Tyler McGillivary just wants to have fun. But there’s an underlying movement she’s also partaking in: dressing women with no limitations. Whether it's redefining narratives thrust upon them or thinking about real size diversity in this current era of fashion, fun may be the goal, but refreshing is the domino effect.
Tyler McGillivary first launched in 2019 to spread joy, spark awe, and redefine what it means to get dressed. Now, the brand's spring-summer 2026 collection, Mermaiden, dives headfirst into the “sparking, mysterious world of the sea siren." Reimagination is a massive part of McGillivary’s latest collection — but more than anything, it’s about ensuring every person who rocks her brand feels “f*cking hot.”
Post-show, we caught up with the 30-year-old designer backstage to discuss her inspirations, diversity on the runway, and what it means to feel good in her clothes.
Tyler McGillivary: That was the hope, that every woman here who was a teenager in the 2000s or the late '90s or whatever, understands Aquamarine. We were so excited she said yes.
TM: I think a lot of our work focuses on the idea of nostalgia. I wanted to push that to a degree this season where it wasn't only nostalgic, but it went into this idea of shared folklore and shared mythology. The idea of a mermaid appears in a lot of different cultures across different parts of the planet and different centuries. And what I love about it is it's this sort of consistent representation of a woman. And what I also like about it is that often it's identified as a temptress. So it has this sort of interesting, almost like a negative connotation, but that ultimately comes back around to being really powerful and woman-forward. And so I think I started with that, I really want to dig into the public domain, really dig into different representations of mermaids over time.
And a lot of the prints are from that. A lot of the prints in the collection are from Hans Christian Andersen's old Little Mermaid illustrations from the original book. And then around that, we built out the idea of what it would be like if you had a mermaid enter New York City now, like the Aquamarine of today living in New York. That's where the denim came in, and a lot of those influences. At the end of the day, we just used a lot of those traditional sort of Coney Island type elements of glitter, and all of those things. I'm really happy with how it came out
TM: I think that's sort of the core of the brand, always. I feel like everybody I work with, our sort of connective tissue of the team, is that we want to have fun and be playful. And to me, there's no point in designing if that isn't at the ethos and at the center of it, because we're all trying to have fun getting dressed. That's my main idea and what we're doing. With this collection, like others, I always try to find this balance between having that playful element, but also making you feel f*cking hot and sexy, and really dressing women's bodies and dressing all different bodies. I think that is always the fun of these shows, is that you get to see all these different pieces on all these different bodies and all these beautiful women, and it has that kind of balance of being like, yeah, that's fun and it's beautiful and colorful, but also she looks f*cking hot.
TM: This was an interesting season because I hired a new designer, Dylan Reisner, who is amazing. And I find that I am somebody who's just drawn consistently and overwhelmingly to print, color, fun. And I wanted somebody to come in and give an eye to the idea of what if we focus on sort of different silhouettes and added a simpler color. I feel like it really elevated the collection and made me excited to design in a different way. I feel like I focused so much on collaboration with my work and across the board with my creative director and with everybody on the team, it's such an effort of balancing what we all want and what actually works for us.
TM: Yes, definitely. Our stylist, Sarah Brown, did an incredible job of adding different hats and all these different elements to it. I think the bags were something that were really fun to make because we bought all the shells and the blowfish one from this shell shop in Provincetown, Cape Cod. And I'd been there a few times, and I have the bumper sticker on my car. But Dylan was there this summer, and I was like, “You have to get shells. We have to make accessories from them.” Because I think that's a huge part of the brand too, is just highlighting these strange artistic communities and different collectible things from different places and bringing them into the brand and finding a new context for them.
TM: It's the most important thing. Women have different bodies. Nobody's body is the same. And when you boil it down to feeling like you should have the same body, that's not interesting. And it's not what being a designer is about. I think that anybody can dress somebody who is literally a toothpick, which is again, that's a body that's beautiful as well. But all to say it is an exciting element of design to work with different bodies because clothes are meant to be worn. They're not meant to just be on a hanger. It's super important and it makes me really sad to see, I think — especially in the last year — a drop in diversity on the runway. We will never do that. I don't want to. I think it's really weird and sad to see.
