LCF MA26 | MA Fashion Futures
- Written byS Cheevers
- Published date 20 February 2026
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MA Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion, UAL challenges the status quo of the fashion industry, experimenting with and responding to its current conditions. Through themes of technology, control, care, and the body as a site of refuge and resistance, this year's cohort examines both the possibilities and anxieties of an uncertain future.
Below, we take a closer look at the exhibition, highlighting selected student projects that contribute to this thoughtful and critical body of work.
MA Fashion Futures has a bold ambition: to challenge fashion norms and critique the status quo, envisioning radically different ways to think, make and experience fashion. Our students look beyond trends, considering what fashion needs to do - addressing its role in climate, social, racial and technological justice. This course offers a space to experiment, combining physical and digital prototyping with an awareness for technological applications as much as its implications. Our students challenge existing narratives as they put principles into action in a manner that aligns with their individual strengths, values, and future aspirations. We are living through turbulent times, meaning this work is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Our students show courage and tenacity – they are not only the future, they are the realists of a larger reality.” - Julia Crew, Course Leader, MA Fashion Futures
Maeve Huthwaite explores the female body as objectified, spectralised, and consumed by a disciplining gaze. Her work seeks to reclaim the body by resisting containment, transforming the violence of objectification into forms that repel and confront. Through soft robotic experiments and speculative garments, Maeve animates figures that refuse compliance.
“The garments embrace monstrosity as a feminist force, reclaiming eroticism from passivity and control. Rage, excess, and discomfort are mobilised as tools of resistance rather than spectacle.” - Maeve Huthwaite, MA Fashion Futures
Tatsat Yadav’s Sanctuaries of Becoming also considers the body as both refuge and resistance within an ecologically and socially fractured future. Set in a dystopian landscape shaped by human excess, the project interrogates systems of control imposed on nature, identity, and selfhood. Paper, manipulated, layered, and structured, becomes a central material and an act of defiance, transforming vulnerability into strength.
“Becoming is framed as a continuous, non-linear process; messy, political, and necessary. The work asserts fashion as a critical medium, one that resists erasure, honours transformation, and reimagines survival as an act of care, resilience, and collective responsibility.” - Tatsat Yadav, MA Fashion Futures
Digital identity is explored in Vincy Xie’s Beyond the Body, Between Two Realms, which questions how identity is reconstructed and emotionally negotiated when the body becomes optional. Set in a near future, the project unfolds across three spaces: reality, a virtual bar, and an abstract consciousness realm. Here, audiences encounter three evolving avatars; a human-like mirror, an uncanny hybrid, and a post-body entity. Through speculative design, digital fashion, avatar morphology, voice, and AI-mediated emotion, the work examines how recognition, trust, and empathy shift when familiar bodily cues dissolve. The outcome is a short interactive film that also functions as a research experiment into post-body selfhood and algorithmic feeling.
Yanxiao Wu speculates on the illusion of care offered by technology. The Visionary is developed from the perspective of a fictional tech company in a near future shaped by artificial intelligence and surveillance capitalism. The project explores how AI-driven wearables promise convenience, beauty, and personal optimisation while quietly extracting data and reshaping individual autonomy. The collection comprises three wearable devices and one garment, including smart glasses, an EEG interface, and an AI-guided watch. Audiences are invited to reflect on their trust in technology, and on what is sacrificed in exchange for comfort and personalisation in an AI-dominated future.
Antonia Bruno also engages with AI futures in Of Logic and Intuition: Folklore for the Age of Machines. Through the lens of synthetic folklore, two AI-driven “governors”, Logic and Intuition, take form as creaturely masks with contrasting material qualities. The project exposes the instability of emotional binaries in technologically mediated life, revealing both the limits of machine intelligence and the human labour required to make AI feel legible.
“Ultimately, this project argues that sustainability, understood as relational, embodied and ecological, cannot be automated and must be cultivated through shared meaning-making and care.” - Antonia Bruno, MA Fashion Futures
Human care is further explored in Sayoko Kojima’s Re-Embodiment, a somaesthetic project investigating how fashion can motivate bodily movement and enhance self-awareness. Through dynamic physical expression, this performance film reflects on technological advancement and its impact on human behaviour and wellbeing.
A cohort shaping the future of fashion
The MA Fashion Futures graduates of 2026 both respond to and challenge the future, actively shaping what is to come within a complex and demanding context.
The LCF MA26 | School of Design and Technology Postgraduate Exhibition is open from 17 – 24 February 2026, Monday – Saturday, 10am - 5pm at London College of Fashion, UAL, East Bank campus.
- Read more LCF Stories
- Explore more MA Fashion Futures graduate work on UAL Showcase