As designers Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter grew up in the Caribbean, the turquoise sea was the inspiration behind the Nina Ricci Resort 2022 collection.

“We wanted to link more to our world where we feel free, and look less at the archive. We wanted to listen to our intuition,” Herrebrugh explained as a model walked by in a wetsuit transformed into a bouclé skirt suit, a wavy zip evoking the way aquatic-wear wraps around the body. Exercised throughout the collection, the diving motif drew direct lines to the way the designers express themselves in their menswear. It inevitably made for a more personal experience. “We love the underwater world,” Botter said, and that aesthetic is entirely individual to this duo.

The properties of dive suits—both historical and contemporary—made for technically interesting and quite flattering lines, like those of a jacket with an intricate panel structure that concealed its closure, or little wetsuit-inspired turtleneck knits with fronts cut like razorbacks executed super lightweight. Tailoring played with the codes of beachwear in wraparound skorts and board short suits, which Botter said was a proposal for “a new suit.”

Between tuba snorkeling heels, abstract coral prints inspired by the florals of kitschy tourist board shorts, and the dégradé sunrise/sundown color formations printed on both garments and bags, you’d be inclined to call this a holiday collection. For Herrebrugh and Botter, however, tropical beach and sea life feels more like home than some exotic, post-pandemic “revenge travel” postcard.