It’s beach season — or, as we like to call it, prime tunic time… To celebrate, we partnered with Shine by Three’s Margaret Zhang, who headed out to the Harry Gesner House in Malibu with models Zoey Deutch, Kenya Kinski-Jones, Annie McGinty and Nikia Phoenix to shoot the summer collection’s best tunic looks. Here, the photographer tells us about the outing and shares her own tunic tips.

The inspiration behind the shoot…
The idea was to bring together a cross-section of women from different backgrounds, skill sets, and industries, but who are together a great representation of the young Los Angeles woman. These are women who could hold a meaningful conversation about their areas of passion — something I love to do with a subject to understand their character and make them as comfortable as possible in front of a camera.

And the inspiration behind the location, Malibu’s Gesner Beach House…
Harry Gesner is such an iconic fixture in American architecture, and his work is so much about drawing on shapes in nature. This particular house was built for his wife using found and reclaimed materials and didn’t just feel like a “modernist” home transplanted into a beach environment. It was very much built into the landscape, which was well suited to the relaxed and uncontrived direction of the shoot.

Favorite look from this collection…
I loved the hooded tunic we shot on Annie. It just has such an easy, Baja surf sensibility — with a Sixties Cali-rock soundtrack playing in the background.

A fun behind-the-scenes anecdote…
I couldn’t stop laughing at the house pug, Zephyr, a paunchy, cross-eyed sweetheart.

I love a great tunic because…
I’ve always struggled with beach cover-ups. Most are awkward and a strange degree of sheer. Tunics split the difference so well, and make excellent layering pieces.

My bohemian icon and why…
I love Janis Joplin’s Seventies aesthetic. The evolution of her image was so much an extension of the rawness of her voice and her approach to sound.

A West Coast state of mind is…
Laid-back.

SHOP TUNICS