If your idea of spring is black, delicate lace, Victorian florals, black, shoulders that Nosferatu would have loved, more black, oversized ruffles, Edwardian capes, and oh, did we mention black, then you’ve found your designer: Meruert Tolegen. It was all present in her spring 2025 collection, which she presented at the very beginning of the penultimate day of New York Fashion Week, in the shade of a sun-drenched Central Park. It was the first time I’d seen one of her shows, but not the first time I’d heard her name; Writer and fashion icon par excellence Lynn Yaeger has been wearing Tolegen for a while now, and in fact arrived at today’s presentation in one of her creations: a silk taffeta artist’s blouse the color of freshly uncorked champagne, trimmed with ruffles and embellished with black embroidery that looks like it was supervised by Edward Gorey. She looked fantastic.
The New York shows in recent days have been marked by female-led brands that have combined conceptualism, minimalism and pragmatism in equal measure: Tory Burch the night before, Catherine Holstein’s Khaite on Saturday night and, just after Tolegen’s show, Toteme, partly designed by Elin Kling. Of course, The Row and Phoebe Philo are also heroines. And yet there is another group of designers who feel the pull of a darker, more romantic, gothic (like Mary Shelley, not Siouxsie Sioux, though sometimes she is too) and deliciously fragmented and fractured undercurrent. The wonderful Simone Rocha is part of this, to some extent, as is Elena Dawson, the best-kept secret, who works out of Sussex in the UK, sells at Dover Street Market and doesn’t just exude an air of mystery, she practically wrote the playbook.
Tolegen clearly shares the same mindset. “I really wanted to focus on the artistic side of what I do,” the designer says. “I feel like my brand has been perceived as very light and airy, but because of that, I wasn’t sure if I was representing it properly in some way; I wanted it to really reflect me.” By that, she means being the kind of woman who grew up listening to goth rock music—screamo music, she called it, which I loved. And from that statement, one imagines Tolegen wants to offer a more specific reflection on how she perceives her own femininity, shaped by her particular life experience as someone who moved to New York from her native Kazakhstan as a child. (Today, she continues to live in the city—and makes her clothes here, too.)
She opened her show with a woman walking down the runway in a beige taffeta dress with red beads, her only accessory a singing bowl that vibrated and hummed as she walked. (After a frenetic subway ride from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, this was welcome. The downside: Now I need it every day.) From there, a procession of delicate young and old moved slowly and gracefully through the space in black lace dresses trimmed with flowers and a train in its wake, while another wore a black leather harness. Two cute guys wore Pierrot pajamas and a loose golden beige sweater over a black linen kilt; an hourglass-shaped black jacket—the waist nipped in as if someone had sucked in a breath of shock—was paired with ruffled-hem pants; a downtown Degas tulle petticoat looked decidedly Black Swan-ish. The fabrics rustled, the sound of the ballerinas was barely audible as they were so soft on the floor, and there was a quiet silence in the air. And as you walked out at the end of the show and watched Amy Fine Collins warmly congratulate Tolegen, you wondered where she might go from here.
#Meruert #Tolegen #brought #touch #magical #darkness #sunny #York #Fashion #Week