TAKING HEART: NENSI DOJAKA

DESIGNER NENSI DOJAKA LETS INSTINCT LEAD HER WORK. HER GARMENTS REFLECT A WORLD OF CONTRADICTIONS, WHERE BEAUTY TAKES A THOUSAND SHAPES.

By Nicole DeMarco

Last spring, when Nensi Dojaka visited London’s Hayward Gallery, there was one particular piece that caught her eye. It was a bright yellow and pink ombré sculpture called Tunnel Boring Machine by Teresa Solar Abboud, featuring what looked like a pair of elongated fins or butterfly wings, emerging from a clay base. “It looked like a huge mushroom,” Nensi recalls from her London studio. “It was so beautiful, it stuck in my head.” Though the designer’s collections never draw from specific visual or thematic inspirations—“I don’t work that way,” she says—the sculpture’s sunset hues found a way onto her latest runway, and one very intricately ruffled mini dress. It playfully crisscrossed down the model’s abdomen, forming a layered skirt, complete with a twisted chiffon tendril that cascaded across the floor. “It’s subconscious,” Nensi says. “Everything I see is, in a way, a reference.”

Growing up in Tirana, Albania, Nensi wasn’t exactly surrounded by fashion—she was endlessly inspired by the natural world. She attended drawing classes every Saturday from the age of five. They were quite free in that she could sketch whatever she liked; for Nensi, this included girls playing dress up in highly detailed gowns and abstract floral patterns. The drawings themselves have a romantic naïveté about them, but there’s an unexpected synchronicity between her visual musings as a child and her present-day designs: a long flowing gown with pleats and petals drawn onto its bodice, a musician performing in a fringed dress with an oblong, sculptural cutout at its center. “When I look back, I’m like, Oh, I was always thinking this way," she says, though it took quite some time for the designer to set her sights on fashion.

“My dad was always buying clothes for us—for me, my mom, my sister—and he has really good taste,” Nensi tells me with a smile. For her 15th birthday, he bought her her first branded dress. It was Miu Miu. Still connecting the dots, she moved from Tirana to Shropshire at 17 to finish out high school in England. She thought she might study architecture due to her love of math and science. But it didn’t feel right, so she moved to London to enroll in the foundation course at Central Saint Martins. “I had no intention of doing fashion at all; it wasn’t a lifelong dream or anything. I couldn’t even say I liked fashion,” Nensi explains. Quickly, though, she found a love for construction. “I just like working on the mannequin. It’s really as simple as that. It started very organically, which maybe is why it’s a bit more sincere.”

From there, Nensi went on to study lingerie design at the London College of Fashion, interning with Peter Pilotto and Fyodor Golan along the way. These formative experiences inspired her to pursue an education in “proper womenswear,” so she returned to CSM for her master’s. Nensi’s graduate collection, which she presented at London Fashion Week in February 2019—paneled bralettes and strappy, lingerie-inspired dresses in black and nude tones—was a watershed moment. “Nensi was the stand-out for me at her graduate show. It was executed with such astonishing precision,” stylist Fran Burns recalls. “It was sexy but it was clever and modern. I was lit up.” The collection was instantly snatched up by e-commerce site SSENSE for an exclusive capsule which was, at the time, somewhat of a stamp of approval for emerging designers.

A year later, in 2020, one month before the world shut down, Nensi made her official runway debut with Fashion East. It was a bit of a tease, her delicately draped dresses and sheer tops emerging at a time when we had little reason to dress up—let alone leave our homes. But there was what felt like an industry-wide hunger for something new, exciting, provocative, and Nensi managed to capture it. “London is historically a creative hotbed,” adds Fran, “and at a moment when we were seeing a lot of streetwear and a lot of color and flamboyance, Nensi’s work felt refreshingly grown-up.” It was ’90s minimalism with a knife twist, and there was raw, inimitable emotion behind it that just so happened to catch on like wildfire.

This is, in part, thanks to Bella Hadid; the model’s fashion choices have historically catapulted unknown designers into virality. She turned to the then-27-year-old designer for a look for the 2021 VMAs: a mesh bodysuit and bra top, paired with low-slung trousers and, to complete the ode to Tom Ford’s Gucci, an exposed thong. However, nowhere was this edgy-yet-feminine ethos more clearly on display than in the Spring/Summer 2021 lookbook that followed, put together by Nensi, Fran, and photographer Harley Weir during lockdown. Models donned twisted cut-out tights and now-signature semi-naked dresses—garments that demonstrate the designer’s capacity for simultaneously revealing and concealing the female form—jigsawing and draping chiffons, georgettes, and silks like equally important pieces of an aesthetic puzzle. “I don’t necessarily want to call them clothes,” the designer says, likening her work to pieces of art. “You can hang it because it’s just beautiful.”

While much of the fashion industry was put on hold, the designer’s brand continued to grow exponentially. The requests were never-ending—Rihanna, Dua Lipa, Zendaya, Hailey Bieber. In 2021, Nensi won the prestigious LVMH Prize. “The emotion I felt in the moment was probably the realest emotion I’ve ever felt,” she says. The show that followed, Spring/Summer 2023—closed by Emily Ratajkowski in a cranberry pink dress—was the most viewed of the season on Vogue Runway.

For Nensi, everything happened so fast. “When I first started, I was like a child in my head, so I had no idea what I was doing,” she explains. While all the awards and accolades have allowed the designer to expand her team and her vision further, they’ve also come with a unique set of challenges. Not only would she have to live up to industry expectations, but also commit herself to building a truly sustainable business. “I do feel a lot of pressure,” Nensi adds. “I feel pressure to satisfy commercial needs.”

Nensi has dealt with this weight over the past few seasons by setting boundaries and intentionally slowing down, focusing on maintaining the elusive work-life balance. “I like switching off, because I do get really sucked in,” she says. She’s even let herself turn down opportunities at major fashion houses when they aren’t quite the right fit. When we spoke, Nensi was preparing for her upcoming Spring/Summer 2025 show—her first since February 2023. Scrolling through sketches of the not-yet-finalized looks, you could feel her excitement. “It’s been a while, so it feels like a comeback. I’m not sure if I will be doing a show every single season,” she explains. “As an independent young brand, it’s better to see how it feels every time and take it from there. Shows are not easy to do—they’re an investment, actually. I don’t want to feel enslaved to the rules of the industry, and I don’t think I should.”

Not only has Nensi been able to reflect on the pace of the industry, but taking time and space have further allowed her to consider her place within it. She has her sights set on something far more expansive than the runway, and we shouldn’t expect anything less from her: “I want to reach a level where the brand has a bigger world,” she explains. Her long-awaited collaboration with Calvin Klein, which featured this season, and comes in a range of sizes and styles not previously offered, is a start. “I always mention Rick Owens, because when you think about Rick Owens, you think about everything. You can imagine a space. You can imagine the person. You can imagine everything around this person.”

Nensi’s world is full of roses and punctuated by thorns. It’s a drooping tulip, snaking down one leg like a poisonous weed. A stunning halter neck gown with ruched panels from which secrets can spill out. Everything is poetic, romantic, real. “Aesthetically and visually, it looks feminine and edgy,” Nensi says. “I’m a bit like that myself, and even my brain works like that.” It’s quite like the many contradictions within that pink and yellow ruffled dress, and the mesmerizingly complex gowns that have become her signature. They’re closer to her heart, the designer says, perhaps because all of them are spontaneously draped on the mannequin, as she learned during her time at CSM. Not designed to be “sexy” as her clothes are so often labeled, but to confuse—subverting conventional beauty standards through a geometric, architectural lens. “They are sexy, of course, but I don’t necessarily like that word…” Nensi muses. “I think it has a bit more emotion than just sexy.”

This is at the forefront of Nensi’s work. She designs with emotion, which she feels is lacking in the industry, likely due to its obsession with likes, clicks, and celebrity culture as a whole. “Fashion has really latched onto it [and] it feels insincere,” she says. “It’s almost like nothing comes from the heart.” It’s a distinctly feminine point of view in an industry that’s unfortunately lacking women at its forefront. That really, truly is something that Nensi hopes to change, in more ways than one—first, at her namesake label, and then beyond. “I would love to bring back a bit more heart to the industry,” she says.