The designer Meruert Tolegen likes to hide symbols in her clothes: floral prints with discreet ghosts; figures that look like swans but, upon closer inspection, turn out to be women with bird bodies. “There’s a weirdness to it, but a good weirdness,” the 34-year-old designer tells me, sitting in her first-ever boutique, on Wooster Street, in New York’s SoHo. The shop, which had a soft opening in the fall, is full of dark wood, earthen sculptures, and Tolegen’s Mary Shelley–esque designs: clothes with lots of ruffles, eyelets, and tulle, mostly in black or ivory. Her atelier is housed there too.
Starting her brand four years ago was “accidental,” says Tolegen. She studied math and physics in college, first at the University of California, Davis, and then at CUNY, in New…
