The bikini was featured on, and in Vogue UK and Women’s Health magazine. She captioned: “Thank you for my Kiini!!” The model Dree Hemingway posed provocatively by a surfboard in a bikini with dark panels and green-and-orange detailing. Irgit’s product got its first significant Instagram plug. Sales were unremarkable until January, when Ms. Irgit, who wore bright lipstick and a pilot-style jumpsuit unbuttoned nearly to the navel, revealing her Kiini top beneath. Models, stylists and other denizens of the beautiful-people set sipped Caribbean beer and posed for photos with Ms. In June 2013, Kiini had its launch party at a buzzy restaurant owned by Mr. before settling on “Kiini” and a logo with three triangles over the “i”s, like the panels on the top and bottom of her suits. She paid careful attention to branding, playing around with “bikini” and her initials - I.I.I. Irgit decided to mark up the retail price to $285, putting her suit into the high-end luxury market. Irgit asked a friend in the fashion industry to create a prototype, and a factory in China made a batch at a cost of about $29 each. “A reflection,” she said, “of my personality.” Irgit hoped buyers would see it as sexy but sporty, bohemian but sophisticated. sensibility popular on both the internet and the runway, and Ms. Its tiny form contained an unexpected array of elements: triangular panels contrast-color stitching and most distinctively of all, those vibrant elastic straps threaded through loops of crochet. Irgit looked at the bathing suit and saw untapped “superpowers.” It was bright, colorful and looked fantastic on Instagram. Why not create more of these distinctive bathing suits? Why not become a bikini-maker? Irgit would later put it, this was the spark that motivated her to start a business. Irgit was playing paddle ball with a friend, the restaurateur Serge Becker, when he complimented her striking bikini. She was a waitress and a bartender she worked for a fashion company as an assistant to a merchandiser and in the wholesale department. Irgit, who, without the cushion of a trust fund, bounced from job to job. It was an expensive existence, especially for Ms. She became part of a downtown class of trendsetters who all seemed to have a purpose. Irgit moved from Turkey to New York, with $300 in her pocket and a vague dream of making a life in one of the city’s creative industries. Now she was on the beach on Long Island, wearing a handmade-looking bikini with crochet and exposed elastic straps, trying to figure out what to do and who to be. Earlier in the year, after having her heart broken, she had taken a vacation in Brazil, visiting Rio de Janeiro and the beach towns of Bahia. On a sunny summer day in Montauk, Ipek Irgit was in the familiar situation of not knowing what she was doing with her life.
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