Swimwear Thinking Made City-Appropriate
February 13, 2026 · uneasy.in/92bc6ab
Sun Studios sat on the sixth floor of 628 Broadway, between Bleecker and Houston. On the afternoon of November 5th, 1992, Liza Bruce showed her Spring/Summer 1993 ready-to-wear collection there — a small presentation in a SoHo loft space with draped white backdrops and scattered petals along the runway floor. The petals were the only decorative gesture. Everything else was restraint.
Bruce had built her reputation on swimwear. Lycra bodysuits, minimal seaming, the kind of stretch engineering where the fabric does the structural work instead of the pattern cutting. By 1993 she was translating that logic directly into daywear, and the results looked like nothing else on the New York calendar that season. Second-skin turtlenecks in white ribbed jersey. Ankle-length wrap skirts in warm stone that opened at the front to reveal a lighter underlayer beneath. Column slip dresses with spaghetti straps that owed more to lingerie than to anything you'd normally see at 4 p.m. on a Thursday in Manhattan.
The silhouette logic across both key looks was what the research calls "column plus interruption" — long, close lines broken by a single slit, overlap, or strap. The body organised everything. There was no print, no hardware, no contrast piping. The garment's entire argument was that fit, line, and fabric behaviour were sufficient. The styling reinforced this completely: hair worn long and straight, negligible jewellery, neutral shoes. Nothing competed with the silhouette.
Bruce was stocked at Harvey Nichols in London and Barneys in New York. She wasn't obscure. Yet the collection that people remember — the sheer slip Kate Moss wore, now sitting in the V&A's underwear exhibition — came a season later, for S/S 1994. What the Spring 1993 show demonstrates is that the grammar was already there. The columnar slips, the engineered wraps, the "underwear-as-outerwear" proposition in a quiet, minimalist register. The Moss moment didn't emerge from nowhere. It intensified something Bruce had been building toward on a petal-strewn runway in SoHo, six months earlier.
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