Tombolo’s “Birdbath” shirt designed by artist-in-residence Julian MacMillan uses as its inspiration a Greek funerary painting depicting a figure suspended mid-air between land and water and between life and death.
Tombolo
When you see a Tombolo shirt, you know it’s Tombolo. Not in a cheesy, logomania way. It makes you stop a stranger on the street — I actually did this once in Santa Monica — and ask, wait, is that a Tom Wesselmann reference? Or you’ll notice Lisa (from Blackpink) wearing something interesting on “White Lotus” and go…is that a? (It was a). Tombolo shirts have that sorta distinction. They feel like someone found the ur-object of a particularly glorious summer or mind-bending adventure and gave it Agoya-shell buttons and a terrycloth collar.
This month brings the fourth Le Sirenuse capsule, Tombolo’s longest-running collaboration, timed to the Positano hotel’s 75th anniversary and the opening of Le Sirenuse Mare, its new beach club in Nerano. There is also the FIFA World Cup 2026 collection, an official licensed line suitable for the tournament descending on the New York-New Jersey metro this summer. There are cabana tops, footy graphics and limited-edition keepsakes most definitely on brand for “the beautiful game.”
Tombolo’s Artist-In-Residence 2026: Julian MacMillan
Still, the Artist Residency remains the most interesting Tombolo venture. Now in its fourth year, the program selects an artist, gives them money, space, and almost zero interference so they can turn their vision into a shirt (the company also throws them a solo show in New York City at which the brand takes no commission). The latest release is what I’m calling the shirt of the summer.
The 2025-2026 winner is Julian MacMillan, a Dartmouth-educated, Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor selected from hundreds of applicants, and the resulting shirt is called “Birdbath.” It is limited to 200, which means that by the time I tried to get one, they were already gone in my size, but you should keep checking. The shirts are individually numbered and initialed by the artist and they might just be the most alluring garments Tombolo has produced.
Darmouth-educated, Brooklyn-based artist Julian MacMillan was selected from hundreds of applicants for Tombolo’s 2026 artist-in-residence program.
Tombolo
Contemporary Fashion Inspired By Ancient Greeks
I reached out to MacMillan, who bases much of this recent work on “The Tomb of the Diver,” a Greek funerary fresco from circa 470 B.C.E. featuring a youth suspended mid-arc between land and water (and, yes, metaphorically, between life and death). At the Tombolo exhibition this month, MacMillan showed sixteen new paintings and sculptures, including loons and swans and images of dangling feet and swirling eddies. “I looked at a lot of videos of loons swimming underwater, and photographs of their plumage,” MacMillan says. “Loons combine a sense of mystery with this refined, austere beauty which looks designed.”
MacMillan’s work studies the dialogue between water and its surroundings, distilling organic forms into something that feels at once ancient and designed.
Tombolo
The shirt has a hand-embroidered diving loon, too, abstracted into concentric lines and polka dots, which MacMillan traces partly to research he did on “dazzle camouflage,” the razzle-dazzle paintwork the British Navy used on WWI battleships to confuse enemy rangefinders.
To make the shirts, Tombolo sent MacMillan shirt silhouettes which he printed out and started drawing. The design process was largely on paper, in pencil and ink. “I’m very analog,” he says. “I always think of my work as drawing, mediated through various processes and materials. The idea of a drawing wrapping around the body, moving through the world on skin, really excited me.”
You can sense that passion. The shirt is stop-you-on-the-street impressive, right? It’s also good for artists at a time when there’s not so much of that. As MacMillan says, “Tombolo designed the artist in residency program by asking, basically, what do artists actually want? The answer being exposure, opportunities to show their work, and money.”
I’ll keep hitting refresh on Tombolo’s site to see if any surface, like loons coming up for air.
