The fashion industry loves to talk about disruption. These seven designers are actually doing it.
Spring 2026 arrived with a particular energy on the runways – less reverence for legacy, more appetite for vision. Across New York, London, and Johannesburg, a new wave of designers showed up with work that doesn’t ask for permission. Some are making their first CFDA appearances after years of building independently. Others are reclaiming heritage the industry tried to flatten. All of them are worth your full attention.
Here are the emerging designers defining fashion right now.
1. Menyelek Rose — Menyelek
Menyelek Rose learned everything from YouTube.
The 28-year-old Baltimore-raised designer never completed formal training – one semester of community college, then a one-way move to New York and a decision to just do it. That was nine years ago. Since then, Rose has staged two collections a year, entirely outside the establishment, building a brand around his signature crochet and patchwork aesthetic that traces directly to his grandmother’s handmade blankets.
“The Menyelek motto has always been about using what’s around you to create beauty,” Rose told W Magazine ahead of his debut on the official CFDA calendar for fall 2026 — his first time on the schedule after nearly a decade of building on his own terms.
His spring 2026 collection tells the story of a Victorian warlord’s illegitimate daughter and her longing for a father’s attention (loosely drawn from his brother’s estranged relationship with their own father.) It’s emotional, theatrical, and unmistakably his.
Menyelek Rose is proof that the industry’s gatekeepers were never the point.
Follow: @menyelek_
2. Sinéad O'Dwyer
Most designers make one sample size for a runway show. Sinéad O’Dwyer makes five.
The Ireland-born, London-based designer fits her collections from a UK size 4 up to a 32 (a decision that sounds simple and is), in practice, a complete reimagining of how fashion gets made. Her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, “Everything Opens to Touch,” continued her commitment to designing for the full range of bodies the industry has historically ignored, casting disabled models and celebrating physical difference as an aesthetic truth rather than a brand statement.
Winner of the Zalando Visionary Award and a fixture at Copenhagen Fashion Week, O’Dwyer doesn’t describe what she does as “inclusive fashion.” She describes it as fashion. The modifier, she suggests, is the industry’s problem to work through, not hers. Vogue UK recently called her work “dismantling the notion of sample sizes entirely.” That’s exactly right, and it’s barely a fraction of what she’s building.
Follow: @sjodwyer
3. Thebe Magugu
Thebe Magugu’s Spring 2026 collection was a tribute to Sarah Baartman – the South African woman sold into slavery in the 19th century, whose body was put on display for European audiences as spectacle.
That’s the level of weight Magugu brings to his work.
The Johannesburg-based designer and LVMH Prize winner has built one of the most intellectually rigorous brands in fashion – collections rooted in African history, politics, philosophy, and feminism, presented with the craft precision of a European luxury house. His Spring/Summer 2026 runway, held as part of his ongoing designer residency with the iconic Hotel Nelllie in Cape Town, confirmed what the fashion world already knew: Magugu is not emerging. He has arrived. But the broader audience he deserves is still catching up.
For Linger, Thebe Magugu represents everything the magazine stands for: fashion as a vehicle for history, identity, and cultural reckoning. Watch him closely.
Follow: @thebemagugu
4. Mel Usine — Stephen Biga
Mel Usine is not a person. She is a French water nymph – a mythical figure who became the unexpected muse for one of New York’s most quietly radical young designers.
Stephen Biga, 34, launched the Mel Usine label in 2024 after training at Parsons and The New School, and working alongside Rodarte, Proenza Schouler, and Gabriela Hearst. His Spring/Summer 2026 debut – his first collection on the official CFDA calendar – drew on medieval tapestry and French mythology to produce something genuinely rare: womenswear that felt romantic without feeling weak.
“An embrace of femininity, but in a way that doesn’t feel fragile,” is how Biga describes his design philosophy. Silk, chiffon, organza, and Italian lace transformed into what he calls “narrative fashion” – clothes that build a world rather than simply fill a closet.
The label’s name came from a typo, the muse from a centuries-old legend, and the talent from years of watching how the best in the industry thinks. Spring 2026 was just the first chapter.
Follow: @mel__usine
5. Lorena Pipenco — Pipenco
Lorena Pipenco’s apartment smelled like lemons for weeks.
That’s because her Spring/Summer 2026 showpiece – a sleek halterneck dress constructed from over 900 dried lemon slices – required every piece of citrus she could get her hands on. “We were all just having lemonade, making lemon cocktails, drinking lemon tea,” the 25-year-old designer recalled. The result stopped the industry cold.
Pipenco grew up in Essex making custom pieces for the girls in her town with her mother and grandmother. Her Romanian heritage runs through everything she creates – the tension between childhood and adulthood, the weight of generational tradition, and a signature line of comically oversized hats in nylon yarn that Lauryn Hill has worn on stage and Raye recently wore for an editorial shoot.
Her fall 2026 collection turns inward. Pipenco found a display of traditional Romanian textiles at a festival in New Jersey that told the story of a woman’s love life through pattern and embroidery. She is now telling her own love story the same way. “I feel a bit exposed,” she admits. “But I’ve grown with the brand, and I want to talk about myself for once.”
Pipenco is whimsical, dark, personal, and completely her own. She belongs on every list.
Follow: @pipencolorena
6. Andrew Curwen
Andrew Curwen started his brand because of a John Galliano show.
Specifically, Galliano’s final show for Maison Margiela in 2024 – the collection that reminded Curwen, who had spent years working at Beacon’s Closet and alongside fellow Parsons graduates, that fashion could still hit like a physical force. “I realized the hunger was still there,” he told W Magazine.
His debut collection (11 pieces, anchored by a corseted top bearing his own family crest) established the visual language his brand still speaks: dark, gothic, architectural, and steeped in a romantic obsession with the turn of the century. Think oxblood red and deep black. Think Edgar Allen Poe. Lady Gaga wore one of his designs. His fall 2026 collection goes, by his own description, “more extreme.”
Curwen grew up moving constantly because of his father’s military career. “I never felt like I had a home,” he says. His collections are an ongoing attempt to build one on his own terms: through clothes that treat beauty as essential to human cognition, not decorative afterthought.
Follow: @andrewcurwen
7. Caroline Zimbalist
Caroline Zimbalist’s kitchen is a laboratory.
The 28-year-old New York designer constructs her garments from biomaterials – substances made from natural ingredients, typically used as plastic alternatives – that she mixes, dyes, and pours in her apartment before sculpting them into wearable form. Adding vegetable glycerin creates a rubber-like consistency. Every piece is one-of-a-kind, because the material “does what it wants to do.”
Chappell Roan wore one of her designs on The Tonight Show. Zimbalist was a selective mute as a child, communicating through an aide and tablet at school, speaking only when she chose to. Now she has something to say loudly, through clothes that look like, as she puts it, “Fruit Roll-Ups” — though she works hard to ensure they never feel crafty.
Her Spring/Summer 2026 CFDA debut brings more conventional fabric into the equation (100 percent cotton, because biomaterial only adheres to natural fibers) while the sculpted material functions as hardware and embellishment. The result is something you could theoretically wear to the bodega, constructed by a process that more closely resembles a science experiment than a fashion atelier.
Zimbalist is the most formally experimental designer on this list. She is also, quietly, one of the most exciting.
Follow: @carolinezimbalist
Spring 2026 is not short of talent. What’s notable about this particular group is the range of entry points — a self-taught designer from Baltimore, an Irish designer rebuilding how clothes get sized, a South African intellectual bringing African history to the luxury runway. None of them got here through the standard path. All of them are rewriting what the standard path can look like.
That’s the story of fashion right now. And Linger will keep telling it.
Want more emerging designer coverage? Explore Linger Magazine’s fashion features and follow @lingermagazineusa for editorial spotlights every week.
