Three final year students from the Fashion Design BA Honours course have been selected by SHOWstudio for their Class of 2021 shortlist of graduate talent who stand out from the crowd.
Following the success of SHOWstudio’s online showcase for graduating fashion design students in 2020, British fashion photographer Nick Knight and London-based fashion consultant Adam Andrascik put together a shortlist of 21 graduating students from over 360 submissions, selecting students whose work stood out from the crowd.
Graduating students from across the world were showcased in celebration of their most important projects to date. Michael John Kirby, Christine Ha and Caitlin Yates, students from the Fashion Design BA course at Westminster, were all selected as stand-out designers who made this year’s shortlist. Each of the students presented their unique collections, based on the knowledge and skills they have gained during their time studying Fashion Design.
For example, Michael John Kirby’s final collection ‘The Absence of Field’ is a series of sustainably produced experimental and wearable garments which seek to explore and abstract a personal relationship between the individual body and agricultural environments. Michael investigated traditional references to workwear alongside contemporary abstracted forms in order to capture the intangible tension of the designer’s intimate turmoil between personal and inherited identities.
Talking about the shortlisting, Rosie Wallin, Course Leader for the Fashion Design BA Honours course, said: “To have three of our exceptional graduates selected for the SHOWstudio shortlist this year is incredible and testament to the creativity, resilience and hard work of our students. COVID-19 totally changed the way we worked this year, and gave the Fashion BA students very little access to on-site facilities. Despite this, we helped them to set up home studios with mannequins, sewing machines and online tutorials for design and pattern cutting – and they made it work.
“Caitlin, Christine and Michael are all extremely accomplished designers and a varied and equally strong aesthetic coupled with an impressive work ethic. They tackled their final collections with an enthusiasm and curiosity about what they could achieve, and none of them played it safe; they took risks and fully engaged with their concepts to create brilliant innovative collections.”
See more of the students’ work on the SHOWstudio website.
Find out more about fashion courses at the University of Westminster.
