Margarita Mermaid Makes Swimsuits For Hopeless Romantics
It may still be February, but wth Spring Break right around the corner, it’s never too early to start thinking about swimsuit season.
Enter Mexican designer Margarita Mermaid, who teamed up with dreamy photographer Hana Haley to promote her mermaid-inspired swimsuits with an editorial and a new short film, “She Comes With the Tide.”
The movie is part The Little Mermaid, part The Virgin Suicides, telling the story of what happens when a sailor boy meets a mysterious girl in the water.
They quickly fall in love on land, but will it be enough to keep this mermaid landlocked, or will she say, see you later boy and high tail it back to the sea?
You’ll have to watch the video to find out, and in the process, we guarantee you’ll fall under the spell of the Margarita Mermaid’s swimsuits.
Tell us a little about your movie.
To present our Spring collection we went extra and made an actual mini movie titled “She Comes With The Tide”. It’s a story about a lone sailor who sees a mermaid in the sea and invites her up to his boat. He teaches her about life on the boat and shows her the wonders of the jungle while they fall in love. She struggles between her new life on land and her longing for her ocean home.
Why’d you decide to go that route to show off your collection?
I really love designing swimwear but sometimes the swim industry can feel superficial and ephemeral. Making a film for a collection shows all of the inspiration that’s really behind it and will be something to look back on and still appreciate when the clothes are gone.
How’d you get into designing clothes in the first place?
I was majoring in humanities at college. Just impulsively I decided to switch to fashion design and I moved to San Francisco to go to FIDM and didn’t look back. I thought that having a fashion line was a way of telling a story that people could bring to their own lives and if they liked the character they could pretend they were her by wearing her wardrobe.
What’s been your favorite part of the process so far?
Aside from the actual process of designing it’s been meeting people like Hana Haley and bringing our vision to reality together with photo shoots and short films. I love looking back at the photos I did 5 years ago compared to what we do now and seeing the progress and change.
What are the three things everyone should know about this fashion film?
1. The stars of the film, Emma and Daniel, are a couple in real life. We wrote their characters before we met them in person and when we told them about who they were going to play they were laughing because that was exactly their real life personalities. They have been the most fun people to work with.
2. We had a pretty low budget for it and all of the locations were thanks to people from my hometown where we shot the film (Cancun, Mexico). The boat is a small scale copy of Christopher Columbus’ “The Niña” and the jungle is actually the backyard of a family that does bird rescue. The locals of Cancun have very dreamy and surreal lives.
3. We like to think that the story goes on beyond the ending. If it was a longer movie perhaps our ending would just be the middle.
What’s the biggest misconception about being a fashion designer?
That it’s mostly about designing. If you have your own line you’ll spend most of your time solving problems with production, fulfillment and sales. It’s not easy to start or to maintain!
Have there been any times when you doubted or had second thoughts about being a designer and how’d you overcome that?
Yes, after I had worked on the line for a few years but still hadn’t broken into the industry. I got over it from people talking some sense into me. Someone once told me that having my line was the only constant thing in my life for the past 5 years and it wouldn’t make sense to give it up. That hit me for some reason. I don’t think I would have quit though, I love it too much. My doubts mostly disappeared when I moved to New York. It was the right city for me and things started falling into place as soon as I moved.
What’s the biggest thing you hope people take away from seeing this film?
That when they see the suits we design they’ll also see a story behind it. Swimwear many times represents a vacation from daily life, I’d like my line to represent a vacation from this world into a dreamy world where Mermaids and sailors fall in love. I also think it would be cool if more designers teamed up with artists like Hana to bring more art to the fashion world by advertising with it.
She Comes With The Tide from Hana Haley on Vimeo.
