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 kind of shows you base 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—the ones who build their own aesthetic worlds and bring different perspectives to the industry. These are the types of runways, presentations, and showrooms I walk away from feeling reinspired, 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, 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. While Fall/Winter 2025 was inspired by the executive suite, 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."
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Jane Wade
Button Down Dress
Jane Wade
Corseted Pencil Skirt
Jane Wade
High Collar Gown
Romanian designer Lorena Pipenco drew from her heritage, referencing the 1965 film De-a fi Harap Alb, a fairy tale about resilience, luck, and kindness when the odds are stacked against you. Her collection embraced fantasy and surrealism—favoring beauty, play, and imagination over hyper-capitalism. The most unforgettable moment? A gown crafted from 900 lemon peels.
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PIPENCO LORENA
Pipenco Flower Bag
PIPENCO LORENA
Pink Ladder Knitted Cardigan
PIPENCO LORENA
Green Moving Stripe Cardigan
At DCTV in downtown Manhattan, Gabe Gordon presented a collection drawing from J.G. Ballard’s Crash, David Cronenberg’s film adaptation, 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 husband, Timothy Gibbons, who brings a background in costume design and tailoring to the knitwear line. With their Spring/Summer 2026 collection featuring collaborations with Guzema Fine Jewelry, TômTex, and Lime x LL, LLC, the two are now finalists for the 2025 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.
