Dear Shaded Viewers,
“I want every look to contain that tension,” says Meruert Tolegen, as models glide through the Palais de Tokyo in a whispering eighteenth-century reverie of corsetry and lace, sharpened by her own modern twist and strict construction. There is an inwardness to the work that makes it moody rather than theatrical. She says it springs from who she is internally, and she speaks of people as kaleidoscopes of many facets. The clothes share that refusal to settle into a single state, and they never explain themselves all at once. In an industry addicted to confession, a designer who keeps something unsaid is almost indecent.
Tolegen arrives in Paris with a vocabulary that has never pretended to be soft. Born in Kazakhstan and trained in biosciences before turning to design, she composes her language from sculpted silhouettes, meticulous corsetry, and materials chosen for their rigidity and hold. A former scientist who dresses women like architecture makes perfect sense to me. Who better to understand that desire is a matter of tension?
Her references are an architect grandfather and a garden tended with her grandmother in Almaty. That is the whole thesis: the hard frame and the living thing inside it. Her clothes stage the negotiation between the two. The garment is the building, the body is the garden, and the pleasure is in their argument. Her earlier seasons had the same drama, with voluminous dresses on pannier skirts, chunky sculptural knits, and shearling that turned heads.
Tolegen offers something more valuable than wearable art: a silhouette that lets you feel like the hero of your own romance.
