Meruert Tolegen seems to be living a fashion dream. Since launching her line in 2021, the designer has been a finalist for both the LVMH and CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prizes, and in the coming week will open her own boutique at 39 Wooster Street. “I feel it’s kind of surreal that they even considered me for anything,” the soft-spoken Tolegen said in a preshow interview. “I learned a lot from my peers, the designers I’ve had around me. It’s been a really nice and humbling experience.”
Tolegen’s trajectory does not follow the usual path of design school, internships, apprenticeship, and entrepreneurship. Rather, she comes to the métier through an obsessive curiosity about how clothes are made. As a child in Kazakhstan, she practiced handcrafts with her grandmother, but that was long in the past, when Tolegen started collecting while working as a scientific researcher. “I just would buy pieces that I really liked, and I loved to see how they were made,” she told Laia Garcia-Furtado. “I was fascinated by how much work goes into it, and then I started to develop this fascination with the actual craftsmanship of it.” After becoming a mother, Tolegen launched an online shop for childrenswear and discovered there was a demand for mommy-and-me looks. Like Mary Quant, who at the beginning of her career bought fabric over the counter, not knowing about wholesale, this designer started out working with elaborate and expensive materials.
She made her runway debut in Paris for fall 2022 and first showed in New York two years later, for fall 2024. That collection was distinguished by its romanticism, historicism, and a certain Frenchness that was communicated through textiles. The panniered opening looks of the spring collection she showed in her soon-to-open boutique today seemed to nod to Marie Antoinette, whose style will soon be celebrated by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tolegen wasn’t stuck on the 18th century, however: A puff-sleeve jacket was Victorian in feeling, ditto some of the corsetry. The designer wanted to focus more on tailoring this season, and the result was that the collection felt tighter. “I think I just prefer sculptural, structured pieces,” she said. “I wanted people to focus on the garments, so I made all the looks very clean.”
Her goal is that the customer discovers an “artisan hand” and a “feeling of whimsy.” Although Tolegen’s collections are driven by craftsmanship rather than narrative—she didn’t have a PR inspiration statement—her references to Pierrot, ballerinas, queens, and fair maidens of Arthurian lore lend a storybook quality to her work.
