TYLER'S STORY

Tyler Ellis’ sartorial journey has been a lifetime in the making. In November of 1984, she was born in Los Angeles to the legendary designer Perry Ellis and his good friend, Barbara Gallagher, an NBC executive and one of the original producers of Saturday Night Live. "The plan was for me to live in L.A. for the school year and travel abroad with my father in the summers," Tyler recalls. "But things changed."

The fashion industry was rocked when Perry Ellis tragically passed away in May 1986, of complications from AIDS. Although the world lost an icon, Tyler lost her father. "My dad passed away when I was 18 months old, so I have no personal memories of him," Tyler says. "But after researching his life and hearing personal stories from my mom and his peers, I see so many similarities between me and my father.  He was a very private man who took his career extremely seriously, dreaming big and striving for nothing but the best.  Yet what he loved most was spending time with close friends and family, sharing funny stories over delicious food and fine wine…enjoying life.  Unique points of view I find innate in me.”

After graduating Boston University with a degree in communications, Tyler moved to New York City, where she began to connect with the fashion community that had embraced her father so many years before. "I was fortunate to meet Michael Kors and ended up interning directly with him and his team," she says. "They were so down to earth—a sentiment that, prior to this experience, I didn’t think existed in fashion." Eventually, the pull of her design DNA proved too difficult to resist, and she decided to launch her own handbag line in 2011. "I have always been an accessories girl, but what really pushed me into the handbag world was traveling," Tyler says. "I kept noticing that women all over the world, from London to Tokyo, were carrying the same luxury brands. So, I chose to embark on designing a seasonless line of handbags with the same quality as the large houses, but with the charm of a boutique brand.” 

With that mission in mind, she set out to design a truly original and luxurious collection of handbags, purses, totes and clutches. The bags were first crafted in Paris, France, and today, Le Sieci, Italy, where she continues to source the finest leathers and rarest exotics. Initially labeling the line Tyler Alexandra, she surprisingly left off her famous last name. "Reflecting back, starting the company was a life-altering event," she explains. "I was leaping into an entirely new world about to be critiqued by an industry that my father had mastered. Candidly, I felt I needed to earn my last name, not just use it."

In 2017, after five years of perfecting her designs and developing an incredible partnership with her factory, Tyler took the next step – launching her first collection, ‘Palm Springs’, under the Tyler Ellis label. "I finally felt ready to embrace my last name in the fashion world," she says. "My father is an extraordinary American fashion icon, and he always will be—but that doesn’t mean that I can’t create my own Ellis legacy.”

Currently, Tyler and her husband Ben live in Los Angeles, with their puppies. Passionate about continuing education, Tyler is an Executive Board member of Learning Lab Ventures, an organization focused on transforming the lives of children living in Los Angeles and disrupting generational poverty through intensive after-school education and enrichment programming. She is also a founding member of the InStyle Fashion Trust, a charitable initiative that provides business support to U.S. based designers through financial grants and strategic mentoring.