A Big Night Out for Central Saint Martins’s B.A. Class of 2021
Vibrating with exhilaration, color, and tear-jerking emotion, the show that the Central Saint Martins B.A. class of 2021 put on Tuesday night was a graduation celebration like no other. A collective triumph of youth and creativity over the adversity and trauma of a year of struggle, it had all the thrill of a grand fashion reunion for the hundred students who each walked in their own looks—and for the widely spaced audience who hadn’t seen a live fashion show in so, so long. Seli Arku-Korsi, who carried off the year’s L’Oréal Prize in his swashbuckling printed, puffy silhouette of cape and trousers, said, “Getting through it was like a massive exhale for all of us. It felt cathartic. After all the emotional roller coaster of the past year, when I lost my mum to COVID, I put my whole soul into it. It felt like we were part of something special.”
Wild cheers and applause followed every graduate as they stomped a snaking runway covered in a patchwork sewn from leftover fabrics from their collections—a feat completed by a group of first-year students. Course director Sarah Gresty, who has been teaching students scattered all over the world with her academic team, had commandeered the cavernous open-air loading bay alongside the campus for five COVID-19 compliant shows, with 30 guests at each. “We came together to experience this as a community,” she said. “Seeing them celebrating their work with each other, and us all cheering them on and realizing how wonderful they are—it felt euphoric.”
With all its wild varieties of giant shapes, towering headpieces, and handmade textiles, the show looked just as CSM as ever—only yet more daring and tellingly personal. It opened with Claudia Gusella’s astonishing piece, painstakingly constructed from a “chain mail” of eggs. “I just didn’t know what to do, had no inspiration, until Easter, when we were blowing eggs at home,” she said. “Then I started to play around with latticing them together with wire.” As a symbol of emotional fragility—and new life—turned into something of crazy beauty, it spoke of the hours and hours students spent in lockdown.
Extreme innovation blossomed in kitchens and bedrooms, when there were no “normal” fashion resources at hand, no clubs to go to, nowhere to meet. “Obviously, it was a big shock to the system and the way things went is nothing any of us signed up for,” said Laura Barnes, who ended up constructing her dress from cardboard boxes and waste leather. “I think the biggest part is that I missed my CSM friends and my classmates because that’s a huge part of the degree, you know, trying something, and seeing how ridiculous it looks, or seeing how fun it is, getting opinions. But equally, I think, looking back, to have the chance to concentrate and, not go 5 million miles an hour this year has come to mean so much.”
At home in London, Angelica Ellis dedicated herself to intense embroidery, making a navy blue tailored jacket and a glinting pailletted skirt over trousers. Spurred by living through the Black Lives Matter protests as a person who was brought up in a Caribbean household, she reflected, “The symbolism of my work is protection. I was thinking of the Windrush generation. Their clothes were their armor.” She appliquéd Black figures onto her jacket, and set about making sequins from Coca-Cola cans—exquisite results that applied and pushed everything she’d learned from an internship with Chanel’s Lemarié feather and embroidery house. “I was quite upset at first about not being able to go to college, but it ended up working out for me,” she said. “All I needed was a Coca-Cola tin, thread, and my needles.”
