator, and Collina model Kimberly Drew sets the stage: “Collina is a cloth and a dream. An invitation to our tiniest selves to come play. A reminder that there is only one planet. A reminder to love our mother. To compost with care.”
The book features contributing words by Rachel Tashjian, and includes Taymour’s Sustainability Cheatsheet, an Upcycling With The Or Foundation booklet, Collina Trading Cards & Don’t Eat My Friends special inserts, and a cameo with Powwie Hillary’s Pomeranian muse.
There’s also a timeline mapping the story of Collina Strada, which began circa 2008 when Taymour founded the brand while living in Los Angeles. Shortly after moving to NYC in 2010, she and photographer Charlie Engman met via a Craigslist posting. In 2017, Collina Strada grew to a fully vegan brand and presented its first runway show, instantly an editorial favorite.
By 2019, Taymour, known as a perennial harbinger of consciously cool, was selected as a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist. Taymour and Engman’s symbiotic visions were further cultivated through collaborating on the Resort MMXX “Radical Transparency” collection and The Collinas launched in 2022 on YouTube by CashApp.
“I Care A Lotta, I Wear Collina Strada” is as much a collection archive as it is a souvenir of Taymour’s ethos that sustainability is a journey of incremental change. Turning each page is a wander through Collina’s idea garden – a dizzyingly bucolic world where enchanting broccoli mixes with crystal. Digging beneath the splendor of each collection, in the details of Collina Strada’s maximalist universe, are cleverly dressed messages to be harvested. Engman’s images are seeded with conscious mantras like “Accessibility is Utopia.”
Almost everything Collina Strada produces is made locally in NYC from deadstock and circular materials like Rose Sylk, an organic cellulose fiber made from rose bushes and stem waste.
At the center of every Collina Strada presentation is something to be learned from show locations, and, increasingly, a call to action. In 2021, as part of Gucci Fest, Collina Strada launched the “Collina Land” 5-game series taking players on a climate change combat adventure. The immersive experience aligns with the book’s theme of fashion as an interactive, educational journey. At her Spring-Summer 2022 “Snail’s Pace” presentation at Brooklyn Grange – NYC’s largest rooftop farm – guests were given a “More Lawns Should Look Like This” letter template to advocate for green infrastructure and more green roofs. Spring-Summer’s “Got Milkweed?” immersed attendees into Brooklyn Greenway’s Naval Cemetery Landscape, which is now a milkweed haven for monarch butterfly caterpillars and other biodiversity friendly pollinators.
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Follow author, Collina Strada Founder and CFDA member Hillary Taymour, Art Director Charlie Engman and Powwie the Muse onto a creative caravan of a decade+ Collina collaboration in “I Care a Lotta, I Wear Collina Strada.”
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