Meet NYFW's Most Exciting Emerging Designers
As NYFW unfolds, emerging designers are claiming space alongside industry heavyweights, offering collections rooted in emotion, craft, and individuality. From sculptural tailoring to handmade textures, these rising talents are shaping the future of fashion—bringing fresh energy and new perspective to the season.
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Mel Usine explores the tension between opposites—sensuality and restraint, strength and vulnerability, transparency and opacity. Founded in 2024 by Stephen Biga, a Parsons graduate with design experience at Proenza Schouler, Gabriela Hearst, and Rodarte, the brand draws from forgotten French lore and historical dress codes, translating them into modern wardrobing through cerebral clashes of modest textiles with curious opulence. With a discerning emphasis on silhouette, proportion, and texture, Mel Usine centers savoir-faire through surface design, luxurious fibers, and precious details. At NYFW, Biga presents the brand’s debut collection mixing the temporality of memory with the exuberance of modernity in reverence to the female form.
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Caroline Zimbalist approaches fashion as a painter and sculptor would, translating abstract color and form into wearable art. Trained across painting, illustration, and sculpture before earning her BFA from Parsons, Zimbalist has spent recent years pioneering the use of biodegradable bioplastics—molding fluid, three-dimensional forms from a proprietary recipe of natural materials. Her work blurs the boundaries between fashion, art, and design, positioning biomaterials as both medium and message. Intricate crochet and body-conscious silhouettes appear alongside sculptural bioplastic elements, creating pieces that feel theatrical yet grounded in ecological responsibility. The Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree presents a vision less about trends and more about material experimentation—fashion as an evolving conversation between body, color, and sustainable innovation.
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Gabe Gordon brings a quietly cerebral approach to fashion, rooted in meticulous handcraft and the tension between nostalgia and discomfort. Since 2019, the New York-based designer has built his practice around innovative textile techniques—hand-looming, hand-dyeing, space-dyeing yarn, and his distinctive moth hole treatment. His knitwear-focused collections draw from nostalgic Americana and vintage sportswear, yet infuse these references with something more complex: an exploration of queer identity, decay, and the body’s relationship to its “woven second skin.” Gordon presents work that reveals itself slowly, rewarding closer attention with garments meant for regeneration and transformation on the wearer.
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Andrew Curwen’s designs are driven by vulnerability and fantasy—two words, he admits, that don’t often sit together. A Lake Placid native and Parsons graduate, Curwen found early inspiration in the work of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. His collections balance refined tailoring with experimental fabric treatments: shirred and shredded silk transformed into shearling-like textures, three bolts of cotton voile gathered into a single skirt, sharp shoulders cut into both suit jackets and hoodies. At NYFW, Curwen builds on the rawness and sincerity of his July 2025 debut, Your Last Breath Belongs To Me, presenting fashion that refuses to be sterilized—a map to his safe place, and a vision of where fashion could go when devotion feels truly romantic.
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Contessa Mills operates at the intersection of New York City elegance and ancient mysticism, creating garments that transform the everyday into something extraordinary. Drawing from both the material exuberance of urban life and the allure of occult practices, Mills approaches each piece as a unique work of art—tactile, sculptural, and designed to inspire awe. Her work celebrates both form and formlessness, crafting clothes for those who revel in standing out and find magic in the act of dressing up. Mills presents a vision rooted in joy and self-expression, building a body of work that speaks to the wearer’s most extraordinary self.
FEATURED IMAGE Photo by Duane Mendes on Unsplash