No exaggeration: Central Saint Martins MA graduates are the backbone of London fashion, and have been for years. No less than 14 independent alumni of many generations will show this week. The headcount includes Roksanda, Simone Rocha, Mark Fast, Ashish, and Richard Quinn, right up to Paolo Carzana, Kazna Asker, Pauline Dujancourt, Jawara Alleyne, Charlie Constantinou, and Yaku. And that’s not counting the exciting ones who are putting out lookbooks, Steve O Smith, Stefan Cooke, and Derrick. Alexander McQueen went before them. Hundreds have also been populating design studios in international luxury houses for decades—Kim Jones is just one.
Kudos to course leader Fabio Piras, who’s led the talent generator for 10 years, and to the late professor Louise Wilson, before him (both were course alums). But what of the class of 2025? What is the value of even a top-notch fashion education when graduating into a bleak world and a very tough time for independents, and facing a risk-averse industry?
Well, no matter what, strongly going for what you truly believe in is still the collective philosophy. This cohort of individualists were facing up to the gloom, grappling with AI, confronting the pushback against feminism, and representing their cultures. To this generation, creative honesty and fearlessness might mean showing emotional fragility, expressed in drapey minimalism, intense essays in black, or a falling-apart state of dress.
“I don’t know—it’s a patchwork of moments that are part of our shared history,” said Piras when asked for an overview. “It’s a response to the life we live in the moment. So there is a lot of romantic attitude about a completely disastrous, shambolic situation. It’s very difficult to be positive and create, but creativity makes you positive by default, because that s the most positive thing you can do. That’s what we’re trying to show. But I mean,” he added, “ There are also moments of stupidity, lightheartedness, and beauty.”
Tuuli Tururen, a Finnish student, said she’d made her collection by thinking about walking in the city streets at night. “I wanted these characters being not afraid to just walk around. To create this new idea of a kind of femininity, where you can feel comfortable, still strong and powerful, but not necessarily so loudly.”
Alison Keogh and Kate Dewar fed AI a load of pictures of generic men’s polo shirts and normal trousers, then tried to emulate the shiny, slippery colors and textures of the unreal fabrics it came up with. “It doesn’t know what fabrics are. It was very difficult to do, but was definitely more interesting than we could have come up with. We liked this hyper-colored hyper-normativity.”
The two winners of the prestigious L’Oreal Professionnel award were Petra Fagerstrom and William Palmer. Interestingly, both of them had worked in the industry before deciding to do an MA. Perhaps that is the best way to get the most out of this level of education—it’s not a course for spoon-fed babies.
Fragerstom, a Swedish designer who’s worked at Acne and Balenciaga, came up with the staggeringly original, almost couture-skilled collection that opened the show. It started with her looking at the aesthetics and politics behind 1950s couture—and then, also with some help from AI, and the Clo animation programme, she took it somewhere else. Part of it was her astonishing, subversive trompe l’oeil lenticular technique of micro-pleating through which superimposed legs appear on a skirt, and a classical Bar-type jacket turns around to a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t back view of underpants.
“I’ve been looking at this traditional wife trend that’s going on. I wanted to comment on that very conservative way of dressing. Then through my AI glitches, I kind of deconstructed those garments into someone who feels like they have the opposing values.”
Then, just before the finale came William Palmer’s totally British blokey-jokey collection. Thus: a teapot bag, a teacup hat, a loaf of bread sports bag with a chunk bitten out of it, a red checked tea-towel shirt, a gingham plastic tablecloth cagoule, and daft sort of matching deerstalker rain hats. In times of trouble, you can always rely on an English sense of humor to brighten things up. He made the entire audience leave with a smile.
