Pipenco Reimagines 1965 Romanian Film De-a fi Harap Alb 

The designer’s Spring/Summer 2026 Collection featured thousands of lemons, a childlike imagination, and a soundtrack close to home.

Once upon a time, in the 1965 Romanian film De-a fi Harap Alb, a king sent his three sons out on a mission to save the kingdom. The eldest two, who were considered more capable, failed to achieve the goal, thus leaving it up to the youngest prince to get the job done. Embarking on a long-winded journey, Harap Alb bumps into all kinds of characters and encounters a plethora of different experiences, and ends up saving the kingdom through kindness and naive luck.

“My apartment’s full of stills from the film,” Lorena Pipenco tells me as we discuss her Spring/Summer 2026 collection. It’s under a week before her show, and she lets me in on its central inspiration. “I like this story so much because we’re in an industry where everything is so calculated. You become a designer to create, but then you have to think about all these other elements and you sometimes lose yourself. Sometimes, you just need to come back to the silly things that make you happy or what actually brings you that joy again. This film feels like this guy is having a very serious journey and saves everyone but just through really being authentic to himself and pure.”

The Pipenco brand, founded just two years ago and already a favorite of New York Fashion Week and celebrity clients alike, echoes this sentiment. Helmed by the Parsons graduate, it takes a whimsical, fantastical, imaginative approach to documenting the real stories at the heart of her family’s history and her own childhood growing up in a Romanian household outside of London. 

“What is my purpose here? What are the stories I want to tell? It always comes back to the women and their experiences, or the things I watched growing up,” she explains. “From a young age, watching TV while my grandma and mom were working, I’d find these safe haven moments in these old Romanian movies that were super whimsical.”

For the runway, Pipenco created her own De-a fi Harap Alb journey, crafting a pathway not unlike the one taken by the protagonist of the film. Walking to the sound of whistling (just as the protagonist did in the film), models emerged in a mix of the fantastical, whimsical styles the brand is known for (i.e. a huge apple) and more grounded looks you’d see on a downtown girl in New York City.

“We’ll screenshot all the moments we like and I’ll start putting them in files for colours, textures, greenery, scenery, fruit, silhouettes,” she explains when discussing her process. “I take certain prints that you see on the brick walls or how the castle is decorated or the armor from the kingdom and try to reimagine them in different ways.” There’s a fuzzy yellow look, for instance, whose texture and colour the designer pulled from the film’s big yellow bear. 

Then there’s the lemon dress, seen in the film as a mesh piece adorned with the fruit. For Pipenco’s version, she wanted to find a way to incorporate the motif without simply putting full lemons on the body. The result? A long lemon gown made from peeling over a thousand lemons, coating them, and embroidering on them. “We’ve been peeling lemons every day for four months. My apartment smells of lemons, my fridge is full of lemons, everyone’s taking a bag of lemons back home to make lemonade. I still don’t even know if we need more lemons so I can’t even give you the exact number, but every day, we buy 60 to 100 lemons.” It’s so much that they’ve actually caused an increase in lemon prices at their local corner shop. “The store down the road where my team goes to buy the lemons has upped the price because we buy them every day.”

Listening to the designer talk about her New York City apartment — a home-slash-studio full of lemon peels and film stills — it sounds a lot like the place she grew up, a household that has inspired every aspect of her work. “Our house is very crazily decorated.” She laughs. “Leopard print walls, velvet couch, it’s almost disturbing. It will hurt your eyes.”

“My designs all stem from this Romanian household and growing up with my grandma and my mom who raised me, and seeing them as working women and always grinding. My grandma was a seamstress in Romania so we always had this kind of fashion element and background, and when I got older, she started to tell me stories about how she would take the scraps sneakily back to her apartment in Romania and my mom would find ways to play with them.” From there, her mother started making scarfs from the scraps and selling them, and ultimately got a one way ticket to the U.K. “That’s how our family started.”

This story takes on an even more special meaning when Pipenco explains the fabrication selection for her Spring/Summer 2026 collection. Just as her grandmother and mother had in Romania, she found new purposes for old materials, turning last season’s leftovers into unrecognizably new designs. “This season, we’ve been repurposing old fabrics, transforming fabrics,” she explains, citing both the limited budget of a young designer and the problem-solving creativity push it gives her. “It makes you think, ‘how can I reuse this and no one will know that it’s an old fabric that I already used before?’”

Another kismet family moment happened when Pipenco set out to select the score for the runway: “We were picking the music for the show and the name of the show is called Lalele, which means tulips in Romanian, but it’s basically one of the songs that will be playing on the runway. It’s a Romanian singer and I called my mom to tell her and she was like, ‘wait I know that guy. He lived down the road from me in Romania and he used to play at all the restaurants, and his son and I would play together.’ That’s what I love about the process and speaking with my family. It’s so small.”

Words – Sophie Wang