In February, designer Meruert Tolegen made her New York Fashion Week debut amid a winter storm. As snow fell outside the windows of her chosen venue, a former shopping arcade in Chinatown, models walked in suitably romantic outfits, including a Pierrot-inspired black silk dress with beaded flowers. An ivory smock, embroidered lace dress with panniers. and a wraparound white satin coat with an elegant floral print. Emphasizing the synergy of the moment were the show notes, which included an excerpt from Belgian author Paul Willems’ 1983 collection of stories, “The Cathedral of Mist.” A quote: “The sound of our voices changed and bent too, beneath the whiteness, while the flakes piled on our clothes and hats.”
It was a particularly serene show, heralding the arrival of a new talent. The 32-year-old Tolegen, who has previously shown collections in Paris, makes clothes full of personality rich in both embellishment and technical skill. And while her work has hints of the antique—“When I say I like vintage, I mean the 1800s,” she says—it’s also modern and fresh. Her eponymous brand was born out of La Petite Anaïs, an online children’s clothing store launched by Tolegen, who had started her career as a scientific researcher, in 2019. Soon after, she added an in-house line with her own designs. Among the current offerings are a jacquard coat with a Peter Pan collar and a strawberry vine pattern, and a pink lace dress with a yoke encrusted with rosebuds. After deciding she’d like to wear something similar, she began posting women’s looks on Instagram in 2020, though her love of beauty and craftsmanship was established long before that.
Until settling with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 10, Tolegen grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, and she spent much of her time at her grandparents’ house, which had a yellow facade and a walled garden that she would help her grandmother take care of. “At night, these big beetles, maybe two inches wide and all green and blue and pink, would gather around the lights,” he recalls. In the colder months, she knitted and crocheted with her grandmother, surrounded by rugs and pottery that Tolegen’s grandfather had taken on his travels. On the top of the house was a dome, the interior of which, with the low table and the myriads korpe — hand-stitched patchwork tapestries—they looked like a yurt, and whenever Tolegen felt upset or otherwise moved, she would climb the ladder to the dome and draw images of the Trans-Ili Alatau Mountains, which border the city to the south.
Her women’s line began as her own artwork: “I made exactly what was in my head,” she says, adding that it’s since become more wearable. The voluminous yet light Pierrot dress, for example, is an update of one of her early designs, which was originally made from a prohibitively heavy velvet. Her clothes, which are hand-knitted and embellished in New York, where she has lived since 2013, have also grown bigger. “When you have a child you dress up, they have this sweetness, and you want some of that sweetness, but it’s faded a little bit,” says Tolegen, whose daughter, Anaïs, is now 7. Being a mother was such a big part of my identity, but now I’m coming back to myself and rediscovering who I am.”
One way Tolegen cuts through the sweetness is with a sharp fit. “Let’s say you’re wearing one of the dresses with the floral print and the lace and the bows, but then you pair it with something that’s almost like a train,” says the designer, who also mixes sensibilities into individual pieces such as . a pleated twill skirt with a flash of lace that interrupts the clean lines of the garment. “I know it’s just a skirt, but I think it really means that a woman is both strong and soft,” she says.
But Tolegen’s vision extends beyond a single gender—she challenged herself by showing some men’s looks in February—and fans of her line aren’t limited by age, either. When the designer held a presentation in her hometown last year, her grandmother’s cousin, who is in her 80s, arrived wearing one of the brand’s pieces, a satin coat with images of fruit, flowers and rabbits. What Tolegen’s fans share, in her eyes, is an artistic streak, and perhaps a sense of humor — because she enjoys a bit of whimsical irreverence. The elegant print on the puffer coat, for example, features ghostly figures traversing ranunculus in the nude, and a print from last season incorporates creatures that are part woman and part swan. “It’s almost like a secret,” he says. “If you really look, you’ll see it. Otherwise, it just looks like a cute floral print with ladies in dresses.”
Model: Zahra Traore at Elite NYC. Casting by Studio Bauman. Scenography: Adrian Ababović. Stage Assistant: Maggie DiMarco. Hair: Jadis Jolie at EDMA Makeup: Eunice Kristen at EDMA