Amy Smilovic held Tibi’s fall 2026 presentation in the Financial District, a stone’s throw from the New York Stock Exchange — which turned out to be exactly the right setting. The collection drew from her own time on Wall Street and her late nineties Carolyn Bessette Kennedy-inspired personal style, two reference points she was candid about from the outset.

But nostalgia, Smilovic made clear, was only ever the starting point. “Even when you go back, the physicality of the place might not have changed, your clothes might not have changed, but you’ve changed,” she said. “Time moves on.” The design process was guided by a set of questions she posed to herself: what to love, what to carry forward, and how to manipulate it into something new. The answers came out as pull-on stirrup pants with a drop crotch in athletic knit, long streamlined coats, and a sheer plaid capelet that created the convincing illusion of a ruffled blouse beneath.

Modularity and versatility ran through the collection as genuine design commitments rather than marketing language. A soft blazer that functions equally as a jacket or a blouse. Flannel balloon trousers with a tapered ankle that can be buttoned back for a less extreme silhouette. A two-piece apron skirt designed to be worn together or separately, over trousers. Even the footwear was thought through — sleek slingback heels finished with adjustable bra-strap-style fastenings that eliminate the need for cobbler visits.

Smilovic is a pragmatic designer, but Tibi is not a bland capsule wardrobe operation, and the collection’s closing look made that point emphatically: a slim-fitting olive-green skirt finished with a dramatic horsehair-filled ruffle. “There are a million things I know I’ll wear it with,” she said. The pragmatism and the personality, held together in a single piece.