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In 2019, Meruert Tolegen was working as a scientific researcher, with plans to head to medical school, when her career took a hard pivot. With no formal training in fashion design, Tolegen—who was born in Kazakhstan and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area —turned away from the path she was on and moved in an entirely different direction, culminating in being named a semifinalist for the 2025 LVMH Prize.
The career change was “very accidental,” says Tolegen, who now lives in New York City. After giving birth to her daughter in 2017, she started a curated online children’s store as a fun way to spend her time while she was away from research. “It was just a creative outlet for me,” she said. She started to incorporate her own designs, which featured balloon-like dresses with Peter Pan collars, ruffled bloomers, and more, and it wasn’t long before they developed a cult following on social media. Eventually, many of the mothers shopping for their children were asking for designs that they could wear themselves. After creating women’s pieces that felt more elaborate than her children’s designs, Tolegen opted to sell her womenswear as a separate brand, using her first name and her maternal grandfather’s last name.
“I had no experience at all,” she says. “So I opened up the CFDA book online, where you have all of the seamstresses. I picked a name in knitwear that looked familiar to me because I speak Russian.” As it turned out, the man she reached out to had worked with Oscar de la Renta, and he pointed her in the direction of other collaborators. She also posted on Instagram, which led a cousin to refer her to another industry expert, and the rest, as they say, is history. “I always wanted to do something like [fashion],” she says. “I just never had the courage to really try…and well, here I am now.”
With every season, Tolegen looks to improve in her new profession. “It’s still a learning process for me, and I think it always will be,” she says. “I’m always trying to understand how I can make something better, what I can do to make something that is very solid.” With her fall 2025 collection, the designer debuted sculptural, chunky knitwear; voluminous dresses with pannier skirts; and head-turning shearling. The goal was to lean into her artistic side. “I just let [that] take over,” she says. “I don’t want to let myself worry about the other parts.”
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE.
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