The annual BA Fashion show at Central Saint Martins is a riot. Unlike the MA show, which claims a prime spot on the official London Fashion Week calendar and allows students two precious extra years to refine and clarify their practice, the BA show is the moment to think big. Push a few buttons, tutors tell their students, rally against the banal. Modesty can wait.
This year, just 40 young designers were selected from the 2025 cohort, who presented 241 looks in the hallowed Granary Square campus’s central hall. It’s a well-earned reputation as the fashion world’s foremost incubator that draws in teams of editors, buyers, and talent – many of them alumni, of which there’s a headspinning list from Alexander McQueen to John Galliano, Phoebe Philo and Hussein Chalayan.
Burberry’s creative director (and CSM graduate) Daniel Lee was this year’s judge for the L’Oréal Professionnel prize, watching front row alongside Zandra Rhodes, Fai Khadra, A$AP Nast, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Dexter Navy, and Bianca Saunders. Around them, a sea of fashion editors and buyers leaned forward, waiting like expectant parents for the next generation to make their screaming entrance into the world. In uncertain times, there’s real value in turning to fashion’s youngest minds. And while it’s nigh on impossible to thread an overarching theme through these works, a sense of optimism runs bright. Sacchirine colours, alien-like inflated knitwear and playful experiments with form worked into an overall joyful, chaotic offering.
From L’Oréal prize winner Myah Hasbany’s sculptural, otherworldly offering inspired by a UFO legend from her home state of Texas, to Matthew David Andrews’ dissolvable collection, The Venice of Essex, drawn from the fantasy of a flood sweeping through a town carnival, photographer Harry Miller joined the designers backstage at this year’s show. Click through the gallery above to see their works.
