Over the weekend, 14 masters students studying fashion at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts presented their final-year collections via a series of installations and a runway show. For the uninitiated, the Royal Academy is one of the few major, major fashion schools, nurturing everyone from the famed Antwerp 6 (Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, et al, and incidentally the subject of a major exhibition at the city’s excellent Momu fashion museum in early 2026) to Martin Margiela to more recently Demna. It’s where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of the future.
It’s not the first time I’d been part of the external jury judging their work; I first did it back in 2010. (I got a reminder of doing it the night of the this year’s show as one of my fellow judges, Belgian model and jeweler Anouck Lepere, turned up to cheer on the 2025 group.) Fifteen years later I was happy to be doing it all over again, yet you don’t need me to tell you how much fashion has changed during that time, because everything has changed. Everyone working in it is grappling with what’s going on, but so too are students, poised to enter the industry at a moment of cataclysmic change. In some ways more so: they’re weighted with the expectation that they might have new and innovative ideas about how to conceive and make fashion—disruptive, as we once all called it—while challenging industry norms from the outside. That’s a lot on their shoulders.
It was heartening then to see how the Royal Academy’s Class of 2025 responded to all of this. Quite a few created deeply personal collections which spoke to their own life experiences. Perhaps in the era of social media’s self storytelling, that’s not surprising; you are your own best inspiration. Also interesting: How the class of 2025 was the first to come through post-Covid. The heaviness of the pandemic, and the world right now generally, saw them eschew overtly political narratives (as one might expect, given the harrowing world climate) in favor of what might be deemed more frivolous subject matter. An examination of superficiality and pretentiousness was actually a starting point for some of the designers. That’s not a criticism, by the way. When everything can feel so overwhelming, maybe the natural reaction is to double down on finding some joy and lightness in difficult times.
With 14 very different points of view, it’s not so easy to find some common ground. But I liked that there was, on the whole, an ambitious and often accomplished sense of construction and decoration. It can feel a little reductive to talk about trends, but some common themes prevailed: dramatic, conceptual volumes; the interplay between the external and internal make of clothing; corsetry and wiring; blousons, shirts and sweaters as vehicles for creative expression; lots of color; and, shoes in exaggerated cartoon-like proportions. But everyone, as you will discover with the 14 students below, everyone has their own story to tell. Oh, and lastly: Congratulations to you all!
Maria Albores Lojo
Collection: Lost in tradition, found in Galicia
Maria Albores Lojo’s collection was, she said, an ode to 20th century Galician women, a community of fearless individuals who ran everything while the men went off to sea but, she stressed, it was always meant to be more feminist than folkloric. Her research images were great—such as the black and white mid-century street image of two young women shrouded in huge makeshift headscarves to protect them from the rain, which had all the elegance of Cristobal Balenciaga. And they were echoed in one of her looks which featured her version of those scarves with an oversized oxblood leather blouson and pink techno-poly track pants. Other standouts: the petrol blue anorak deconstructed into a floor length bustled skirt with a kind of Edwardian elegance, the straw bags woven by local Galician artisans turned into a bustier or a hat, and the draped and pleated trench which had an umbrella tucked into its back folds. Apparently it’s a tradition of the region, but to these untutored eyes, it gave the coat a surrealistic spin worthy of Salvador Dali, another Galician resident.
Emiliano Alvarez Torres
Collection: In A Violent Nature
Emiliano Alvarez Torres came to study in Antwerp from his hometown of Las Vegas, and he brought plenty of American references with him packed in his suitcase. That white dress wired to look like its skirt was swirling upwards because of the air from the subway grate? Pure Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch. The eerie shrouded transparent dress where you could glimpse a crushed blood red corsage through the fabric? Inspired by that creepy opening scene of Twin Peaks where a shrouded Laura Palmer washed up on some empty Northwestern shoreline. Torres was, he says, drawing connections between personal narratives and cinematic storylines, while looking for a dialogue between fashion and nature, reflecting our all too real environmental concerns. How much fluency there was in all this is up for debate—if we are looking to his favorite director David Lynch, this was storyline-wise more Lost Highway than Blue Velvet—but a deconstructed blue and white polka dot dress under a trench was one of the looks that was well worth the screen time.
Sybrand Jansen
Collection: Shattered pieces kept forever
The honest weathered patina of robust denim workwear and the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana were on Sybrand Jansen’s mental mood board. If these images showcased his meditation on surface texture and how time and intent can transform it, he was also thinking about infinity and eternity. Cue circular pattern cutting that looped and twisted: oversized crumpled and wrinkled cotton shirts spiraling around the body, and jeans (washed or starchily new) engineered into sculpted volumes. Elsewhere, he knocked the stuffing, literally, out of a hunchbacked MA1-style flight jacket (I have to say, these Antwerp kids love a blouson; almost every collection featured one) and distressed a plaid shirt almost to the point of extinction. All of this meant the detour into midnight blue sequins mixed with a draped navy trench was a little redundant. What was essential: his chunkier than chunky ankle boots with the huge 3D printed Mobius strip soles, like tread tires on steroids. People would go cra-cra-crazy for those. (Glenn Martens, if you’re looking for someone to join the Diesel design team, look no further.)
Anji Jiyoung
Collection: Fake energy, sliced time
During her conversation with the jury at our walkathon meeting with all the masters students, Anji Jiyoung talked about materialism, speed, and the way technology can blur the lines between reality and illusion. Weighty stuff, for sure—or in Jiyoung’s case, weightless, because she was also thinking about how we’re untethered in many ways from the world. She wanted her clothing to float, to be in motion. In the end it wasn’t the intellectual positioning of her work that elevated her work, but its corporeal qualities. There were some pretty great looks here: The selvedge seamed track pants twisted into a top, worn with a pair of the same pants worn in the usual manner; a teal velvet skirt suit, the plush textile striated by pleating to form a kind of highbrow corduroy; and a black and white fuzzy mohair diamond motif cardigan colliding with a vintage black leather biker jacket to excellent effect. Into this mix, she also riffed on the classic handheld doctor’s bag. I kind of got lost as to how it fitted into the bigger scheme of things here, but its technical accomplishment was undeniable; supersized to become a skirt over a white boned strapless dress, the left hip of the skirt extended to a highly exaggerated degree.
Jaden Xinyu Li
Collection: Love letters to the unwanted
There was something emotional and affecting—heartwarming, too—about Jaden Xinyu Li’s celebration of vintage. Unsurprising, perhaps, given Li had looked back to a break-up from last year and its aftermath: “I was trying to find a way to process a broken heart—not to fix it, but to understand it,” was how it was phrased in the collection notes. Li turned to writer Alain Badiou’s book In Praise of Love to heal, and alighted on Badiou’s central tenet that with love being a transforming act, heartbreak is less failure and more a move onto a different emotional plain. Li echoed all of this by working almost exclusively with vintage garments, between 70 and 80%, Li reckoned, all coming from friends or thrift stores; the once loved and the now passed over and passed on, in a way that was ripe with wit and humor. (I did kind of die inside—and laugh out loud—when Li said all the pieces that were reworked were from the last century, i.e. the 20th century, as if he was talking about having unearthed something from the Neolithic era.) Some examples: a beaten-up aviator jacket flipped up and over, the shirred waistband now a collar framing the face, or a wedding dress spliced with a red gilet with linebacker shoulders. The bride, Li said, laughing, had gone off to America and married herself. Who doesn’t love a happily-ever-after ending?
Floran Polano
Collection: Embraced me, strangled silk
Floran Polano didn’t shy away from naked honesty in their work; design as personal revelation and act of redemption. Polano was thinking about the vulnerabilities of being someone who could be labeled effeminate, and how you negotiate that as you grow up in your family, negotiating parental expectations. “Through design, I hope to overcome my inability to express in words all the love, gratitude, but also guilt, I feel towards my parents,” wrote Polano in his notes. “The garments in the collection embrace the body in the same way a parent would hold and protect their child.” Among the highlights: a softly draped supersized classic white tee and slouchy jeans, or a silvery top spun around the body, with metallic beige undulating cropped trousers. The draping segued into 1950s couture-y exaggerated looks, impressive in their ambition, but it was the call-out to the everyday which connected more. At the same time, Polano was looking to the heroic sculpture of Francesco Somaini, playing on the idea of his own strength and vulnerability, making hulking showpiece breastplates, but done best with his quirkily exaggerated shoes, the stone uppers actually made from recycled cardboard.
Chloe Reners
Collection: Dot dot dot
Shout-out to Pieter Mulier for how the Alaia designer has become a big inspiration to many of the students in Antwerp. By the way, it would be Chloe Reners’s absolute dream to work for you (just saying). Reners ruminated on surface texture, amplified by swathes of huge quarter-sized dots as cut-outs on her sculpted clothes; femininity seen through, she said, the prism of art and how it’s instrumental in creating idealized images of women. She was looking at the work of George Underwood, and how, “the figures in the paintings are twisted, elongated, and shown in a fantasy-like way captured in unreal forms.” Hence the manipulation of two- and three-dimensional forms, like a flatted white dress around which wrapped a jutting, curving black velvet skirt. (My favorite look here, fyi.) One of the most interesting revelations Reners offered up was about her own path to studying fashion: She had answered the call to embark on a design career during the pandemic, deviating from her former life studying to be an economist.
Annaelle Reudink
Collection: Too many mes, not enough hangers/Professionally undecided (working title) Or who am I wearing?
The collection from Annaelle Reudink was so captivating in its madcap craziness you couldn’t help but be charmed by it—and by Reudnik herself. Here’s what it came out of (and apologies that I am paraphrasing here): the sentimentality of the pop-up Mother’s Day cards she would get for her Mom when she was a kid, a childlike and naive expression of love, and the made-up biographies of artist Rinus Van de Velde, who subscribed to the Walter Mitty-like belief that if you think you are it, well then just fictionalize your own life and have fun along the way! Reudink’s collection featured some of her own faux parallel lives: a judge, a farmer, a bouquet of flowers handed to a lover, and a dancer from the 1920s. “My design language,” she told us, “is storytelling.” (She also cited the endlessly transforming Cindy Sherman and Leigh Bowery as creative north stars.) Her looks were a controlled explosion of embellishments (beading, embroideries, appliqué)—“decoration as obsession,” as she described it—rendered into fairy tale-ish coats and dresses. (Shout out too for the white plastic supermarket shopping bags transformed beyond recognition into huge flowers over the likes of a graphic black and white coat.)
Lille Schmid
Collection: Loophole
Positioned as part of Lille Schmid’s installation was the book “Pretentiousness and why it matters” by Dan Fox. Schmid used the text as license to springboard into thinking about, well, pretentiousness, but with the idea that it is really the most self-centered of qualities; something we assiduously pursue as a construction of ourselves. That led her to pieces which are multi-layered, and colored the right side of lurid: candy pink latex coated denim; items which mishmashed trashy lingerie, classic tailoring and plastic coatings (there was a lot of plastic in these collections, rather surprisingly); and, my favorite two pieces of hers, a spongy, white cable knit cardigan, lined in a gauzy yarn printed fabric, and a pale blue knit dress, with an inbuilt bra.
Amar Singh
Collection: Mama, I see clowns…
Amar Singh might be the only designer who made an entrance, appearing from a makeshift backstage area during the tour of the students’ installations. The hugely charming Singh was attired in a whittle waisted houndstooth jacket (appliquéd on the back with the legend, Desperate for Attention), a horned court jester hat, a shocking pink embellished pencil skirt, and vertiginous heels, which Singh would rather adorably highlight by kicking up one leg every now and then to emphasize something they were saying. A self-confessed performer and club kid, Singh equally leant into the theatrical realm for their collection, unsurprisingly for someone who said they liked to dress like a circus tent, though obviously all this campy hilarity was a means to get into challenging gender norms. Yet the clothes could exude a pretty broad appeal: the blue plaid coat cascading with lamé ruffles, say, or the relatively classic black hourglass jacket they made to prove to themselves they could actually do it….only being unable to resist the urge to bedazzle the hell out of it.
Beilu Song
Collection: Error
Independence versus following the rules: That feels like the narrative almost every single fashion design student is going to have to tackle as they leave the liberated atmosphere of college into the confines of the work world. Beilu Song might have been thinking about herself expressly when she chose to explore that as her collection’s theme, vis a vis, the ordered strictures of how we understand most clothes to look—tailoring, shirting—versus the very human ways we may accidentally personalize them when we wear them wrongly: misbuttoned, askew, turned inside out. For all the critical thinking, Song looks like she’ll make the transition from her current environment to the professional realm easily: I liked, a lot, her pinstriped jacket with its matching shirt; the red sculpted sweater with the scarlet pants and grass-green waistband; and perhaps best of all, the ineffably cool black folded and tucked shorts that she herself was wearing.
Delara Tavassoti
Collection: Almost A Mess
Almost a mess? Not quite. Well, maybe just a little, but in a good way. There was a lot of love for Delara Tavassoti’s clever, knowing, and absolutely uncompromising vision of women and femininity, via an exploration of interior and exterior lives, and ergo the interior and exterior of her garments. Her approach allowed her to smartly (and sometimes humorously) push her theme to a very interesting place. (She had me when she outlined that she was thinking about someone “who is a mess, but still dresses to impress.”) My favorites: The grey shetland sweater with the diamanté necklace bursting out from beneath the yarn, accompanied by a deconstructed polka dot skirt; the sculpted lace bra with a matching lace pleated skirt, its waistband standing away from the body (a recurring motif in many of these students’ work); and the duchess satin LBD with a décolleté and shoulderline made from layers of kitschy brassieres.
Paula Van Dyck
Collection: Black mascara
“Superficiality as a coping mechanism,” was the thinking behind Paula Van Dyck’s collection and, Paula, we have all been there. But there’s a harder truth to this statement; during a time when we feel like we are living in a powder keg, the move to (creatively, at least) live at surface level, enjoy it, and not go deeper, carries an appeal. Perhaps it’s also generational, given the pressures on a generation that’s in their 20s and being optimistic about how life might look in your 30s is tough to imagine. Van Dyck expanded on her theme, outlining that she’d chosen to examine how “beauty, artifice, and external appearance can serve as both a form of self preservation and a method of emotional camouflage.” A furry top was intended to evoke a makeup brush, while a leather jacket encased in a hairnet-like lattice played to her idea of emotional control. Yet the best look of Van Dyck’s collection, for me—a white rubberized evening coat dress—was sublimely worked and needed no subtext or deeper meaning to stand out.
Hoyt Zhang
Collection: Drive My Car
The pandemic led Hoyt Zhang to think about mental health; how redemptive the sensation of freedom was when it happened, exemplified for him by the simple, everyday, almost banal act of putting your hand out a car window, and letting the wind blow through your fingers. That sense of comfort was what he was thinking about with his collection; the pleasure to be had from the familiar—all of Zhang’s clothes were based on tropes: jeans, anoraks, comfy knits, a trench, the ubiquitous blouson, taken to bigger-than-big proportions, and often mashed up to create hybrid garments; the accumulation of our memories of comfort. Some pieces were wired to fly away from the body, as if in motion—something Zhang amplified in the graduation show, where his models ran in a loop around the runway. The conceptual flourishes aside, there was something satisfying about Zhang’s cozy, comfortable, all-enveloping offerings.