MEGAN - We're here for the Melissa Shoes launch at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Swim. Lorenzo, tell us about your involvement. You seem you're just involved in everything. Is there 24 hours in the day for you? What's going on here?

LORENZO - The days seem a little short for me. I manage to work with so many artists and brands because I think I made really good choices. I happen to work with people I love.

I've been involved with swim week because of Nycked swimwear, my swim line, but also with Melissa shoes. Melissa shoes is a company that I've been working for three years, since they relaunched in America. It's a thirty year old brand. But we are excited because in today in miami, down in South Beach, we are showing the 2012 collection. We invited our friends, press, and buyers to see come our new shoes. We have a lot of novelty. The two major ones are two new collaboration.

Mellisa is a major brand that has been very good with collaborating with artists, designers and architects - creative people, and they make shoes. That's the great thing about having plastic as the medium of the shoes because you can do whatever you want with the shoes. So we had worked with amazing people, from Jean Paul Gaultier to Zaha Hadid to the Campana brothers to Theirry Mugler in the 80s.

MEGAN - Wow!

LORENZO - We've worked with a lot of amazing people. This year's collaborators are amazing. We have one European collaborator, English. Gareth Pugh has designed shoes for us, and Jason Wu. Jason Wu is the first America designer to collaborate with Melissa, so we're really excited. We are actually taking him to Brazil tonight. We're taking him there, stealing from America for a week, and we're doing amazing things with Vogue and Elle, all the local magazines in Brazil. We're doing parties and events, and we're launching his shoes today there, so please pay attention to the waiters, the waiters are carrying our shoes around, including Jason Wu's.

Something else we did for today, we asked a local Miami artist, because I think it's really important to work with local people, wherever we are, I think we want to collaborate and meet with local people, we collaborate with designer Nektar De Stagni, this fabulous designer, she has this beautiful jewelry line, but is also an artist. The brand has this sustainability angle to it - the shoes are recyclable, but I thought, why don't you do a sculture out of shoes, so we sent her shoes from past collection, and she has created those amazing scultpures. They're little characters and I loved the way she plays with color. They're fun, they're joyful, and I think that's what the brand is all about. It's a very colorful, fashion-forward brand, and I think Nektar captures that through her work. It's nice to meet up with this beautiful venue at this grove, and having a delicous brunch, and then having good things to look at and beautiful objects, and thank you so much for being part of this.

MEGAN - Thank you for inviting us! Speaking of beautiful objects, last year you were here with Irina Shayk. It's exciting she made the swimsuit cover!

LORENZO - Yes! She was inside the issue last year, and this year she is the cover of Sports Illustrated, which is such a big deal, and that has changed her life forever. I've been representing her for a year with Ryan Brown, my business partner at ARC, which is our talent PR agency. We are part of this process of making her into a star. She's really excited. She's modeling a lot more, and she's now also taking parts in movies, and her career is going to another level. It's so exciting for her!

MEGAN - Let's talk about another reason you're here in swim week. You're a big designer with Nycked swim wear and Jules Kim. Talk about the swimwear you showed last night. It's a hit, it's sexy, these are the most fashion-forward suits I've seen on the market. Tell us a little bit about that.

LORENZO - I'm honored you say that. Nycked is another project of mine that I started with Jules Kim. And that I think leads to what I was saying. There are amazing people that we decided to create projects and companies together, and I'm so lucky that I've met all these amazing designers in fashion that brings so much of my ideas to life.

Jules Kim is someone I met when I had this idea of having a swimwear line. And I thought there was a niche in the market because I felt a lot of the swimwear brands were very.. they had this either Miami or LA sensibility, and they were all very bright colors and bright prints and palm trees, and I thought "you know what, I think there's something about people that live in the city that likes solids and dark colors, they don't have swimwear."

MEGAN - New York.

LORENZO - New York. And also, New York is such an inspirational lifestyle that I love. I think a lot of brands captures New York with ready-to-wear, but no one captures the New York downtown lifestyle in swimwear. It's such a disconnect, there's no beach there, so I think no one had that idea before, and I thought there was actually a way.

I'm a foreigner. I'm brazilian. And I thought when I arrived in New York three years ago, I started seeing that New York is all about the architecutre, it's all about the nightlife, it's all about the social wear. People dress up all the time. It's one of the few cities that you take the subway and you see people wearing gowns and tuxedos going to the theatre, and it's very exciting that people dress up. And we captured those concepts, in architecture, social wear, and nightlife, and we translate to bikini.

This is our second season, we are also part of Salon Allure that we're showing the collection at the W Hotel here. We had a beautiful fashion show last night. It was really exciting because I didn't want to do a show nor a presentation. I wanted a more artistic presentation, so I also hired two Circue de Soleil performers, and they were wearing our suits. Meanwhile, the girls were doing the runway, and we had this amazing performance from the Cirque de Soleil girls, and it looked beautiful. So we're excited. In our first season, we were in Saks, Shopbop, The Bay in Canada, and now this season, the collection looks even better, so I hope to grow this project and this brand and make it into very much a hit. And I hope everyone can enjoy.

MEGAN - One that we we're going see in the subway, or out in the club.

LORENZO - Hopefully! We always joke like that. We are very good at creating one piece suits, and we love girls that wear that as a top, with shorts that go out at night, and they wear out of the pool or beach environment.