Toteme

Toteme

Elin Kling, a Swedish fashion journalist, and Karl Lindman, an art director who had worked with Interview magazine, founded Toteme in New York in 2014, the same year they married, before moving the company back to their native Stockholm in 2016. The name started as Totem until Kling suggested softening it with a final e, and the label built its identity on pared-back Scandinavian tailoring: poplin shirtdresses, boxy bouclé jackets and a signature fringed scarf detail.

Bags

Bags entered the lineup as Toteme expanded beyond ready-to-wear from its Stockholm atelier, and the same restrained, monochrome instinct that defines the clothing carries straight through to the hardware and shapes. One Toteme bag was singled out as a most-wanted style in recent seasons, which is a fairly quiet achievement for a brand with no interest in obvious branding. Structure and proportion are doing the work that a logo would elsewhere.

More Bags

A second grouping keeps circling the label's minimal toolkit: clean silhouettes, a muted palette, almost no external branding. It is consistent with a house that spent its first two years building a wardrobe of essentials before ever thinking about accessories. The range rewards people who want a bag to disappear into an outfit rather than announce it.

Shoes

Toteme moved into footwear in 2019, five years after founding, once the ready-to-wear line was established enough to support it. Shapes stay close to the brand's tailored, understated register rather than chasing statement silhouettes. It reads as a considered category addition, not a licensing afterthought.

More Shoes

This grouping continues the same footwear logic: pared-down shapes, restrained hardware, built to sit quietly under trousers or a shirtdress. Toteme's shoe line has stayed fairly narrow in scope even years after launch, favoring depth over constant novelty. It matches the brand's broader habit of refining a small set of ideas rather than expanding endlessly.

Tops and shirting

Shirting is arguably where Toteme's identity was actually built, since the poplin shirtdress became one of the pieces that defined the label in its early Stockholm years. Kling has described wanting clothes that felt real rather than trend-driven, and the shirting here still carries that slightly utilitarian, borrowed-from-menswear feel. It is the category most responsible for the brand's reputation as a minimalist reference point.

Accessories

Accessories round out the wardrobe-building approach Kling and Lindman started with in 2014, extending the same monochrome, considered aesthetic into smaller pieces. Scarves in particular echo the fringed-scarf detail that has become something of a house signature on outerwear. Nothing here is treated as an afterthought to the clothing.

More from the collection

The rest of the assortment shows how far Toteme has grown from a two-person operation working across from each other with laptops into a brand with flagship stores in Stockholm, New York, London and Los Angeles. The scale has changed considerably, but the design office, still run by Kling and Lindman together, keeps the collection recognizably tied to its founding restraint. These pieces fill out categories beyond the label's headline shirting and knitwear.

More from the collection

A further grouping continues to round out the current range, built from the same limited color story and structured tailoring that has carried Toteme since its New York founding. The label has resisted the urge to chase seasonal statement pieces in favor of repeating and refining a fairly tight set of shapes. It is a strategy that has aged well as fast-moving trend cycles have made restraint feel more distinctive.

More from the collection

This section fills in further pieces from the current assortment, consistent with the brand's now decade-long habit of building slowly rather than launching a new gimmick every season. Toteme's expansion into menswear only arrived in 2026, well over a decade after founding, which says something about how deliberately Kling and Lindman have paced the brand. These pieces extend that same unhurried approach.

More from the collection

A final grouping closes out the edit with more of the same considered basics that built Toteme's reputation, from tailored layers to the label's characteristically muted palette. The brand's growth from a Stockholm atelier to stores on three continents has not really changed the underlying design brief. It stays, deliberately, a small number of good ideas repeated well.

Our honest take

Toteme's whole appeal rests on restraint at a moment when a lot of contemporary fashion is still shouting for attention, and a decade in, that bet has paid off. The flip side is a range that can feel a touch repetitive once you have seen a few seasons of it, since the brand rarely strays from its core palette and silhouettes. Still, for shoppers who want the Scandinavian minimalist look without hunting through noisier labels, the consistency is the point.