What is the secret sauce of the Central Saint Martins MA—the crucible that produced Alexander McQueen (class of 1992), and, a generation later, Sean McGirr (class of 2014), who’s now in the McQueen hot seat, as well as a hundreds-strong alum diaspora of independent London designers and team specialists at work across planet fashion? In a nutshell—a point that shines out in defiance of Brexit Britain and small-minded politics—it’s the diversity of student talent it draws from, the individuals who Professor Fabio Piras and his academic team put together to spark off one another, while each manifests what’s uniquely important to them.
“I don’t know, it’s like a very cliché thing to say, but the college has a legacy that attracts everything. Sometimes when you see fashion on a runway nowadays it’s more like a beautiful product—but when you see CSM, it’s something unknown, it has to be close to your identity,” said Dhruv Bandil, the Indian graduate who was awarded the prestigious annual L’Oreal Professionnel prize for his vibrantly ‘drip-dyed’ collection, decorated with his own technique of 3-D cotton-cord jewelry-like interior beading, inspired by 11th-century Shiva temple carvings in his local region. “It’s a requirement that it should be what you believe in,” he added. “That raw emotion is something that makes us crazy in our authenticity. Doing this cheered me up!”
Bandil had worked for Manish Arora in Paris, gaining industry experience before making his MA application. So had Alvaro Mars, who’d previously had his own brand. “I’m Spanish—really Spanish,” he laughed, describing the “everyday couture” idea he pursued by making pouffed panniers out of cotton shirts, styled over chopped-up tailoring or a gray sweatsuit, underpinned with Spanish leather-goods expertise (and some Loewe factory leftover leathers).
Mars’s answer to the CSM MA secret sauce question? “It’s like joining a ballet company. You come in here, you think you know how to dance, but then you see that everyone around you is freestyling. And at some point, you start free-styling yourself. You’re surrounded by talented people making things you have to see to believe.”
Across the table in the CSM studio, one of them was Jonathan Ferris, who had sourced a 3-D scanning company who printed latex masks of his own head. “I’m working-class, and I’ve had a lot of 9-to-5 jobs where I struggled with the anxiety to fit in,” he said. His conceptual revenge on the repression of British uniformity was a disconcertingly Ferris-faced collection of messed-up menswear classics with hair streaming from the back of office shirts, or knotted as a tie. “An eerie world of fetishes and fantasies.”