What happens to fashion creativity when all bets are off, and all the parameters of present and future are suddenly compressed into the space of your bedroom, with just a few Zooms into other people’s cloistered worlds? The lockdown class of 2021 are the first Central Saint Martins M.A. students to have fully worked through the pandemic mind fuck. Their analogue sensibilities in a digital world were finally out on display today. Anyone and everyone able to steer their mouse along the paths of the virtual college campus can encounter them there, with a welcome intro voiced by Michèle Lamy: “I dare you.”
“Teaching onscreen makes it more mad, more intense and penetrating,” said course leader Fabio Piras. “It took away the slickness. We trusted the students. Quite an intense humanity came out. They were incredibly in control, and it was humbling to see how resourceful they were. We adapted [to] the reality, no matter what. I didn’t see it as an impediment.”
The annual winners of the L’Oréal Prize, selected this year by Vogue contributor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, are Sol Hansdottir, who worked from her home in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Antonio Castro, a Portuguese student, holed up in London, fashioning elaborate textiles from waste. Their collections touched on primal, pagan forces—and clearly say that they had no problem at all with working from home.
“I had this idea of constructing theories around kind of giving up control, because we think we have control of life, but we don’t really. It was surrendering to that force,” said Hansdottir, who created her spiraling “irrational tailoring” from wool gathered from old Icelandic fabrics and fleece from her family’s farm. “To be honest, I didn’t really miss the atmosphere in the studio—personally my thoughts and processes really thrive in alone time. To do it a thousand miles from industry resources—having to be resourceful and figure stuff out—I think that affected the collection in a good way.”
Antonio Castro found inspiration in a folk tradition from the north of Portugal. “I created these characters from this ritual—it’s a Celtic tradition like the wicker man. They get transported by a glitch that takes them from this initiation to these other Zoom calls that are happening,” he said. “I cut vintage garments and rewove them. I made corsets and shirts, but I don’t think in gender. It was a challenge at first, but it was also very good to focus, to construct on my own body. Because of that, I think the outcome was much richer.”
Students are meant to challenge the existential boundaries of what “the fashion industry” is supposed to be. It’s almost a Central Saint Martins tradition and there’s surely more of that challenging needed now. Adam Elayassee, a British-Moroccan student, decided to bring his whole self to his collection, naming it after the khamsin wind that blows from sub-Saharan Africa. “Usually, I’d do a collection which was something to do with art, the sort of thing that people talk about. But this time, I chose to talk about my personal stuff,” he said. “My own life is literally split into two. My god mum is Nigerian, my girlfriend is South African, her god mum is Jamaican, and for my 25 years, I’ve spent summers with family in Morocco. I’ve lived in this community in East London where all these cultures were clashing and it felt normal to me—this little underdog community.”
His menswear collection of reversible, interchangeable pieces worn by friends from the East End is based on the idea of nine tents, which he hand-dyed with saffron and blue mineral rocks from Morocco. “Tents are in my culture. When everyone got married, for a birth, a funeral, people come together under these tents in Morocco. [In] my area in London Brutalist estates are everywhere. My tents can join together so that everyone can live under them. All of us are first-generation children,” he says. “So, long story short, [the] khamsin wind is like a metaphor, an allegory for the African diaspora. How we moved from immigrant parents to a first generation in London, trying to use our voices. It’s creating a collection that literally shelters the whole community.” He laughed at the idea that COVID-19 restrictions might have thwarted what he wanted to do. “No. Making the best out of the least. That’s what we do. I’ve done it my whole life.”
In womenswear, there was body-positive deconstructed lingerie from Elisa Trombatore, an essay in repurposing her own wardrobe from Genevieve Devine (which could be a new personalized service), and a madly colorful collection of “Witches Work” by Ru Kwok. Vivien Canadas’s polished collection, A Sip of Wind, featured a circle skirt bouncily caught in movement. The effect of not working in the studio, she said, “gave a sense of freedom. The freedom of doing what we thought was right.”
Through it all, chatting to a few of this cohort, there’s a sense of self-reliance, ethics, kindness, and a real joy found in exploring what making clothes can be about. Ranura Edirisinghe’s completely cheerful collection reveled in homecrafts, “paying homage to my Sri Lankan heritage of batik printing to forge a new design language rooted in artisan collaboration,” she said. Connor Baxter, meanwhile, created a purely escapist 3D hotel fantasy for 2021, complete with a piano, a piano stool, and luggage, all made from tulle. “Check in here,” he wrote, “and check out.”
