For Maggie Marilyn’s Maggie Hewitt, the last few years have been about resets and new beginnings. She’s in the middle of the changes begun during Covid, and she recently gave birth to her first child. “The first years of Maggie Marilyn we had such rapid growth; Net-a-Porter was one of our first stockists, we got shortlisted for the LVMH Prize, then we quickly picked up a lot of international retailers,” she explains, seated at a table inside her bright Sydney showroom. “Everything felt like it was spinning so fast, and it wasn’t sustainable at all, not for the environment sure, but also for me, for my team, and for longevity and building something that was really going to be around for a long time.”
And so each collection is now carefully considered, picking up where the last one left off. A striped cotton shirt gets paired with a bubble skirt in the same fabric—a style which she introduced last season, while tweedy “business separates” get youthful updates; like a tailored vest and bolero-combo that’s actually one jacket (this one from the resort 2022 collection). An easy butter yellow crepe dress with a built-in matching belt at the hip is heavy enough to hide underwear lines while remaining light enough to wear on a hot summer day. (Both Hewitt and another employee were accidentally wearing it on the day I happened to visit.)
Hewitt has also recently begun producing a line of sportswear pieces like windbreaker jackets and pullover fleeces emblazoned with a “Marilyn” logo that’s clearly inspired by all the icons of ’90s American sportswear. It’s funny to see such a traditionally masculine thing—think TOMMY or POLO or CALVIN—thrown on its head a bit. (It helps, of course, that Marilyn just so happens to be such an emblematically feminine name.) “I think there’s this thrill for me, designing with nostalgia in mind—thinking about the old fishing jackets my dad would wear, or the fleeces my mom would wear when she was in the veggie garden,” she added. Now her dad and her partner wear the pieces bearing her name instead.