LCF MA26 | MA Innovative Fashion Production

Designing the systems behind fashion’s future

Step into the MA Innovative Fashion Production space at the LCF MA26 | School of Design and Technology Postgraduate Exhibition, and it quickly becomes clear this is not an exhibition about finished looks alone. Instead, it reveals the often-invisible systems behind fashion: how garments are made, tracked, adapted, preserved, and transformed over time.

Across the exhibition, digital workflows sit beside physical garments; speculative systems appear next to personal stories. These projects show that fashion production is not just a backend process, but an active and creative design space.

“The year of 2024/25 MA Innovative Fashion Production graduates have created a wide range of projects, including digital prototyping to physical garment creation, investigated Digital Product Passports and their impact on supply chains, re-imagined ancient fabrics in the Digital Sphere to bring Heritage to a wider audience of both consumers and designers.” — Ella Sharp, Course Leader, MA Innovative Fashion Production

Fashion as infrastructure

A key theme in the exhibition is fashion as a system of information. Instead of asking what fashion looks like, many projects ask what it knows: what data it has, who it serves, and how that knowledge can be used more responsibly.

Jinyu Shen’s work reframes the Digital Product Passport as a living infrastructure rather than a regulatory label. By embedding detailed design, material, and disassembly data alongside records of wear, care, and repair, the project proposes garments that actively support reuse, recycling, and extended life, bridging the gap between designer intention and post-consumer reality.

Yan Xu’s parametric motif system shows the hidden labour of surface design. Parametric logic lets designers control density, scale, and variation, replacing fragmented workflows with responsive systems. Patterns can evolve easily across screen, garment, and textile production. Here, efficiency means clarity, control, and creative freedom, not just speed.

Digital bodies, lived experience.

The body – measured, mapped, protected, and reimagined – runs as another strong thread through the space. Several projects challenge how bodies are represented and accommodated within fashion production systems.

Qinyu Huang’s custom virtual avatars blend luxury, technology, and identity. Made from high-quality body scans and facial photogrammetry, the avatars support virtual try-on and made-to-measure services. In the exhibition, they feel more like portraits than technical demos, raising questions about intimacy, trust, and authorship in digital fashion.

In contrast, Shangyue Chen’s workwear research is grounded in physical labour. Drawing on personal history, the project rethinks construction workwear through ergonomics, movement, and social identity. The resulting garments respond to strain, heat, and posture, offering protection while respecting the dignity of the worker. This is a reminder that innovation must remain accountable to lived experience.

Heritage in translation

Rather than treating heritage as something fragile or fixed, several projects explore how digital tools can act as translators, extending the life of traditional textiles without stripping them of meaning.

Xiyu Tan’s digitalisation of Leno fabric revives an ancient Chinese weaving technique through high-fidelity virtual fabric assets, enabling pre-sale visualisation and on-demand production. Similarly, Miaoyu Huang’s re-imagining of Indonesian ikat proposes a “digital museum” that combines textile digitisation with cultural storytelling, making visible the labour, time, and memory embedded in handmade cloth.

“By addressing the needs of consumers and the fashion industry, they have interrogated sustainability, functionality, and modularity using a range of manufacturing processes, addressing the advantages and limitations of new technologies in both physical and purely digital formats.” — Ella Sharp.