Frankies Bikinis Brand Guidelines: The Malibu Mother-and-Daughter Label That Grew on Instagram

A mother, a daughter and a set of custom swimsuits.

Frankies Bikinis was founded in Malibu, California, in 2012 by Francesca Aiello and her mother, Mimi Aiello. The company’s own account places the start in the family’s Malibu home. Some trade reports of the 2022 Victoria’s Secret deal, among them FashionUnited and Just Style, credit Francesca alone, but the company presents the label as a mother-daughter founding, and its website calls Mimi her daughter’s closest collaborator.

The first product was a custom order rather than a collection. Interviewed by The Daily Front Row in July 2022, Aiello said she had not set out to build a brand. She could not find the swimsuit styles she wanted, so her mother encouraged her to have some made and helped her find seamstresses. Friends then asked for their own. Of the decision to make it a brand, she told the paper: “That was 10 years ago this July.”

Aiello then opened an Instagram account, @frankiesbikinis, to show the designs. Nylon, in a profile dated October 2026, describes this as the earliest stage of the platform and reports that a request for swimsuits from the model Candice Swanepoel showed mother and daughter there could be a business in it. Aiello told Nylon she replied to each request by hand and went years without proper advertising. If she could not beat competitors on infrastructure and production, she said, she could try to beat them on growing the Instagram page.

The company’s account of the following years rests on three milestones. It says Aiello became the youngest designer to show at Miami Swim Week, was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and won Fashion Collaboration of the Year at the Daily Front Row Awards. A company profile on Built In dates the Miami Swim Week debut to 2014.

Collaborators, and a move beyond swim.

Collaboration is the part of the brand the press writes about most. Nylon says Aiello’s first co-designed collection was with Sofia Richie in 2019 and that it sold out almost at once. Hailee Steinfeld asked to take part in 2020, and the list has since grown to include Bella Hadid, Gigi Hadid, Kylie Jenner and Jennie, the magazine reports. The Gigi Hadid collection appeared in 2022, when The Daily Front Row covered it alongside a Hamptons pop-up.

In 2023 Aiello worked with Pamela Anderson on a recreation of Anderson’s red one-piece, which Nylon calls a full-circle moment. The most recent collaboration it names is with Devon Lee Carlson, built from the pair’s vintage archives, going through favourite pieces, trims and fabrics to decide what story to tell. Aiello called that collection one of the label’s top sellers. The company’s website adds Sydney Sweeney and Naomi Osaka to the list, and it currently shows capsule collections with Barefoot Dreams, KHY and Lexxola.

The range has spread well past the swimsuit. The company says it has grown from swimwear into ready-to-wear clothing, knits and activewear, and Adweek has listed accessories, children’s clothing and beauty products as well. Its current website sorts clothing into dresses, sweaters and knits, and matching sets, with named lines such as With Love, From Malibu and the Forever Collection alongside the seasonal drops.

Malibu stays at the centre of how the brand is described. Reporting the 2022 investment, FashionUnited said the label was widely known for translating the area’s laid-back feel into its clothes and identity. Aiello told Nylon that much of the brand’s character comes from Malibu style, which she described as low-key and quite unlike what people imagine of the place. The magazine describes her designs as split between the ultra-girly and the tomboy. The company’s biography of her points to summers as a junior lifeguard, surfing and water polo.

Swimwear and resort labels.

Swimwear and resort labels sell a place as much as a garment, so their visual identity tends to start with the setting. Seafolly’s website speaks of Bondi Beach and the Australian beach lifestyle; Vilebrequin’s speaks of Saint-Tropez in 1971. For a designer, the useful question is how that place is carried through photographs, shop interiors and the small printed items around a sale.

The printed fabric is the first thing to study. In this category a swatch can work like a logo: Vilebrequin’s chief executive told The Week in 2017 that it made a sea-turtle print every year in a different colour, and its website describes lining up a back pocket by hand so the pattern runs across it. A print archive, where a label keeps one, gives it a repeatable source of colour and motif from year to year.

Lookbooks then supply the setting. Beach huts, pool edges, towels and harbour walls appear often in this kind of photography, and they do the job a product shot cannot, by showing the clothes in the place they are meant for. Collection names often work the same way: Ragtrader’s report on Seafolly’s summer 2020 range lists names such as Summer Memoirs and Check In, each tied to a print.

Boutique displays and packaging finish the picture. A stack of folded prints reads as a colour field; a swing tag, box or pouch carries the mark away from the shop. Each brand in this guide sets out who founded it, who owns it now and what it says about where its goods are made, and marks what rests on the company’s own word. The palettes here are our own interpretations, not official colours.

A minority stake, then a run of stores.

In March 2022, Victoria’s Secret & Co. acquired a minority interest in Frankies Bikinis, FashionUnited and Just Style reported. Martin Waters, its chief executive, called Frankies Bikinis “an aspirational beachwear brand and trend leader in the swimwear category,” FashionUnited reported. Nylon said in October 2026 that the stake remained in place, and that the two companies’ work together has included a collaboration with VS Pink.

Physical retail came in stages. FashionUnited reported in June 2019 that the brand had opened a pop-up in the Selfridges Body Studio in London, with an exclusive reflective capsule of two silver styles and a space built from perspex and neon; Aiello called it her first international pop-up. In May 2022 the label opened its first brick-and-mortar shop on Mercer Street in New York’s SoHo, according to the SoHo Broadway Initiative, which described it then as a pop-up due to run until spring 2023. SoHo remains on the company’s store list. The first flagship followed in Malibu, at Cross Creek Ranch, with a grand opening on 17 August 2024, the Pepperdine Graphic reported; the company describes a 900-square-foot boutique with in-store exclusive styles.

The company’s store locator now lists its own shops in Malibu, Venice, Newport Beach, New York’s SoHo and West Village, Miami, Chicago, Boston and Georgetown in Washington, DC, along with a Desert Hills location. It also sells through retailers, and names Victoria’s Secret, Revolve, SSENSE and Bloomingdale’s among them.

For a design guide, Frankies Bikinis shows a label whose identity is told through a place, a family and the names of its collaborators. Compare Triangl, another swimwear label that grew on Instagram from 2012, and Hunza G. For this guide we use dusk rose, shell pink and sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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