Agnes Fischer has always felt at one with the sea (and it’s not only because of her last name). The 29-year-old Swedish swimwear designer spent her childhood visiting St. Barth’s and snorkeling off of its crystal clear coastline with her family. Now, though, “those same coral reefs are no longer as colorful,” she laments, citing the thousands of tons of abandoned waste that have wreaked havoc on the ocean and its ecosystem. It was this stark realization that led Fischer, a Parsons graduate who had previously worked at Saint Laurent under Hedi Slimane, to research sustainable fabrics until she finally landed upon Econyl in 2017, a 100 percent regenerative nylon fiber made out of abandoned fishing nets.
“These nets are part of all the trash that’s out in the ocean but they’re so bad because they can stay in the water for 600 years and nothing happens unless someone takes them away,” says Fischer. She put a prototype swimsuit to the test during a jaunt to her father’s home on the French Caribbean island. “I was curious: Is this quality good? Will it work?” she remembers asking. The results surpassed all her expectations. “It made me want to start a brand,” she says—and thus Fisch was born.
Swimwear design has proven to be a natural fit for Fischer, who still remembers her first bathing suit: a turquoise ruffled one-piece that her mother bought for her in Paris. And while there are no frills in her 17-piece range of cross-back maillots, tie-front tops, and Brazilian-cut bottoms, there are plenty of equally statement-making details, such as the hand-painted leopard print (recently spotted on models Elsa Hosk and Carlotta Kohl), scrunchie-like shoulder straps, and bright, poppy hues inspired by Jacques Cousteau’s underwater exploration film, The Silent World. “I want to make suits you can swim in and wear as part of an outfit to dinner,” says Fischer, who’s been known to pair her Select style (a low-backed one-piece) with leather shorts on nights out. It’s a two-for-one deal that echoes her bigger-picture goals: “To change the way people behave and how we make an impact on our planet.” Here’s to making waves this summer, one sustainable swimsuit at a time.
