I Just Went to NYFW—These Are the Emerging Brands That Stood Out to Me

While I'll always look forward to the marquee names at New York Fashion Week—the shows you plan your entire calendar around—I get just as excited for the emerging brands every season. There's something I've always loved about discovering unconventional new designers at the intersection of fashion, art, and culture who build their own aesthetic worlds and bring different perspectives to the industry. These are the runways, presentations, and showrooms I walk away from feeling inspired and reminded of what fashion can do when it embraces unbridled experimentation and deeper self-expression.

For spring/summer 2026, the labels that stood out most to me were Jane Wade, Gabe Gordon, Meruert Tolegen, Colleen Allen, and Mel Usine. Below, take a look at each of their latest collections.

Ever since Jane Wade started showing, she's become one of the designers I look forward to every season because of how her work is sharp, consistent, and distinctly her own. Fall/winter 2025 was inspired by the executive suite, but this time, she shifted to warehouses and workwear with a collection titled The Fulfillment. With visual direction by Tre Crews and creative direction alongside Joe Van O, Wade focused on utilitarian looks with her signature sleek touch.

The show notes read, "This season interrogates labor as currency—how bodies are monitored, time is sold, and exhaustion becomes uniform. Through operations, logistics, and manual work, the collection exposes the quiet violence of expendability under commerce, where machine efficiency threatens to erase human presence. Each garment resists invisibility, insisting on the value, tactility, and irreducible presence of the laboring body."

Shop Jane Wade

Romanian designer Lorena Pipenco drew from her heritage and referenced the 1965 film De-a fi Harap Alb, a fairytale about resilience, luck, and kindness when the odds are stacked against you. Her collection embraced fantasy and surrealism—favoring beauty, play, and imagination over hypercapitalism. The most unforgettable moment? A gown crafted from 900 lemon peels.

Shop Pipenco

At DCTV in downtown Manhattan, Gabe Gordon presented a collection drawing from J.G. Ballard's Crash, David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the novel, and Madonna's Erotica. According to the show notes, "Desire in American visual culture is often inseparable from destruction. Across media, the erotic is frequently staged through gestures of violence, collision, and rupture. This entanglement is nowhere more potent than in the overlapping imaginaries of demolition derby, fetishwear, and high-gloss sexual performance."

This marks the second season of Gordon's creative partnership with his partner Timothy Gibbons, who brings a background in costume design and tailoring to the knitwear line. The brand's spring/summer 2026 collection features partnerships with Guzema Fine Jewelry, TômTex, and Lime x LL, LLC, and the two designers are now finalists for the 2025 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.

Shop Gabe Gordon

From her background in menswear at The Row to her emergence as an independent designer, Colleen Allen is now a beloved staple at New York Fashion Week.

For this collection, she looked to women's domestic wardrobes—nightgowns, lingerie, and dressing gowns—crafted from silk and lace. The idea was to take pieces that were once confined to home life and make them public-facing.

Influenced by Red Comet, the biography of Sylvia Plath, Allen explores the duality between domestic constraint and creative ambition in her most recent collection.

Shop Colleen Allen

Originally from Kazakhstan and now based in New York, Meruert Tolegen has quickly become a favorite among editors since debuting in Paris in 2022. Tolegen's accomplishments speak for themselves: She is a 2025 LVMH Prize semifinalist, and her first store has just opened at 39 Wooster Street in SoHo. With such an impressive trajectory, it will be exciting to see what she does in the coming seasons.

Shop Meruert Tolegen

Mila Sullivan's show felt like stepping into a Victorian-era dream with the atmosphere set to music by the harp-and-violin duo called Leya. The Brooklyn-based designer works with reimagined vintage materials—hand-dyed silk, collaged lace, distressed textiles—to create pieces that feel incredibly thoughtful (because they are).

Shop Mila Sullivan

The debut of Stephen Biga's Mel Usine was one of the most exciting discoveries of the week. The Parsons fashion design alum, who previously worked at Proenza Schouler and Rodarte, has now launched his own line.

Inspired by Mélusine, a medieval French water nymph from the late 1300s, Biga's collection brings a modern twist to historical dressing. The result is wearable medievalism. The pieces are currently only available through custom orders and wholesale with Ric NYC.