Tai Swim 2026: Waimea and Lehua, Hibiscus Prints from Big Island Memories

When I bring fabrics back with the same name, the art changes but the story doesn’t.

Meet the first drop of our 2026 spring collection: WAIMEA (est. 2021) + LEHUA (est. 2021).

This delicate hand-drawn hibiscus takes on a familiar shape you might recognize from our original drop 5 years ago, but now in a softer colored-pencil style tracing straight from my sketchbook. Warm, nostalgic, and a little different. If you missed it back then, this one’s for you bestie.

These two fabrics take me back to Big Island baby days: to Waimea Hospital (yes, before it was Queen’s lol), where I spent my birthday, and where my littlest sister completed our family seven years later and one day before me.

If you’ve been here a minute, you know Tai Swim collections always have hyper-specific lore, but this drop might showcase it the most. I pull little artifacts from childhood and turn them into bikinis 23 years later, like a long-game Easter egg hunt you may not have seen coming.

Watching Seri, my baby sis, grow up wild and carefree in tiny floral outfits made certain colors and patterns stick in my brain. When I design today, those threads come back decades later and find their way into new collections. This was the story we shared when our “waimea” fabric initially released. but let me invite you a little deeper into the journal:

Seri literally LIVED in this yellow shirt and flowered pants. Like, all the f**king time. My siblings and I would joke, “you got any other clothes babe??” I remember hiding them from her so she wouldn’t wear them to school 10 days in a row. My mom outfitted her with dupes but Seri wasn’t falling for that. She did finally outgrow them, so maybe my 2026 version will be worn into ground and lived in just as much. This tiny capsule collection is for the inner child in all of us who hyper-fixated on our fav fits, bc outfit-repeating is sustainable and iconic.

let’s take a step into my family’s 2002 lil grass shack in kealakekua, hawai’i and drive upcountry, where that golden light has always hit different.

we’re going back in time on 2.21 ❤️💛