Call Off the Search: Indie Designer Taylor Dorry Has Created the Dress of the Summer

“Growing up in South Florida, fashion wasn’t really a thing,” 33-year-old designer Taylor Dorry deadpans via video link from her home studio. Her Zoom backdrop is a rack of one-of-a-kind babydoll dresses, each painstakingly handcrafted from reclaimed upholstery fabrics and fit for a maverick, modern-day princess. Born and raised in beachside Hollywood (Florida, not California), the story behind Dorry’s eponymous label aptly has all the hallmarks of a silver-screen fairytale. Her entirely upcycled designs — which are about to blow up on social media in a big way — almost didn’t happen at all.

For years, she hid her fashion zeal and detoured into political science, all while secretly amassing a superlative vintage archive. “I had these incredible pieces that I would feel uncomfortable wearing out,” Dorry says, adjusting her large aviator spectacles. Her days as a wallflower were numbered, however. (Today, she’s wearing one of her signature pieces — “a thrifted hotel bed cover that I turned into a loose-fit babydoll top” — over a metal band T-shirt.) Soon, she’d relocated to Miami to work as a stylist’s assistant, where her eye for scene-stealing vintage fostered a successful side hustle.

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