In February, the designer Meruert Tolegen made her New York Fashion Week debut in the midst of a winter storm. As snow fell outside the windows of her chosen venue, a former shopping arcade in Chinatown, models walked in fittingly romantic clothes, including a Pierrot-inspired black silk dress with beaded flowers; an ivory smocked, embroidered-lace dress with panniers; and an enveloping white satin puffer coat with a dainty floral print. Emphasizing the moment’s synergy were the show notes, which included a passage from the Belgian writer Paul Willems’s 1983 story collection, “The Cathedral of Mist.” An excerpt: “The sound of our voices changed and bent, too, beneath the whiteness, while the flakes piled on our clothes and hats.”
It was a notably serene show, and one that announced the arrival of a new talent. Tolegen, 32, who previously showed collections in Paris, makes personality-suffused clothes rich in both trimmings and technical skill. And, though her work has hints of the antique — “When I say I like vintage, I mean the 1800s,” she says — it also feels modern and fresh. Her namesake brand was born out of La Petite Anaïs, an online children’s clothing retailer that Tolegen, who’d begun her career as a scientific researcher, launched in 2019. Soon after, she added an in-house line of her own designs; among the current offerings are a jacquard coat with a Peter Pan collar and a motif of strawberry vines, and a pink lace dress with a rosebud-strewn yoke. Having decided she might like to wear something similar, she started posting women’s looks on Instagram in 2020, though her love of beauty and craftsmanship was established long before.
Until settling with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area at age 10, Tolegen grew up in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, and spent much of her time at her grandparents’ house, which had a yellow facade and a wraparound garden she’d help her grandmother tend. “At night, these big beetles, maybe two inches wide and all green and blue and pink, would gather around the lights,” she recalls. During the colder months, she’d knit and crochet with her grandmother, surrounded by the rugs and pottery that Tolegen’s grandfather had picked up on his travels. At the top of the house was a cupola, whose interior, with its low table and myriad korpe — hand-stitched patchwork tapestries — resembled a yurt and, whenever Tolegen felt upset or otherwise moved, she’d climb the staircase to the dome and draw pictures of the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains, which border the city to the south.
Her women’s line started as its own art project: “I kind of just made what was inside my head,” she says, adding that it has since become more wearable. The voluminous but lightweight Pierrot dress, for instance, is an update of one of her earliest designs, originally made from a prohibitively heavy velvet. Her clothes, which are hand-knit and -embellished in New York, where she’s lived since 2013, have also become more grown up. “When you have a child you’re dressing, they have this cuteness about them and you want some of that cuteness yourself, but a little bit of that has faded away,” 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 the sweetness is with sharp tailoring. “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 what almost looks like a tail coat,” says the designer, who also combines sensibilities within individual pieces, like a pleated twill skirt with a flash of lace that interrupts the garment’s clean lines. “I know it’s just one skirt, but I think it really gets at the notion of a woman being both strong and soft,” she says.
But Tolegen’s vision extends beyond a single gender — she challenged herself by showing a few men’s looks in February — and her line’s admirers aren’t limited by age, either. When the designer held a presentation in her home country last year, her grandmother’s cousin, who is in her early 80s, arrived in one of the brand’s pieces, a satin coat splashed 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 dainty print on the puffer coat, for example, features ghostly figures flying through 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,” she says. “If you really look, you’ll see it. Otherwise, it just seems like a cute floral print with ladies in dresses.”
Set design: Adrian Ababović. Set assistant: Maggie DiMarco. Hair: Jadis Jolie at E.D.M.A. Makeup: Eunice Kristen at E.D.M.A.