The Interview: Taylor Tomasi Hill
She’s the street-style star who spurned a fashion career to de-stress her life, only to accidentally create a blossoming new venture, discovers EVE CLAXTON
Creative-director-turned-florist Taylor Tomasi Hill is sitting at home in her airy loft in Chelsea, New York, surrounded by flowers. On her long wooden dining table are pots of peonies, jars of ranunculuses and clusters of anemones in mauves, pinks and whites. With her vibrant red hair tied back in a knot, wearing jeans and a favorite Dries Van Noten shirt, the 35-year-old has just returned from a trip to a nearby flower market and is glowing with contentment.
It’s a far cry from October 2013, when Tomasi Hill had just resigned from her job as creative director of pre-order fashion website Moda Operandi. The plan was to take a break and reassess her career. Instead, she found herself in a slump. “I couldn’t get out of bed,” she admits of the latter part of last year. “I thought after I left Moda I would take some time off and relax for a few months. Then, the first day I didn’t have to go into the office, I woke up, I checked my email, and there was no email. I felt horrible. Like I had no purpose.”
Until that point, Tomasi Hill’s career had been on a stellar rise. Born in Dallas, Texas, she was discovered age 22 by Carmen Borgonovo, the then accessories director at W magazine, while working there as an intern. She went on to become accessories director at US Teen Vogue, where she helped establish the magazine’s hi-lo look, before becoming style and accessories director at US Marie Claire.
Along the way, Tomasi Hill became a street-style star; one of the most photographed women on the global fashion scene. A typical outfit included strong color, lots of unexpected layering and at least three standout accessories, all put together in a natural, inevitable and utterly elegant way. She helped define the way we wanted to dress in the noughties.
After two years as creative director of Moda (she started in 2011), however, she was burned out. “I was traveling eight months of the year,” she remembers. “I wasn’t prioritizing my family life. I had to take a hard look at what I wanted.”
When the initial shock of being jobless wore off, Tomasi Hill – who is married to her high-school sweetheart Johnathan ‘Chase’ Hill – took meetings with designers to see what might be next for her. “And I started making these little bouquets as thank-you gifts after I went to meetings,” she remembers. “The flower market is right by my house and it became my happy place.” In lieu of vases, she reached for little Mason jars on her kitchen shelves. Then she took scraps of the craft paper the vendors at the market used to bundle their flowers and wrapped it around the glass to conceal the stems.
Tomasi Hill’s buds quickly began to garner attention. “People started calling and asking me who was making the bouquets,” she remembers, “and it just kind of blew up from there. I didn’t really have time to think, ‘Do I actually want to do this?’ because I was already doing it.” Thus her business, TTH Blooms, was born.
An early client was Roger Vivier, who in March commissioned table bouquets for a dinner given in honor of Miroslava Duma, the brand’s campaign model for SS14. “I wanted there to be a purpose to the flowers,” says Tomasi Hill. “As a fashion editor, I sometimes went to two or three dinners a night where the flowers were just dumped at the end of the evening and yet you’re given a goody bag with something inside you don’t really need. So I thought, what if you could take the flowers away as the gift?” And so her mini-bouquets were arranged in jars that fit into a car cup holder for the drive home.
Tomasi Hill makes each arrangement personally, using her dining-room table as her staging ground, mixing favorite flowers in artfully messy combinations of vivid pinks, yellows and whites with splashes of acid-green leaves. A wall of spectacular hand-painted tie-dye wallpaper (right) from Eskayel at Studio Four in her living room often serves as a backdrop for photos of the flowers she posts to Instagram (@tthblooms). “No two bouquets look the same,” she says, taking the aesthetic that worked so well for her in fashion and applying it to her floristry.
Since the career change, Tomasi Hill’s wardrobe has been adjusted accordingly. “It’s crazy when you’ve been in heels and fashionable clothes every single day of your life for a decade,” she laughs, “and then you go to wearing the same two sweaters every day.” New staples are Adidas sneakers, J.Crew or Acne Studios jeans and button-downs by Rosie Assoulin. “Even now it’s summer, I still carry a sweater, because the flower market is like a giant refrigerator.” Her green, boxy Dries Van Noten knit is currently in heavy rotation.
Still, she does have the odd excuse to dress up. She served as guest editor for Gwyneth Paltrow’s online magazine, Goop, during New York Fashion Week last spring and will do so again this season. What’s more, she is often asked to attend the events for which she has created the flowers. “After I finish the arrangements is when I think, what will I wear?” A favorite fall-back is her “super sculptural” black Balenciaga runway dress from the FW08 collection. She also adores her Rochas by Marco Zanini heels: “1940s peep-toe lizard nude pumps that I could wear all day and night, they’re so comfortable.”
Even without a store front, a website or any advertising for TTH Blooms, Tomasi Hill finds herself as busy as she ever was as a creative director. She is also learning that running your own business comes with its own stress. “But at least it’s my stress; it’s my baby.” To decompress, she goes to Ballet Beautiful classes, the classical dance-based exercise technique pioneered by Mary Helen Bowers, who trained Natalie Portman for Black Swan and who created a special video series for The EDIT. “You do these subtle moves and train these little muscles you didn’t even know existed, but the results are incredible.”
Tomasi Hill, however, still finds herself chasing that elusive work-life balance. “My husband says, ‘I don’t understand – now you’re launching this business and it’s taking more time than your old job!’” she smiles. “But I believe in following your passion.”
i read the whole thing too! doh... thanks.
