Two Decades, One Unmistakable Silhouette: How Luli Fama Made the Miami Bikini a Global Language
At PARAISO Miami Swim Week, the Cuban-born label marked twenty years the only way it knows how with prints loud enough to be heard across an ocean.
Before a single model appeared, you could feel it. Inside the PARAISO tent at Collins Park on the last Saturday in May, the night opened not with a hush but with a heartbeat Karol G pulsing through the speakers, dancers moving across the floor, the whole room lifting into that unmistakable Latin energy that has always been Luli Fama's native tongue. By the time the lights dropped and the first look hit the runway, the crowd was already on its feet. Twenty years of swimwear history walked out into the heat, and the brand wasn't simply staging a show. It was making a case for its own permanence.
Two decades is an eternity in fashion, longer still in swimwear, a category that lives and dies on novelty. Yet here was the brand celebrating its anniversary the same way it built its name through colour, through confidence, and through a sun-soaked sensibility that has always felt less like a trend than a worldview. The signature is instantly legible: vivid prints, electric hues, silhouettes engineered to flatter rather than merely cover. Other labels chase the season. Luli Fama has spent twenty years convincing the season to chase it.
The runway doubled as a preview, unveiling new styles from the Spring/Summer 2027 collection the brand's signature swim paired with an elevated resort sensibility, pieces that travel effortlessly from the sand to a rooftop dinner without ever changing register. If the early Luli Fama was about the perfect bikini, this season is about an entire mood: the woman who wears it as a statement, not a compromise.
That ethos was written into the casting. Model and television personality Agueda López returned for the milestone show, her Grammy-winning husband Luis Fonsi watching from the front row in a gesture that lent the evening genuine celebration rather than mere spectacle. The lineup leaned into the brand's cultural reach, with Dance Moms alum Kendall Vertes and Love Is Blind favourite Jessica Vestal both taking the runway. Luli Fama has never treated its world as separate from the wider conversation it simply assumes it belongs at the centre of it.
Around the show, the label built an experience rather than a presentation. In a first, an open casting call at its Lincoln Road boutique invited aspiring "Luli Babe" models to compete for a place on the anniversary runway a small but telling gesture from a house that has always understood its customer is also its muse. When the lights came up, the celebration moved to the Harbour Club in Sunset Harbour, where designers, models, celebrities, and longtime believers gathered to toast the campaigns and moments that defined the past twenty years.
It is worth remembering how far that reach now extends. Luli Fama's designs have found their way onto Lady Gaga and Camila Cabello, the sort of endorsement money cannot manufacture. The retail story is plainer but no less telling boutiques across South Florida from Lincoln Road to Doral, Dadeland, Dolphin Mall, and Sawgrass Mills, with collections carried by hundreds of retailers worldwide. What began as a Miami proposition has quietly become a global one.
The origin, like the best fashion stories, is also a love story. Designer Luli Hanimian was born in Cuba and raised in Miami, where the ocean was less a backdrop than a constant companion. She met her partner Augusto while working for his aunt, a celebrated swimsuit designer in Argentina, and the two eventually struck out on their own. Augusto had already helped introduce a fresh sensibility to Miami's swim scene pushing the local language beyond solid neons toward sophisticated European prints and shapes the market hadn't seen. Together they turned instinct into a house, and that house into a category-defining name. The romance is still legible in every collection: this is swimwear made by people who genuinely love the water.
What lingers after a night like this isn't any single suit, but the sense of a brand that knows exactly who it is. Twenty years in, Luli Fama isn't reinventing itself so much as reaffirming itself and signalling, with hard-earned confidence, that the next chapter is already in motion. In a city that runs on reinvention, the label has pulled off the rarer trick. It has stayed gloriously itself, and made the world come to Miami to see it.