Meruert Tolegen, spring 2026 ready-to-wear

Photo: Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com

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 designer said in a pre-show 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, entrepreneurship. Rather she comes to the metier 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 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.