A New Line of Clothes Fit for Magical Rituals, or Just Errands

In T Introduces, a singular talent makes their debut.

While studying fashion at New York’s Parsons School of Design and later London’s Central Saint Martins — from which she graduated in 2019 — the designer Colleen Allen, 28, was drawn to men’s wear. It aligned with her tomboyish personal style (she grew up in Chicago with two older brothers, as well as a younger sister) and, having been taught how to sew as a child by her quilter grandmother, Nana Dot, she was more interested in tailoring than draping. She was also excited by the ways that masculine dress codes were being re-examined at the time, thanks to designers and celebrities such as Jonathan Anderson and Young Thug. “I wanted to be a part of that,” she says, “where it could really feel like you were doing something new.”

Upon leaving school, with an eight-month internship for Raf Simons at Calvin Klein already under her belt, she landed her dream job at the Row, where she helped establish and grow the brand’s men’s wear division. But in 2020, she says, she began to experience “this internal and external world shift where I realized that I wanted to do women’s wear.” Newly fascinated with tarot and the idea of the divine feminine, she was inspired by the Empress and High Priestess cards of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who, sometime around 1955, painted her own deck.

Allen’s first collection, which she debuted during New York Fashion Week last February, features a cotton velvet cloak with oversize Victorian proportions that looks like something one might wear to perform a ritual ceremony (or in Allen’s case, to run errands around Brooklyn, where she now lives). “It’s about taking up space and becoming this grand and dramatic presence,” she says. The palette of tangerine orange, snow white and blood red — which can also be found in Carrington’s work — is meant to be “energizing, transformational and consciousness elevating.” Allen chose highly textured fabrics for their durable nature and ability to hold deeply saturated color. She used Polartec fleece, for example, to fashion a sharply tailored red maxi-length skirt suit, which is washed to a cashmere-esque texture. “When you step out of your apartment and walk around in a full look like that,” she says, “I really hope it will make you feel like the most magical version of yourself.”