Why Amy Smilovic is Secretly the Most Interesting Designer in America

The Tibi designer's calling card is keeping it real.

A few years ago, I was asked by a magazine to write a profile of designer Amy Smilovic, the founder and creative director of Tibi, whose refreshingly unvarnished social media presence makes her an anomaly in the glossy, facade-driven world of fashion. I was delighted to take on the assignment, but the draft I turned in was a lot more voice-y, punchy and fun than what ended up being published. Here is the original version of the story, as I intended it to be read.

It was September 12th, 2011 and the white tent set up in New York’s Bryant Park for fashion week was abuzz with activity. Inside, fans worked overtime to cool the boiling temperature as celebs like One Tree Hill’s Sophia Bush, Emma Roberts and socialite Olivia Palermo dotted the front row, waiting for Tibi’s Spring 2012 show to begin. Suddenly, the lights went down and out trotted a model wearing a crisp white cap sleeve Oxford button down with billowing cream trousers, followed by another in a white boat neck t-shirt and khaki shorts. As model after model sauntered down the runway in monochromatic menswear staples, it dawned on the crowd that this was unlike any other show Tibi had done before: there were no prints. (Well, technically there was one, a white filigree stamp.) Designer Amy Smilovic had brought on the blazer-forward Scandi fashion blogger Elin Kling (now of Totême) to style the show, signalling a new, simplified direction for the brand. WWD called it a “savvy move for the contemporary designer.” Some described it as “delightfully unfussy.” Others were not so kind, noting, “Tiki definitely stepped out of their comfort zone…except to a play it safe zone.”

Behind-the-scenes, Smilovic wasn’t nervous for the reception of the show; “I was just hopeful that people would love it as much as I did,” she says on the phone from her Georgian-style home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Smilovic is, like Phoebe Philo, a “women’s designer”; one who excels at creating quiet, wearable pieces that make women feel good about themselves. Tibi articles are the workhorses of a wardrobe, they’re not necessarily the flashiest items but they’re ones you reach for the most.

“When I first started out, I wrote down in my diary that I wanted to make pieces that are clean, minimal, chic and can be worn every day. That was my mission statement,” she says. But by the mid-aughts, Tibi, founded in 1997, had developed a reputation for selling jaunty, lighthearted party dresses in explosive floral patterns. But as Smilovic continued to design blockbuster dresses, even as her own tastes moved on, something in her began to die.

“A department store would come in and say ‘Oh my god, we saw this on the runway and loved it so much. Now could you do it in bright yellow?’ They would just start redesigning the whole [collection],” she says. Smilovic knew that if she didn’t do something drastic, the brand she had painstakingly created would drift into irrelevancy. “It would have sucked out my soul,” she says.

Rather than end up the fashion designer equivalent of Sisyphus, doomed to roll the same boulder up a mountain every day for the rest of her life, she followed her instincts, hiring consultant Robert Burke to help map out next steps. Burke advised Smilovic to let Tibi drift off towards the white light at the end of the tunnel and create a new label where she could design clothing she found creatively fulfilling. She elected to do the exact opposite. (“Amy is fearless,” says her friend Beth Budgaycay, CEO of Foundrae and co-founder of Rebecca Taylor.)

What followed was a gut renovation of the brand, which pivoted to selling unfussy staples that align with the mission statement she outlined so many years ago. And while it was slow going at first, Smilovic’s steadfastness, clarity of vision and razor-sharp business instincts have led to a second coming of the brand. Within the last two years, Tibi’s sales have shot up – the brand won’t say by how much – and social engagement is at an all-time high. The reason for all this? It’s Amy herself.

In 2020, Smilovic found herself locked down, alongside everyone else in the world. Stranded with no way to communicate with her customers, she picked up her phone and began delivering off-the-cuff sermons on everything from how to build a practical wardrobe to business advice for up-and-coming designers, broadcasted via Instagram live. She began receiving close to a thousand DMs each week, which she continues to dutifully respond to. “It was a little frustrating to my team at first because they kept wanting a plan. And I'm like, ‘No, I have no idea.’ [My content] is the definition of organic,” she says.

On Instagram and Tiktok, Smilovic’s calling card is keeping it real. Her feed is peppered with grainy diagonal mirror selfies showcasing her nonchalant style and front-facing videos delivered in a friendly yet no-nonsense clip. Smilovic bucks the stereotype of the fashion designer as an inaccessible eccentric — think Karl Lagerfeld hiring two personal maids to attend to his beloved cat Choupette — and replacing it with a resolute practicality and forthright honesty. In one video she admits that almost all the furniture that appeared in an InStyle magazine photoshoot of her home didn’t even belong to her. It is precisely her candid nature and charming guilelessness, so seldom found in the world of fashion, that has catapulted her into the role of inadvertent influencer.

“Amy really resonates with people because she’s high fashion but does it in a way that’s actually wearable, which is a hard balance to strike,” says Budgaycay. “Plus, she has this deadpan delivery that is so funny.”

Among Smilovic’s many new fans is Maryam Siddiqi, founder of the wellness-forward travel company Provenance and former editor at the Globe and Mail. Siddiqi was acquainted with Tibi prior to discovering Amy on TikTok, but developed a “rapid adoration” after watching a video she’d made on how to dress when you feel like “hot dog water.” “The versatility she’ll get out of a simple sweater or a button down shirt is amazing,” she says. “And now do I want a pair of Beyren slides from Tibi? Of course I do.”

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Smilovic’s journey towards internationally-renowned fashion designer was hardly foretold. She grew up with a schoolteacher mother and a psychologist father on remote St-Simon Island off the coast of Georgia. The childhood she describes is dreamy and idyllic. “We had to go across a causeway to get to the mainland to get to school, we were late to school if a shrimp boat was coming through…we rode our bikes everywhere, we were always at the beach, covered in mosquito bites.”

A career epiphany arrived when she was a sophomore at the University of Georgia and watched the 1986 film Nothing in Common starring Tom Hanks as a slick advertising exec. At the time, she had yet to declare a major but was so compelled by the way advertising was depicted in the film, she enrolled immediately in the program. Eager to get a foothold in the industry, she even skipped her own college graduation in order to begin work at Ogilvy in Atlanta. Eventually she was poached by one of her clients, American Express, and moved to New York, where she met her husband, Frank. His job took the couple to Hong Kong in 1997, and needing a project to focus on, she decided to start a clothing line.

“People always ask, ‘How did I start a clothing company without a fashion degree?’ But I can't imagine starting a company without experience in advertising, marketing and finance,” she says. Her built-in understanding of break-even analyses, gross margins and cash flow spreadsheets optimized Tibi’s chances of success. (Something people don’t know about Amy is “she reads a lot of managerial books,” says Tibi’s head of design, Traci Bui-Amar.) Soon Smilovic was flying from Hong Kong to New York on the regular and Frank had left his job at American Express to come on board as Tibi’s CEO.

Year after year, Amy’s Bloodhound-like instinct for sniffing out the next sartorial zeitgeist has guided the brand to incredible success. As creative director, Smilovic is responsible for shaping and establishing the brand's vision, from fashion shows to marketing and to ensure the brand delivers a cohesive aesthetic. Tibi’s first collection consisted of four items; a shift dress, body con dress, cigarette pants and a-line skirt, all rendered in a kitschy batik print reminiscent of the Lilly Pullitzer patterns of her youth. (“It was a moment I was in the mood for,” she says of her previous proclivity for prints.) Tom Ford came out with a Lilly Pullitzer-inspired collection the following season.

Tibi isn’t just the label Amy founded, it’s her second wardrobe. “Tibi is my personal style,” she insists. The brand’s tagline of ‘creative pragmatism’ is a term Smilovic coined to eschew the various style categories she felt boxed in by. “If you go into a department store, you have an area that’s bohemian, an area that’s modernist, a classic area and a sexy, edgy area,” she explains. “People want to know, ‘Are you a sexy brand or are you a classic brand?’ But as a person I’m not one of those things individually, I’m a little bit of all of them.” Creative pragmatism is Smilovic’s way of acknowledging that true style contains multiplicity.

It’s a concept she’s taking on the road – spreading the gospel on her ‘Creative Pragmatism 2022’ tour, in which she hosts seminars in places as varied as Vancouver, Denver and Dubai, helping people unlock the secrets of their own unique style and open up space for thoughtful and considered conversations on the role of fashion and style in life.

By showcasing how versatile Tibi is via her personal Instagram, Smilovic is her own best advertisement for the brand. “My head of design [and I] are constantly asking ourselves what we’re in the mood for, why and following the trail of breadcrumbs to see where it leads us,” she says. Traci Bui-Amar, who has worked as Tibi’s head of design since 2006, tells me her design process begins with considering what kinds of clothing the Tibi customer already owns, then creates items to freshen up their wardrobe. She doesn’t design based on trends, rather, she exclusively creates clothing that both she and Smilovic get excited to wear. Bottom line, “If we're not going to wear it on our bodies, it doesn't go into the collection,” says Bui-Amar.

“Everything I do has to be effortless, modern, and have some classic reference to it,” says Smilovic. “If it doesn’t have that, I find that inevitably it’s not something I want to wear.”

This unfussy approach extends to Smilovic’s personal life. She shares that much of her virtually nonexistent free time is taken up by mundane chores like grocery shopping. She savours spending time at home with family, soaking up the sunlight in her backyard. “Amy is one of the hardest working people I know,” says Bui-Amar. Life and work are intimately entwined for Amy. Even the simple act of watching a movie might send her running to her studio bursting with creative inspiration that she’ll bring back to the brand.

By inquiring about Smilovic’s hobbies, I had hoped she might divulge some bizarre pastime that might take me on a breadcrumb trail towards some stunning insight into exactly the kind of person she is. But what I’ve learned is that with Amy is that what you see is what you get. (“She’s exactly the person you see on Instagram,” says Budgaycay.)

Despite the fact she’s working all the time, she has the luxury of doing exactly what she wants — and people love her for it. “It’s one thing to do things on your own creatively and authentically, and then have it fail, but to have it be working, it's just completely energizing.”