Marvin Descroc. Photo: Asia Werbel.
The Central Saint Martin’s MA graduate show is always an exciting fixture on the fashion week calendar as students prepare to forge a name for themselves on London’s fashion scene. But, for this class, there is more to worry about than setting themselves apart from the city’s stiff competition. In the midst of Brexit uncertainty, how will fashion graduates build internationally-striving brands?
While many of the students started their degrees at the famed London school – which has produced fashion giants like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano – before the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, they are now coming of age little more than a month before the 29 March deadline. The current fear of a “no deal Brexit” is creating insecurity about how everyday life issues and international business dealings will continue, but the fashion industry has voiced their own concerns about the impact of Brexit, with the British Fashion Council identifying talent, trade, intellectual property and funding as major areas that will be hurt by the split.
As a Brexit impasse looms heavily on the horizon, CSM Fashion Journalism BA student, Daniel Love, speaks to the 2019 Central Saint Martins MA graduates about launching their collections into the political unknown, and to their course director about what it means for the university’s future.
SHERYN AKIKI – MA Womenswear
Sheryn Akiki is fascinated and excited by the mise-en-scene of the woman on the run. The 25-year-old Lebanese designer who closed Friday’s show, and was joint winner of the L’Oréal Professionnel Creative Award, alongside menswear designer Goom Heo, wanted to create a “feminine illusion of a perfectly imperfect ‘Madame’ – a woman in action today is being able to shift from day to night, bed to office, lunch to dinner as hastily as possible”. This was embodied with her concoction of charity shop fabrics and roughed-up, awkwardly glamorous sequinned evening dresses, paired with precariously falling-open, used and abused handbags.
Being from the Middle East, Akiki, did not receive European funding for her collection – a reality more students could be facing post-Brexit. From necessity, she created the self-described “non-scholarship heels” — literally a heel strapped to a foot — and off-cuts of cheap jersey and pleather punctuate the collection. “I am asking myself a lot of questions about where the best place would be to stay – Brexit is daunting, but I also think it should push creatives to push against it more than ever. We live in a very international world where borders should stop mattering, yet governments want to make borders more concrete than ever,” says Akiki. “What I love with this collection is how my team consists of a Lebanese, a Portuguese, a Belgian-Egyptian, a Russian, with knits from Damascus, fabric from Beirut, repurposed material from all ends of Europe, and this is what makes it great. I hope this never changes.”
WANDA WOLLINSKY – MA Menswear
Known for her playful distortion of the restrictive and traditional male uniform, the 28-year-old German menswear designer studied for her BA in Berlin before moving to London to work at JW Anderson and later to New York for Thom Browne. In an unconventional relationship, fuelled by her time in design school in Germany where divisions between men’s and women’s wear are not so distinct, Wollinsky’s collection is inspired by the adaptation of tailoring for different bodies. At first glance, you see a traditional ‘male’ silhouette, but on closer inspection the sharp designs are distorted with snapshots of womenswear, be it a skirt or oversized angular sleeves on a smock shirt.
"You’re not secure in your position here, I really think my closest friends from other EU countries are going to leave rather soon.”
“For me, it was actually the reason I decided to do the MA right now because I thought this could be the last time I can actually afford this,” Wollinsky says. The designer and other European students are concerned about international fees, which can be as high as £38,000 per year, compared to £9,000 for a UK student. “Everyone is really anxious about this. In the beginning, we had this thing where everyone was like ‘who is from the European Union, put your hands up’ and it was, I think 33 out of 40 people,” says Wollinksy. “You’re not secure in your position here, I really think my closest friends from other EU countries are going to leave rather soon.”
KAUSHIK VELENDRA – MA Menswear
On a constant course to reinvent tailoring by reinforcing the importance of menswear couture, Kaushik Velendra is the first Indian-born designer to graduate from Central Saint Martins MA in fashion design. With the goal to “create a new tailored man every season,” his graduate collection strives to make menswear sexy. Using sportswear construction techniques in a bespoke manner, Velendra brings back a body accentuating fit with the use of external and internal shoulder, calf and knee padding that’s moulded directly to the male form. With production in London, Paris and Southern India, it’s also a truly global affair and a celebration of the traditional embroidery techniques of his hometown paired with contemporary reflective glass beading.
“I understand that Brexit creates a huge problem with money, with trade issues, but I feel that – this is very artistically orientated – it’s not going to affect me because I’ve always worked with people from different places and with different origins,” Velenda says. “I don’t see any reason as to why it should come between me and my work. I’m still going to be travelling and working with new people. Brexit is not going to stop me from doing anything.”
MARVIN DESROC – MA Menswear
Taking inspiration from his childhood, the Martinique-born and Paris-raised designer describes himself as “not black enough for my family and not white enough when I would step outside home”. Desroc, 22, tackles the issues that come with being a queer black man, not only in terms of sexuality, but also identity as a whole. The designer describes his aesthetic as, “Taking hip-hop style and Caribbean sound and romanticising these two with a ‘French’ flair, creating this weird limbo between blackness and whiteness, masculinity and femininity…”
“Brexit hasn’t really affected anything for me, personally,” Desroc says. “Fashion is a universal language. No matter where you make it, it can be understood everywhere. But that’s cause I’m still a student. I’m sure actual brands are affected by this. Fashion breaks barriers so no matter what happens it will keep on uniting us. So, now is the time more than ever to express ourselves.”
FABIO PIRAS – MA Fashion Director, Central Saint Martins
Swiss-born Fabio Piras stepped into the shoes of the late Louise Wilson OBE in 2014, and he’s known for his commercial development of student’s attitudes to fashion design. For Piras, adapting to a post-Brexit world is about more than accepting that most of the students will be paying higher fees.
“I have, as all of us do, both a political and a philosophical, social and emotional reaction to Brexit,” Piras says. “There’s a sense of closure that is really, really scary. We all think about being diverse, but in fact I think we really are terrified of diversity. We’re terrified of the other; we’re terrified of visitors, of immigration. I’m an immigrant; I’ve been an immigrant all my life. I was born an immigrant and that’s fine. You are whoever you are in a country; you’re not taking anything, you’re just contributing to a country. I find Brexit a terrible shame and a problem for a college like this or a university. Especially when the beauty of this catwalk show tonight was owing to the incredible amount of different countries where students come from. It’s not about concentrating on a very specific area of the world. It’s about having somebody from Poland that might not be able to afford the course but decided to take that train, that plane, that bus and comes to London and applies to Central Saint Martins and it goes as it goes. That opportunity will be taken away and that is infuriating, depressing and sad.”
"I find Brexit a terrible shame and a problem for a college like this or a university. Especially when the beauty of this catwalk show tonight was owing to the incredible amount of different countries where students come from."
“Central Saint Martins has an international profile with an unrivalled record for sending the best professional talent into the international fashion industry. If anything is going to be able to battle the storm that is Brexit, it’s going to be the inspiring talent of young creatives in institutions such as this one – and long may the boundary pushing continue.”
See a selection of backstage images here:
Photography by Asia Werbel.