Pipenco: The New York Fashion Week Brand to Look Out For

The emerging brand is a New York fashion week name to know.

Pipenco’s fall 2025 show felt like a living fairytale fever dream. Nestled in the dark lower level of a former prohibition-era speakeasy on the Lower East Side, character after character burst through the hidden doorway. Out they came, wearing jaw-droppingly large, sculptural top hats, the chunkiest sky-high platforms you’ve ever seen (a collaboration with East Village Shoe Repair) and a slew of dresses with puffed up, stuffed sleeves, and exaggerated proportions that spoke deeply to fashion’s latest dollhouse obsession. With trippy, echoing Balkans music playing in the background, the collection was all about a female-driven retelling of the stories designer Lorena Pipenco grew up hearing.

“It’s this whimsical, troubled child,” says Romanian-born designer, the creative mind behind the namesake brand, when asked about what Pipenco stands for. “Every collection, I am inspired by an old Romanian film. I just love watching movies from the 1970s during the Communist times.” Think: Veronica, or Maria Bella, both niche 1970s films which Lorena describes as enchanted lands with the idea of two different worlds. That floor-length black feathered outfit that opened the show? A series of haunting Victorian inspired babydoll dresses in massive proportions? The heavy sweater bedecked with a portrait of a mystical white dog? All things one might see in either flick.

Select looks from Spring Summer and Fall Winter 2024

The fall 2025 collection marked Pipenco’s third show, and everything in it linked back to the label’s sense of humor and surrealism. The designer learned to sew when she was 15, raised by a family of seamstresses in their adopted hometown of Essex, U.K. After graduating from Parsons in New York, she founded her own brand. Pipenco now exists as a surrealist fantasy celebration that also feels nostalgic, and intentionally referential of the designer’s Eastern European roots. “It’s this idea of really feeling at home and everything done together,” she says. “If you are in Romania, most people won’t go buy bread, they prefer to just make the bread at home–and not because it’s a TikTok trend–because it’s what you grow up doing.”

When she was younger, Pipenco felt like she didn’t see many Romanian designers, which inspired her to try to create a sense of belonging with her work. “I remember after my previous show, I had people from Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Italy, all different Eastern European people come up to me and say, ‘this really felt like home.’ And I just love that for me.”

Spring Summer 2025

For spring 2025, Pipenco worked with her mom and grandmother, creating 80% of the collection with all repurposed Romanian fabrics and textiles. The three had been collecting from family houses or markets where little old ladies survive off making and selling beautiful old things. “I try to never cut it,” she says. “I find ways to work with the fabric so we don’t lose anything from it. So, even if it comes with a stain, I’ll leave the stain there.” Rather than upcycling with sustainability as the main mission, she’s doing it out of respect for the craft. “They’re pieces that take hours and hours to make, and it is just on your grandma’s table and it’s been stained. They don’t have the same value that they deserve. So it’s like me giving them this value again.”

As for fall 2025, the designer was inspired by the Romanian Tale of Dracula, but through the lens of the women in his life. “I grew up with that story, but I was told about it in a way that he became this dark entity because he lost a lot of his life and he spent eternity trying to refine that feeling again through different women or different awful acts,” she says. “I wanted to give respect to the women that I would’ve imagined him to maybe fall in love with or the kind of people he would surround himself with.”

Aside from everything else–those hats were certainly one of the most memorable moments of the entire fashion month season. Accessories will always be important at Pipenco. Hence the reason why she’s preparing to launch handbags next. “I always start with the accessories and play around with them.” Think of Pipenco as fashion comfort food. “The biggest success is to make someone feel like they can connect, or remind them of their grandma’s living room.”