The statement was made by 19-year-old Johnny McLean, one student among the 185-strong international college intake, who each got the chance to parade their look made from a standard-issue two metres of white fabric around the Royal Albert Hall in front of the assembled fashion industry. The other side of the banner read “Climate Emergency”.
Marching in testament to the imagination, diverse identities and resourcefulness of youth, it couldn’t help but read as a delightful spectacle. The joy of the White Show is the freedom from the constraints of commerciality. Nobody is expected to sell a thing, only to design purely for what they believe in. It must have made a nostalgic start to the evening for plenty of members of the audience and for several of the nominees – including Daniel Lee, who went on to scoop the Designer of the Year award and three more titles for his creative directorship of Bottega Veneta. The White Show is a rite of passage that all Central Saint Martins students have been through on the path to careers in Milan, Paris, New York and London.
However, among the melee of Monday evening, not everyone would have clocked McLean’s call to take action on sustainability, or even been aware that the vast variety of all-white creations circulating around them – that included 3D sculptures, crinolines, masks, repurposed medical equipment, ritualistic robes, a giant condom, a cloud, twins, a baby, a post-human creature, horned fantasms and much more – was in fact a student show.
However, among the melee of Monday evening, not everyone would have clocked McLean’s call to take action on sustainability, or even been aware that the vast variety of all-white creations circulating around them – that included 3D sculptures, crinolines, masks, repurposed medical equipment, ritualistic robes, a giant condom, a cloud, twins, a baby, a post-human creature, horned fantasms and much more – was in fact a student show.
The point of it all became much clearer as the White Show got its proper end-of-term airing in the vast Central Saint Martins campus at King’s Cross on Thursday, complete with gangways jam-packed with students. “Protest is at the heart of our zeitgeist at CSM, across London and globally,” read a press release, distributed by fashion communication students. “Raising our voices in protest and empowering the individual is what we aim to promote.”
The individuality, creativity and competition to stand out in a crowd of hundreds, which drives this annual student-produced mega-show, acts as a flash premonition of the ripples that will soon break on the fashion pond. Five years ago, graduates from CSM were taking the lead in normalising LGBTQ+ identities in the industry (think Charles Jeffrey and Matty Bovan), and sending a surge of black British creativity stratospheric (with Grace Wales Bonner and Ibrahim Kamara inspiring many more behind them). The make-up of this newest cohort has all that progress and confidence embedded in its ranks, but this year their overriding message is a response to the crashing waves of climate change and political strife engulfing us.
What they came up with is Opus 19, an operatic concept to bind together the high drama of inward emotional turmoil with the activism that is an everyday part of the lives of the Greta Thunberg generation. They hired the soprano opera singer Alexandra Lowe to open the show with a tumultuous aria, then interspersed snippets of speeches from school climate strike protests and Extinction Rebellion demonstrations on the soundtrack. An emblematic line hovered in the air: “We, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves.”
Opus 19 has a student-made Instagram page and a website. All the White Show action – backstage, the behind-the-scenes creativity in college, lookbooks – is there to view, as documented, photographed and written by fashion journalism and communication peers. To handle the enormous production, students set up their own in-house casting agency, Undertones. “There have been big advances in racial representation… but we need more changes to ensure we see complete diversity on our catwalks,” said Maz Taymani, one of the casting collective, in an interview by Aswan Magumbe. “It’s something I’ve always been passionate about, being of Middle Eastern descent.”
Why opera as an emblem, though? “I think it’s grief. Expressing that emotion they’re all feeling,” explains Sarah Gresty, head of Central Saint Martins BA. It’s in the nature of students to rebel (or should be), but for these 19- and 20-year-olds, inner conflicts and the state of the world are being sublimated into a new kind of poetic resistance to circumstances.
As related as many of the looks may be to the dystopian and personal trauma, this generation – post-gender, post-slogan T-shirt as it is – nevertheless represents hope. In all their grand, imaginative, multi-dimensional, multicultural gestures, these young designers are signalling that they are the creative solution-makers: the new energy source that can help the fashion world bring about the changes it knows it needs to make.
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