If you’re a fan of Hillary Taymour’s Collina Strada then it’s safe to say that you are a fan of Charlie Engman, the artist and photographer who is Taymour’s stalwart collaborator. The pair’s latest project is I Care A Lotta, I Wear Collina Strada, a monograph published by Rizzoli that brings together a decade of the New York label’s history in their signature maximalist aesthetic. “This book almost killed me, just to be transparent,” Engman said over a recent Zoom with Taymour sitting by his side. She added, “but it’s so good! I just pushed Charlie so much—it needed to be crazier.”
The book combines straightforward fashion history, detailing each and every Collina Strada collection via runway images and snippets detailing their inspiration with iconic moments in the brand’s history. You’ll see Kim Petras in full horse mode at the Met Gala on page 171—and Kim Petras brushing her teeth before the Met Gala on the page preceding it—along with frenetic collages of Engman’s kaleidoscopic prints for the label, and of course, pop-up appearances by Taymour’s famous dog Pow.
Ahead of the book’s release on October 3—and Taymour’s New York Fashion Week show on September 8—we brought the dynamic duo together to talk about their shared creative histories. The conversation below has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Let’s start at the beginning, how did you two meet?
Hillary Taymour: We met on Craigslist. I had done one or two seasons of my bag line and Charlie was my intern. He wanted to learn how to make patterns and I still have never taught him.
Charlie Engman: Yeah, I moved to New York and I was like, I want to build some skills, so let me try to see if I can find some way to meet people and maybe make some money or figure something out.
HT: Charlie was like, ‘oh, this is my work,’ and he had these really weird college selfie mirror nudes, all random body contortions. I was like, ‘Why don’t you take pictures of fashion things?’ So I was the first fashion-thing photo Charlie ever took. We did a lookbook and we were in Las Vegas for a tradeshow and Urban Outfitters was like, ‘who took these photos?’ and then they sent him to Iceland the next week to do the Urban Outfitters catalog.
CE: Yeah. This was when they had these really fun catalogs where they would send people to various fun destinations and do these sort of friends-hanging-out-in-cool-clothes kind of catalogs. I did a bunch of those and that was sort of the start of my commercial career as a fashion visual person.
So how did the idea for the book come about?
HT: I had lunch with Jefferson Hack, and he said, ‘Here’s Charles [Miers, the Rizzoli publisher], you should do a book.’
Did you know right away you were going to do a chronological history of Collina Strada?
CE: I think for a while we thought we should mix everything up. We’re maximalists obviously, and we love to be messy in a very specific type of joyful way, so at first we thought it would be just that: an explosion of randomness—this is everything. But then we realized that it was a really nice opportunity—just like we had during the pandemic—to give people another way to understand the foundations of what we’re trying to communicate with the brand, and the mechanics of how it works and also see the growth of it. So I thought it made the most sense to just do it in a very linear, chronological way, and then within that, be messy and complex. Also we thought that people would probably have a nonlinear relationship to the book where you just kind of scroll through it and whatever catches your eye, you stop there and then maybe you go back a few pages to understand what you’re seeing or you go forward if it compels you to see what’s next. I wanted a book that anytime you opened it, it would give you something juicy.
HT: Chaotic. But I feel like that’s kind of the brand too. Very chaotic, but scheduled on the calendar.
CE: Exactly.
HT: We’re business-serious but chaos-forward.
It’s interesting that you brought up the pandemic, because looking through the book I was reminded of how much the images and the way you presented the brand throughout those years felt so exactly you.
HT: When the pandemic happened, I was walking to work every day from Williamsburg to Chinatown and making masks in my studio. Charlie lives in Bed-Stuy and he rides his bike everywhere, so he would bike to the studio, and we would make stuff together, and then he’d walk me home every night. And that’s how we came up with all the things that we did during the pandemic.
CE: When the pandemic happened, the rest of my work really shut down. I had to furlough all of my studio assistants, the photo shoots I was doing on the commercial side weren’t happening, and so I had a lot of extra time and energy to give to this. It also just felt more necessary, it felt like a ‘thing,’ the ethos that we were already building [into the brand], the thinking about your position in society and culture in the world, and of trying to make the way you express yourself through clothing, kind of match and be in tune with that—that was the conversation that was happening. So it just made a lot of sense for us to work together in a kind of concentrated way, and I think that was really an opportunity for us to also be like, ‘okay, this is the universe that we re trying to build and this is how we want to invite you into it, and these are the mechanisms of it’.
What was the moment you two realized that you were kindred creative spirits?
HT: I think we’ve always known that.
CE: Yeah, I think it was from the beginning.
HT: There’s a level of trust we both have and a level of simultaneous fiery passion of hatred and love (laughs). But we know each other, all our faults and stuff, so we can really navigate the the environment together; because we know where we will either fuck up or succeed.
CE: There’s a level of transparency that we have—that’s why our first collection that we officially worked on together was called Radical Transparency, because we recognized that that’s an important mechanism to make things work and it motivates our ability to collaborate and work together.
Did the process of putting together the book give you a new perspective on things you want to work on in the future?
HT: For me, yeah, I’m always trying to push myself with the clothes and go as crazy and deep into design as I can possibly go within our limitations of supply and all those things. But putting together the book also proved that we worked really hard for 10 years.
CE: Yeah, we did a lot. It was really nice to reflect on what kind of energy was well-spent, and what kind of energy spent didn’t make the cut for the book. For example, now we have a lot of collaborators on the runway shows, whereas before we were doing everything just the two of us. And now, we’re able to share a little bit of our creative expression in ways that are more effective and useful and make more sense for us; and that really helps us focus on what our specific strengths are. Part of being a maximalist is recognizing that we’re kind of good at everything (laughs), but at some point ‘kind of good’ isn’t good enough.
HT: Ok, before we finish, should we do our book fortune for the day? Like when you open a book to a random place and the second paragraph is like a fortune?
Let’s do it.
HT: [Opens book to a random page] This is the spread from spring 2022, where all of the people walked with their family members.
CE: Interesting! She pulled the family card. That was the first show we had after the pandemic where we could all actually be physically together.
HT: Okay, what’s yours?
Interesting! Seeing Eyes. Lots of horses.
CE: This is a good spread! It’s still images from our spring 2021 video.
This feels good, I feel like this does reflect my current brain actually.
CE: I’m going to do mine. [Opens book.] Mine’s just squiggly flowers.
HT: But you made that.
CE: I just came out of five days in the woods where I put my phone away and nobody had access to me, and this is what my brain is looking like right now.
I would like to do that.
HT: It was really hard for me because Charlie and I talk pretty much every morning and every night. So I was like, ‘So what do I do when you’re doing this? What am I supposed to be doing?’
