Hot Girl Minimalism Comes to New York Fashion Week
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There wasn’t necessarily a shortage of designers pumping out square-toe black kitten heels in 2019. But according to requests flooding luxury sourcer-cum-trend-expert Gab Waller’s inbox that year, the only label making them was Swedish brand Toteme.
Clients couldn’t stop asking for Toteme’s heels, and eventually, its collarless wool coats with attached matching scarves and its slouchy leather clutches with a T-shaped lock. They were in just as much high demand as Chanel, Prada, and Saint Laurent. As Waller shopped Toteme for her clients, she fell in love with it herself. Its pieces embodied a holy trinity of fashion adjectives for Waller: “elegant, sophisticated, and polished,” she says, in its clean-cut trousers and anonymously nice leather bags and endless variations on cozily beige sweaters. Everything looks nice, but there’s still a sense that it can be worn in real life. Now, “There is one cutout ribbed knit top from Toteme that I'm truly not exaggerating when I say it is in my top 10 worn pieces in my wardrobe,” she tells me.
Waller is just one of many in-the-know women who’ve propelled Toteme’s clothing and accessories from just another Scandi-chic label frequently seen on Copenhagen Fashion Week guests to an international juggernaut. In the ten years since co-founders and real-life partners Elin Kling and Karl Lindman started the brand, it’s moved into luxury retailers like SSENSE and Net-a-Porter, opened four stores in the U.S., had several products go viral on TikTok (and subsequently get duped), and landed in the closets of perennial It girls Hailey Bieber, Laura Harrier, and Sofia Richie Grainge. Toteme products are a regular presence in insider-beloved shopping Substack newsletters like Laura Reilly's Magasin and Jessica Graves's The Love List. When TikTokers do their round-ups of what "hot girls" are wearing, Toteme is almost always included.
The New York Times reports that Toteme’s take on plush sweaters and no-nonsense trousers generated $150 million in revenue last year. All that momentum landed Toteme on New York Fashion Week’s Spring 2025 calendar, where it hosted a runway atop a skyscraper with one of the schedule’s most exclusive guest lists.
Toteme’s clothing for the Spring 2025 runway stuck to the beats that its growing following knows. White three-quarter sleeve tops with black culotte pants. Clingy knit dresses paired to a collarless satin or leather coat. A few splashes of butter yellow in the same unfussy silhouettes. Looking from the outside, you might wonder what makes fashion editors post drooling-face emojis for these beige turtlenecks and not the ones shown by another Swedish brand the day before—COS.
It starts with a point-of-view. Toteme, like the similarly pared-back Anine Bing, is founded by a former influencer who’s fluent in aesthetics. Elin Kling got her start as a fashion blogger and an early adopter of Instagram; her understanding of what can pop online shows in her mastery of clothing that’s inherently practical while leveling up from a standard “basic.” Admit it: There’s something very photogenic about a billowing cape coat with a detachable matching scarf or a kitten heel sharp enough to stab.
The brand was shy about taking my interview ahead of the show, but its champions were happy to weigh in. Toteme's POV—minimalism that punches a few steps above a basic T-shirt and trousers—caught the eye of Brigitte Chartrand, Vice President of Womenswear Buying and Everything Else at SSENSE. “We started carrying Toteme in Spring 2016, which came at a time when we were revamping our womenswear strategy and further defining the merchandising perspective that we’re known for today,” she tells me. “Part of this meant focusing on interesting brands with both a minimalistic approach to wardrobing and an interesting design aesthetic, which is very Toteme.”
Toteme clothing isn’t cheap. Most items start at three-figures; its most social-media-friendly coats and bags can reach up to $1,230. Still, it’s not as unreachable as French luxury houses, and its designs can weather more than a few trend cycles. “I'm a big believer in cost per wear, and buying pieces that can be heavily rotated,” Waller says. “Toteme's designs are exactly that. I have absolute confidence that if I'm purchasing a Toteme piece, I will be wearing it a multitude of different ways for many years to come.” Her beloved black shirt, for example, can be paired back with jeans or layered under a blazer.
Toteme clothing isn’t just growing through its own boutiques and retailers. It’s also heating up on the re-sale market—which can often be a sign of surging popularity. Rachel Glicksberg, Fashion and New Initiatives Lead at The RealReal, tells me there’s been a 55 percent YoY increase in Toteme supply on the site, and overall demand for the label is up 66 percent for the same period.
The same T-lock bag Waller’s clients request is one of The RealReal’s top secondhand sellers, too. Demand for all the labels’ bags rose by 851 percent in the past year. Glicksberg says it’s the logo-less, neutral design (formerly known as quiet luxury) that makes Toteme’s bags a standout. “Although fashion insiders can spot the style like a hawk, its under-the-radar style makes it a true classic,” she says.
There were more of those “if you know, you know” bags in Toteme’s Spring 2025 collection: a curved version of the famed T-lock bag in leather, satin, suede and crochet variations, with a detachable wristlet strap. Shoes, meanwhile, included peep-toe leather mules and crossover strap slides. Like those kitten heels from 2019, they’re inherently wearable with a little extra shine. The entire looks, even the most understated, could be copy and pasted directly into Hailey Bieber’s Sushi Park wardrobe. By the time they arrive in stores next May, Waller’s inbox is bound to flood with requests once again.
