Designer Colleen Allen has a knockout piece on her hands that has been the Instagram chatter seen ‘round fashion week: an elegant fleece jacket with a toiled dinner jacket silhouette, whittled at the waist, fastened by old school hook and eye clasps, and a throat-grazing upturned collar. The jacket is lined in canvas at the torso, with silk twill in the sleeves for easy wearing. With its 9th-century flair, this piece is the ladylike solution for those looking for an elevated North Face–or even a piece that would make anyone want an elevated North Face.
Though it is made out of an outdoorsy fleece, the jacket is far from gorpcore, with a feminine silhouette designed to curve with the female form. “I wanted to be this version of myself in nature and felt like I couldn’t access that sort of spiritual thing [through my clothing at the time]. I’m connected to clothing and how I feel in it,” said Allen. “So I was like, ‘I need a fleece that really speaks to you.’”
The personal quality of this collection reflects Allen’s journey as a designer. The Central Saint Martins graduate, who grew up outside of Chicago and is now based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, started her career in menswear. While working at The Row and at Raf Simons’s Calvin Klein 205w39nyc, Allen also had an eponymous menswear line for years. “I did men’s because I wanted to learn the craft of tailoring,” said Allen. “I think there was a lot to say about masculine identity and working through what that meant.”
While designing menswear informed her techniques and silhouettes, she felt that it restricted her self-expression. Last year, wanting to explore femininity, Allen began exploring designing for herself. She found herself identifying with the concept of a witch; a woman who acts alone, independently conjuring up their magical forces. “I have this witch as the center of who I identify as a woman or how I identify as a woman, being this sort of independent creator and this sort of spirit,” explained Allen.
At her Fall 2024 presentation, the designer, who looked plucked from a ’90s J. Crew catalog, was wearing a baby Versace t-shirt and a self-designed long black dangerously low-rise skirt. Resembling a wavy-haired deity, it wasn’t hard to see how Allen’s sense of spirituality comes through in her debut collection. There were knee-skimming Victorian bloomer shorts with lace hems, long billowing skirts that are gathered at the waist in bunched pleats, a sheer muslin shirt patchworked with swatches of fabric that look like you could tear them off, and hulking capes in tangerine and Scarlet Letter red with puffy ruched sleeves; something that perhaps plucked from the back of Bridget Bishop. The designer also made clear use of her tailoring skills throughout the collection: there’s evidence in the hand-sewn labels, the luscious yet practical silk and wool linings, the careful attention to the waist, a skirt that descends into slight drapes, ever-so-slightly edging off of the waist.
Although some of the pieces might echo a time when women’s clothes looked precious, these garments are made to be lived in today. “I want my clothes to be worn,” she said, adding. “I made it this way so that you can bring these sort of very ritualistic garments into your real life.” To that end, Allen’s capes are made in cotton velvet instead of silk velvet, to ensure that the wearer wouldn’t feel jailed to curb-to-cab life by anything too delicate. “I felt like it was too girlish to just have lace,” said Allen. “But when it is integrated into these raw edges, it becomes a texture.” Case in point: a dress constructed out of fused raw strips of muslin. The gritty fusing offering a wildness that overshadows the timidness of the fabric.
Colleen Allen Fall/Winter '24
Beyond the previously noted fleece dinner jacket, perhaps the most Insta-documented pieces from the collection were Allen’s accessories, such as a fleece beanie with a muslin that peekaboos underneath it and a pair of removable fleece sleeves. The latter exemplifies how Allen is incorporating her roots in tailored menswear into her womenswear collection, bringing ready-for-the-elements fabric, silk lining, and an artfully raised shoulder that harkens back to the most explicit forms of women’s dressing in the 19th century. Of course, they will serve today’s women well: Anyone who has worked in an office knows that they are typically regulated for male body temperatures, and a pair of fleece sleeves will come in handy.
It’s this thoughtfulness, about how today’s women live and dress, that makes Allen’s debut something to pay attention to. Be prepared to see these pieces, and the women who wear them, in the wild.
