Leigh started as a different suit.
The original one-piece had elements we liked, but once we began looking at it as part of Collection No. 001, it became clear that liking parts of a design wasn’t enough.
It didn’t feel finished.
So we started pulling it apart.
The straps were too heavy. The leg needed to sit higher. The coverage needed work. And the upper half of the suit didn’t have the same clean, sculpted feeling we had started to establish with Mae and Riva.
One adjustment led to another.
We slimmed the straps. Raised the hip. Reworked the back and reconsidered the amount of coverage. The top began borrowing from the lines we loved in the rest of the collection, creating more consistency between the three women’s silhouettes.
Eventually, it stopped feeling like a revision of the original suit.
It became Leigh.
There was also something useful about allowing that to happen.
When you’ve spent time developing an idea, it’s easy to keep trying to make the original version work simply because you’ve already invested in it. Leigh taught us that sometimes the better decision is to stop asking how to fix the first design and start asking what the piece actually needs to become.
A one-piece can be difficult to get right. There’s more of the body involved, which means every change affects something else. Raise the leg and the proportions shift. Change the top and it changes how the entire suit reads. Adjust coverage and you have to consider how the piece sits from every angle.
We went through those decisions more than once.
The result is cleaner, higher through the leg, cheekier through the back, and much closer to what we wanted from SORVEL’s first one-piece.
Leigh wasn’t the suit we started with.
She’s the one we ended up wanting to keep.
LEIGH 003
Collection No. 001
SORVEL
Wherever the water takes you.