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“It’s about representing different kinds of girls,” explained Nensi Dojaka in an interview with i-D on her fall 2023 collection. “[It’s] an evolution of what I’ve done before.” Even for a relative newcomer—Dojaka founded her namesake label in 2017—that evolution has been impossible to ignore. That’s because Dojaka’s clothes have an allure with a capital A. The Albanian designer has launched herself into the upper echelons of fashion greats at breakneck speed, fostering the kind of hopeless devotion and attention storied houses have spent decades attempting to capture in consumers.
It’s hard to put one’s finger on it. You could say that’s why Dojaka is in a class all her own; a nonpareil womenswear designer with an exacting hand who knows her craft. Known for her delicate dresses, constructed with clever outlines, sheer panels and voids to reveal hints of skin, hers is a feat of epic proportions, pulled off with aplomb. How so? Somehow, Dojaka balances sex with restraint and tastefulness with an appetite for more, neither starving customers of clothes that worship the female form nor driving the point off a cliff, where other designer wares have gone to die of tackiness or excess.
This collection proved no different. As she told i-D, several Nensi-isms carried over into her fall 2023 designs, like her interest in florals, but with a wintry bent. This was exemplified in her incorporation of outerwear, including cropped leather jackets and faux fur, as well as a sprinkling of leggings. They worked to highlight Dojaka’s thoughtfulness as a designer, reflecting her consciousness to adapt barely-there designs for cooler climates, keeping her customer front of mind.
Of course, it was her signatures that stole the show. The bulk of the collection was rendered in black, magenta and red, with sheer fabric twisted into florals that either fanned out from the bust or décolletage like petals or hung from the breast in the shape of a rose, playfully covering up and pointing attention to the area simultaneously. Inspired by nature, Dojaka delivered a “snowdrop dress” worn by Imaan Hamaam, entirely transparent but for diamantes that fell on the body like flakes. Elsewhere, models appeared more covered up, with cropped jackets, straight-legged denim, cardigans and jumpsuits attesting to the designer’s versatility, offering ways of amplifying and quieting the volume of flashes of flesh for which she is famously known.
