Fashion: Central Saint Martins
Fashion: Central Saint Martins
Celebrating one of the most influential fashion schools in the world.
5 February – 10 March 2020
Discover the unique, almost indefinable, qualities that produce fashion at Central Saint Martins. Including specially commissioned portraits of staff and alumni, and materials drawn from the College’s Museum & Study Collection.
“If you can draw it, you can make it.” – Muriel Pemberton, British fashion illustrator and founder of Central Saint Martins Fashion Programme.
This exhibition will unpack the unique environment that makes the College so vital to London’s prominence as one of the key fashion capitals of the world.
Complementing the recent publication of Fashion Central: Saint Martins by Hywel Davies and Cally Blackman, this exhibition will take you into the heartland of the programme, revealing the creative, supportive and enduring relationship between students and tutors.
Curated by final year BA Fashion Communication: History and Theory students and the Museum and Study Collection, this exhibition includes a series of over 20 specially commissioned portraits of notable staff and alumni taken by MA Fashion Image students. Portraits include Kim Jones, Simone Rocha, Rifat Ozbek, Katherine Hamnett, Howard Tangye, David Kappo, Louise Gray, Caroline Evans, Julie Verhoeven, Natalie Gibson, Willie Walters, and Stephen Jones.
A range of graduate and professional work will be in the show, much of it displayed for the first time: an early waistcoat by John Galliano, Phoebe Philo’s final year dissertation, an Alexander McQueen bumster suit SS1997, Craig Green’s MA 2012 collection, a 1993 Hussein Chalayan Airmail dress and a skirt from Professor Louise Wilson’s MA collection 1986. This will be displayed alongside more recent graduate work, such as Edwin Mohney’s pink gaffer tape body suit, Hayley Grundmann’s Bin Bag dress and Sarah Ansah’s chrome shoes.
Plus, sixty looks from The White Show, the first term project by first year students of BA Fashion, which previewed at the British Fashion Awards in December 2019.
Images courtesy of University of the Arts London. Photos: Liam Leslie