Illustration of Tanya Taylor celebrating her New York storeIllustration by Lauren Tamaki
I grew up an only child in Toronto, but I never felt alone. I found companionship in my imagination and the creativity that was encouraged in my family. Our home was infused with art and crafts including Buddhist spirit houses, silk tapestries and beaded dolls from destinations such as Sierra Leone, Thailand and India, where my parents lived while they worked for the Red Cross. The stories of the world they experienced always made me feel like my universe was vast. It fostered a curiosity to explore people and places.
From a young age, I communicated best through creating. I painted 1960s-style life-sized models on our basement walls so that I could feel like the room was full of friends to dance with. When I was older, I made my first boyfriend a collage of our dream life including a poem where I cut letters out of rose petals to profess my love. (He was scared, I was inspired.) I bonded with my mother through papier-mâché projects and my father through dance.
Despite all of these artistic sparks, I studied finance at McGill University in Montreal. I loved business and wanted to live in a culturally inspiring city to find myself. Needless to say, my creative itch wasn’t scratched. Fashion, however, seemed like a form of self-expression that could combine my love of the arts and business education. I wanted to start my career somewhere that was full of people chasing their dreams and expressing themselves, so I moved to New York. There, I found myself working for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s clothing label Elizabeth and James and loved every minute, absorbing their creative energy and relentless pursuit of beauty.
At 25, I decided to channel all this experience into my own fashion brand. My family is full of entrepreneurs and they have created companies that brought them a sense of purpose and fulfillment. I wish I could say I started with a clear vision of what my company is today but I really didn’t. Instead, I was naive but courageous and simply wanted to express myself to the world.
My first day at Tanya Taylor was a meeting at a Starbucks with my first employee, Will, who was the opposite of me. I coordinated my bag to my shoes. He was tattooed head to toe. I designed and he brought my ideas to life by finding local factories where we made our pieces. Now, it’s 10 years later, and to mark my brand’s first decade, we’re opening our first store on one of the most prestigious shopping streets in North America, Madison Avenue.
Everyone told me that SoHo was where the store should be. As a downtown girl, that made sense. But I found SoHo too transitory. My neighbours would be pop-up shops and, the crowd, mostly tourists passing through. We were opening a store to be part of the everyday lives of New Yorkers, to be where mothers would take their daughters, and where friends would shop together. The Upper East Side is better suited to this ethos.
More than the location, the most important part of opening the boutique has been creating the right energy in the space: a sense of home. This experience has allowed me to revisit what home means and look at the design of a retail space through a residential lens. Just like the walls of my childhood basement were adorned with my art, I’ve painted original murals to create a feeling of warmth. My love of colour – such a big part of my brand story – is expressed through custom hues created by Farrow & Ball. We will carry our full range so friends, regardless of size, will be able to shop together. We want to engage the community through philanthropic events that help organizations, such as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, that we have supported for years.
Home is nothing without the people who fill it up and help make your dreams a reality. In the store, my husband, Michel, is the DJ behind our playlist. My friend Monica Sordo is selling her jewellery. Others have shared treasured objects to decorate the space (Jenna Lyons offered up a bubble gum pink cabinet for the dressing room). While opening a shop was, unquestionably, a decision to take my business to the next level, I dream that it will also become a place where our customers feel like a part of our family.