This year the historical St George’s Bloomsbury church welcomed the 12 MA Fashion Design Technology Menswear graduates who were selected to showcase their final projects. Surrounded by colourful stained glass windows and impressive architecture, the Class of 2019 presented their collections to a packed audience, including renowned names in the press and fashion industry. For this years’ designs, students took inspiration from film, literature, family memories, the concept of duality, millenial lifestyle and the everyday world.
The show was styled by Michael Miller, who worked closely with the students to help them shape their garments and deliver a smooth and high-quality final collection. Makeup was provided by Maria Comparetto, and hair styling was assisted by Andy Heasman and the RUSH team for L’Oréal Professionnel. The vocalist Phoebe Haines accompanied each collection singing classic opera songs. Here, we take a look back at the MA Fashion Design Technology Menswear collections on this year’s ecclesiastic catwalk.
Photography: Roger Dean
Jialin Chen
Chinese designer Jialin Chen took the lead and opened the show with her collection Always the years between us. Her designs aimed to demonstrate how fashion design can embrace emotions through aesthetic values and bring personal experiences to life, developed from the concept of “psychological distance” as expressed by Edward Bullough (1912).
Natalie Rushton
Natalie Rushton presented a very personal collection, dedicated to her grandparents and inspired by a pearl necklace that she received from them as an eternal reminder of their youthful memories.
Liu Chen
The collection YOU, by Chinese designer Liu Chen, explores the presence of memories, life and identity in clothing and garments. “The sexually aggressive elements combined with humour through colour and patent leather is showing the self-control and individual liberalism by ‘binding’ and ‘releasing’ elements”, she told us.
Steven Passaro
“In a world where nothing is constant, growth became my fascination, a territory to conquer and master”. Based on his quest, Steven’s collection reflects the first explorations focused on the multiple bodies and minds that we possess.
Zhuti Pan
Zhuti took inspiration from her time commuting around London on the tube, where she observed passenger standing closely with their personal space being constantly invaded. As she explained: “proxemics is a main clue for the collection, which helped me to developing my own design methodology: folding and overlapping.”
Siyi Long
Film and paternity come together in this collection created by Siyi Long. Inspired by the movie Mr. Mom, which tells the story of a businessman becoming a stay-at-home dad, the Chinese designer has worked on developing functional clothing for fathers. Siyi told us that, with her collection, she hopes to motivate fathers to experience the best of parenthood through fashion, feeling more confident to attend any occasion.
Suhyoung Choi
Basing her collection on the study of the millenial lifestyle, Suhyoung Choi created her designs to allow more ease in movement whilst embracing minimalism, as she explained: “The NoMics collection is a poetic reflection of ergonomics, portraying utility versus body.”
Bongseok Gwon
Through this collection, South Korean designer Bongseok Gwon has tried to express the struggles that we all experience to find out who we are and define what we want in life. “This project is an expression of myself in the quest to find the meaning of life”, he told us.
Rachel Brown
By focusing on developing simple and minimally unwavering silhouettes, British designer Rachel Brown developed her distinctive collection by applying minimalism to her design process, in an attempt to “reduce the garment to as fundamental a state as possible”, as she told us.
Chao He
Chao He plays with textures, colours and patterns in his collection, in an attempt to go beyond our understanding of fashion and explore new possibilities, as he explained: “My project is inspired on how to extend our awareness, in order to have the opportunity to explore parallel universes where we might exist.”
Ahmed Serour
Presenting a multicolour and joyful set of designs, Ahmed Serour found his inspiration in male belly dancers, merging traditional Egyptian kitsch aesthetics with trash couture.
Daoyuan Ding
Aiming to express the vagueness of the objects and human identities, Daoyuan’s collection, titled Migratory Vagueness, tells the story that there is nothing really defined, represented by The Uncanny, in which the familiar is unfamiliar.
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