Among the work of the 23 students who were chosen to represent the Central Saint Martins MA class of 2026, it’s impossible to draw out a collectsive theme—unless it’s a mass confrontation with the messy incoherence of our times. Which would be fair, after all. For this generation, it’s a choice between rolling with the chaos and trying to make something new from it, or striving to impose a personal kind of claritys.
All the course director Fabio Piras and his team asks is that their students’ psychodramas and tensions should end up executed with conviction and skill. Even if the result possibly doesn’t much resemble clothes as we know them—like Yodea Marquel Williams’s finale scrap-yard ghost of a galleon, or the asymmetric falling-off bits-and-pieces styling that many of this year’s cohort believes in.
Art adjacency is nothing new in British-trained designers. It can also be very useful—and lucrative—from the point of view of bringing special commissions from private clients, music stars, galleries, and museums. Grey Buscemi’s theoretical approach will likely win him attention in intellectual circles. An American with an economics background, he made a collectsion constructed from narrow vertical slatted strips of bonded calico—a bit reminiscent of blinds—but without using a single stitch.
“I think a lot about the production and how things are made, and I avoid sewing completely,” said Buscemi. “I did my thesis in economics on how sewing is kind of just a really bad practice for economies, for people; you can’t have job growth. It’s not great.”
Taking an anti-fashion-industry approach is no bar to getting into CSM MA. Buscemi says, “It was a real privilege to get into the course and be taught by the people who I respect. Fabio and these tutors are legends in my mind. I was really drawn to CSM for some reason; I just didn’t want to stay in the US. I wanted to come here because London has such a great history.”
Macy Grimshaw had already caught the eye of the influential stylist Harry Lambert before she graduated. Lambert commissioned her to make some one-offs for a Disney pop-up in Selfridges. What attracted him is surely Grimshaw’s exuberantly expressive techniques and the modern art couture level of her work. She showed jackets made from multilayers of petaled denim and “pencil sharpenings,” which actually turned out to be leather; dresses mimicking chain fences decorated with padlocks; a bodice bristling with cigarette stubs; and a graffiti-sprayed corset structured like a shop-front roller-shutter. “Everything is based on a photo or experience I’ve had in London,” she said. The exception: a satin slip dress half papered over with a crumpled image of another dress. “It has a lot of meaning for me. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s. It’s her life that she couldn’t remember, an image of a dress from her wardrobe papering over a silk dress.”
The winners of the prestigious annual L’Oréal award were chosen by Sophia Neophitou of 10 Magazine. The honors went to Maxina Brewer (already commissioned by FKA Twigs) and Ennis Finnerty Mackay. He pulled off a much-memed stunt with a latex bra-bodice that did double duty as a portable wine dispenser, as tried by Vogue writer Olivia Allen during the festive season.
The basis of his winning collectsion, Perpetual Motion, was actually a lot more serious. “My family for the last few generations has had problems with alcohol addiction,” said Mackay. Like Grimshaw, his fascination for elder relations’ wardrobes took on a life of its own. While reinterpreting his grandmother’s 1950s New Look–era jackets and integrating them with his father’s 1980s menswear shapes, Mackay cut some amazing 3D silhouettes. A tweed jacket nipped in the front held a bloused shape in the back; a full dirndl skirt turned into a pencil skirt as it walked away.
The sense of a night out descending into chaos was hinted at in the amber (the color of beer or scotch?) spattering a box-pleated skirt and, later, skirts made from packets of shredded out-of-date condoms. The deserved prize was the culmination of a lot of work experience and personal application to learning tailoring. “I was lucky enough to be hired as a pattern cutter at Alexander McQueen, where I worked on Sarah Burton’s last show. I’ve always worked in ateliers. I want my work to be grounded in skill,” said Mackay.
People expect rebels from Central Saint Martins. Those who go against the grain—and that includes peer pressure and social and cultural norms—are the rare ones to look out for. A couple this year stood out by making cheerful, mood-lifting statements with emotional complexities behind them. Pola Wislicz, a Polish student, dared to go pretty with a collectsion of handmade lace and chiffon dresses and wonky satin hats. “I want to find a balance between fragility and sharpness, and a joy, rebellion, and freedom in the glamorous,” she said. Close up, her metal-stapled embroidery exhibited a level of technique that could get her employed or commissioned for one-offs.
Zeina Issa made a celebratory collectsion called Inherently Loud, which danced with the idea of her Syrian heritage. “I am an Arab designer. My collectsion was really about redefining what the alternative contemporary Arab Muslim woman looks like,” she said. “I really wanted to talk about how women such as myself, through our entire existence, are constantly stereotyped and criticized, no matter what we do. It’s very much about reclaiming the loudness and the noise when we often are told to kind of keep calm and quiet down. So this collectsion is about finding our own identity through it all, but still paying respect to our heritage, our culture, and doing it in a very maximalist and opulent way.”
Tito Crichton-Stuart’s pastel-colored preppy romp was titled American Sissy, setting himself the rhetorical question: What does it mean to be an effeminate man? Twisted preppy polos, knitwear, and underpants turned out to be the refreshingly subversive yet commercially sound answer, with quite a kicker: “He is a version of myself I yearn to be and am simultaneously disgusted by.”
Crichton-Stuart knows of whence he speaks, since he’s an American. He looks to be the kind of designer who could easily get hired by a design studio in New York or Paris. Which is surely the end goal of getting an expensive education, even though the times are so bleak.
The last 10 looks on the Central Saint Martins MA runway were Topshop student collaborations. The very name rings nostalgic bells. Topshop and Topman as we knew them in the British high street boom of the past were lavish sponsors of LFW hospitality and emerging designers. The retail behemoth met with an ignominious collapse in 2020. It has now been rebooted under completely different management. The brief, to reinterpret Topshop Jamie and Joni jeans, brought the individual designers fees and experience working in teams. It also brought more sponsorship for Fabio Piras’s course. Students aren’t the only ones hard up for cash. In this day and age, it’s academia too, even at the level of the most elite of all university fashion courses. “Otherwise,” said Piras, “we wouldn’t be able to show.”
