Self-taught, Baltimore-raised and long operating outside fashion’s official system, Menyelek Rose has spent more than a decade cutting clothes apart and finding new forms inside them. As MENYELEK just unveiled The Narrator in Brooklyn, reconstruction becomes both method and story.
At 28, Menyelek Rose is hardly a newcomer : he has simply spent much of his career working outside the system. Raised in Baltimore and now based in New York, Rose is largely self-taught. After a brief spell at community college, he left for New York and learned by doing, sewing, knitting and crocheting, picking up techniques through YouTube tutorials, trial and error. He had already founded MENYELEK in 2013, following the death of his grandmother, whose crochet would become one of the earliest threads running through his work.
As a child, Menyelek was surrounded by things made by hand. His grandmother and great-grandmother crocheted blankets, hats and clothes for the family. When he began designing, he returned to that vocabulary, turning crochet blankets into sweaters, trousers and irregular, asymmetric dresses. The technique was traditional; what he did with it was not. Cutting things apart and putting them back together became instinctive. By 2017, Vogue had noticed. Young Thug was wearing Menyelek, while Kanye West, Travis Scott and Cardi B were among those drawn to Rose’s work. Yet celebrity visibility never became the point. Over the following years, he continued to stage his own shows and develop his vocabulary largely on his own terms. It took until February 2026 for Menyelek to make its debut on the official CFDA New York Fashion Week calendar. By then, he had been showing collections for almost a decade. The recognition felt less like an arrival than the establishment catching up.
Now comes The Narrator. Presented in Brooklyn on September 13 during New York Fashion Week, Menyelek’ Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear collection begins with an instruction: “Listen before you look.” This time he places himself explicitly inside the work as narrator. Memory, loss, love and desire unfold around a woman who does not require the room’s understanding to possess it. Models move slowly under focused spotlights; clothes and bodies are given time to reveal themselves. At the centre is what Rose now calls the MENI Process, an evolving method of reconstructing existing garments. Each piece begins from a consistent central base before expanding through widened, asymmetric, godet-like insertions. Volumes shift, proportions become uneven and familiar clothes begin to look unfamiliar. His signature mixed T-shirts remain part of the vocabulary, but the method has grown into something broader. Asymmetry, here, is not decoration. It is a way of resisting sameness.
There is another material in the collection too: time. Menyelek Rose works with existing clothing precisely because it already has a life. Wear, marks and previous use are not erased in reconstruction; they become part of the new garment. Cutting is not destruction but continuation. That idea makes this collection feel like a logical next chapter for a designer whose work has always been about inheritance. The crochet of his childhood, the clothes that existed before he found them, the memories attached to both… Rose takes what is already there, cuts into it and lets it become something else.
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