Four Emerging Designers to Put on Your Radar This Season

New York Times

06-02-2025

Mira Maktabi
The Beirut-born, London-based designer Mira Maktabi credits her interest in fashion to her great-grandmother: 'Whether or not she had company, she would dress up in a long velvet caftan, beautiful eyeglasses and diamond rings while having cardamom tea at 5 p.m. sharp,' Maktabi, 26, says. The designer has brought this ethos of 'cherishing well-made garments that can [be passed down] for many generations' to her own brand, which she started after earning her master's from Central Saint Martins in London last year. With her graduate collection, Maktabi paid homage to her design heroes, such as the French couturiers Madame Grès and Madeleine Vionnet, who were masters of draping, using the technique on silk tops and georgette dresses. These appeared alongside cowhide leather jackets and softly tailored trousers, all in a limited palette of cream, chocolate brown and black. This month in London, she will present a trunk show of her fall 2025 collection, which she says 'is a bit dreamier, freer and more evening-focused.' Each item will be custom-made, she says, allowing the garments to 'truly belong to the person wearing them.' Though her home country of Lebanon was most recently hit by a series of Israeli airstrikes, Maktabi has trained herself to remain focused on her work: 'As Lebanese people, resilience is ingrained in us,' she says. 'Creation can be a form of escape.'
Skarule
Growing up in post-Soviet era Latvia, Sabine Skarule developed a DIY mentality at a young age. 'In '90s Riga, clothes weren't bought — they were made,' the designer, 35, says. 'My mother had a knitting machine, and I learned how to create a garment from scratch.' Though she moved to Antwerp, Belgium, at age 24 to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and, after graduating, relocated to New York for an internship at the Row, Skarule has remained deeply connected to her cultural heritage. Her 2020 graduate collection, for which she received the H&M Design Award, was titled '+371' in reference to Latvia's international telephone code, and she returned to Riga to start her namesake brand, which is defined by what she refers to as 'Baltic nostalgia.' Her spring 2025 collection includes an oversize black leather jacket with a pattern inspired by a traditional Latvian men's shirt, and she worked with local craftspeople on pieces like a hand-knit and crocheted mosaic silk vest and hand-woven linen pants with fringe. For her new collection, which she will present during Paris Fashion Week, 'the materials — linen, cotton, wool, leather — are deeply tied to a sense of home,' she says. 'The color palette is more grounded than usual. Riga's gray dominates.' She aims to infuse the brand, which is available at Mr. Larkin in Copenhagen and Houston, with what she calls 'a quiet undercurrent of Latvian traditions, superstitions and beliefs — the kind of details only a local would recognize.'
Raquel de Carvalho
The Brazilian designer Raquel de Carvalho, 33, fell in love with yarn in 2012, when she worked with a textile mill in Tuscany for a knitwear competition. Then in 2021, a few years after earning her postgraduate diploma from the London College of Fashion, she won a competition for emerging designers held in Florence and, as part of the prize, created a 12-piece collection. She established her namesake brand, which is now stocked at APOC Store in London, Magarchivio in Florence, Italy, and the Forumist in Stockholm, the following year. The inspiration for her new collection — which she will present with a short film and lookbook during London Fashion Week — was a hand-knit sweater from her late grandmother's wardrobe. 'She passed away the day after my graduate catwalk show, so I wanted to connect with her through this collection,' says de Carvalho. She sourced vintage Aran sweaters — chunky, hand-knit garments from Ireland — and then unpicked and reconstructed them using a combination of embroidery and crochet, before coating them with foil to give them the texture of leather. Other pieces include a sheer blouse with a trompe l'oeil crochet pattern and a gray knitted dress with metallic thread woven throughout. By screen printing a lace pattern onto jersey or playing with transparencies in her intarsia lace dresses, de Carvalho hopes to explore new possibilities with yarn and string. 'I think many people still see knitwear as something cozy and casual,' she says, 'but I like to take it somewhere unexpected.'
Tíscar Espadas
The Spanish designer Tíscar Espadas, 31, advocates for a slow approach to fashion, releasing only one collection a year, which she calls a 'capitulo' ('chapter') of her brand's book. 'We don't want to serve one season or a short period of time,' she says. 'Much more interesting for us is the idea of building a deeper and more complex story.' After earning a master's in men's wear from the Royal College of Art in London (where she was awarded a scholarship from Burberry), Espadas in 2019 established her own brand, which has developed a cult following in Japan and is stocked in Mexico, Taiwan, Switzerland and Spain. Last year, she won the Spanish Vogue Fashion Fund. Espadas's clothes often feature voluminous and off-kilter silhouettes; the new collection, which is currently on view at her Tokyo showroom, includes balloon-shaped shorts, elongated vests and coats adorned with ceramic jasmine flowers and sterling silver pins. 'We start from sketches, but we allow ourselves to make mistakes along the way,' she says of her design process. 'It's often in those moments that unexpected details come to life.'