From Vintage Patterns to Tennis Wear: How Michele Cosentino Built Top Banana Fashion Brand

How did her love of tennis and vintage clothing lead her to a fashion brand? Michele Cosentino is the founder of the tennis wear line called Top Banana. She began sewing clothes as a home school project and would collect vintage sewing patterns and update them to create her own designs. During the pandemic, she learned to play tennis and she returned to her passion of sewing. Tennis outfits were on her mind and her line Top Banana was born.

“It went from people always asking me where I get my clothes from, to now me creating clothes for them,” she said. Michele’s designs are inspired by her childhood in Upstate New York. Michele calls it a simpler time in the 1970s and 80s, “Summers were long and full of boredom, time was told by ringing church bells and illuminated street lights prompted a quick bike ride home for family dinner.”

Michele’s husband had built a barn on their property that was to be a workspace for him. The space morphed into a fashion design/trunk show space for her new sportswear label. “This summer I renamed it the Top Banana studio. Maybe I knew all along what I’d been working towards.”

Michele studied graphic design at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, GA. After a 15-year graphic design career in NYC, she returned to school at Parsons School of Design and received an AAS in Fashion Design.

Michele lives in Westport, Connecticut with her husband Ari, their son Uzi, their daughter Wallis, and a cat named Lady Di. The latest addition is Waffles, an American yellow lab.