The Central Saint Martins MA Graduate Show

Central Saint Martins has cultivated a roster of stellar fashion talents over the years – and the crop of 2023 is certainly promising. The college hosted a runway show on schedule during London Fashion Week, featuring the work of graduates from its prestigious MA course. Read on for the new names to know now.

It cemented London’s status as talent-maker

It was entirely appropriate that the Central Saint Martins MA graduate show would take place immediately before Daniel Lee’s debut for Burberry. A product of the fabled fashion school, Lee is a Bradford-born Brit who went to Paris, made it big, and returned to London to take over the biggest fashion house in Britain. The raw, experimental expressions that filled the CSM runway were testament to the talent this country continues to nurture. It was exemplified in Yaku Stapleton, who won the prestigious L’Oréal Professionnel award judged by Off-White’s image director Ibrahim Kamara.

Yaku won the L’Oreal Professionnel prize

Known simply as Yaku, the show’s winner presented an inspired collection that envisioned members of his family as characters in his favourite game, RuneScape. They came out wielding swords and giant hammers like something out of a fantasy film, but there was nothing silly about the theatre that played out on Yaku’s runway. Every fantastical garment was beautifully, intricately constructed to the point that you visualise how the designer could exercise his craft in a commercial fashion landscape. Inspired with ideas of Afrofuturism, a philosophy with which Virgil Abloh imbued all his work, you couldn’t help but think how the late designer would have loved it.

Maxime Black made a collection from AI

It’s easy to feel old when you go to a CSM show. Backstage, Maxime Black explained how all his creations had been generated by artificial intelligence. Quite literally, he fed a machine – and excuse the lack of proper terminology here – some 3,000 ideas of what a generic fashion collection looks like, and transformed the results it came back with into real clothes. It made for a trippy and kind of deformed aesthetic where pockets appeared in strange places and spikes protruded from clothes like something out of Michael and Janet Jackson’s “Scream” video (if there’s a reference to reveal a writer’s age). It was a clever and entirely generational approach to design that will see Maxime – real surname Touzé – go far.

Chié Kaya won the Canada Goose prize

Chié Kaya, who won the Canada Goose prize for sustainability alongside Alessandro Tondolo, proposed an idea founded in heirlooms. Created from repurposed menswear, the collection transformed one type of garment into another through draping and adapted others into accessories. “It captures how working women purchase signature clothing items from men’s and women’s existing wardrobes and wear them by alternating, deconstructing and juxtaposing their structures as a proposition to daily and occasional wear,” read her mission statement.

Xuesong Yang took inspiration from Mongolian wrestling

Xuesong Yang put on a spirited presentation informed by his Mongolian homeland. Styled on a strong character cast, he evoked the Mongolian wrestling discipline Bökh “as an interplay between masculinity and the environment”, fusing in his garments the impression of the country’s natural scenery and the attitude of the sport. It made for a pretty hypnotising display that made you want to see more.