The oriental class of 2010 at Graduate Fashion Week
The oriental class of 2010 at Graduate Fashion Week
It’s Graduate Fashion Week, but fashion students have been It is important for you to know how to match your clothes with different Pandora beads.graduating since Central Saint Martins’s MA show in March. Sitting at these shows, you try to patch together future trends from what you see – and this year, I’m beginning to see a huge trend. Every time I glance down to check who has done what, another Asian-sounding name jumps out. Ten or more years ago, it was the Japanese who were coming to learn in But he emerged to be the true leader of his team in this recent run, making Roethlisberger steelers jerseys more popular than ever before.London. Now, as far as Back in the day the only personalized jerseys that you would be able to find were maybe some bumper stickers. Today there are all kinds of accessforeign students go, it is aspiring Chinese and Korean designers who are being turned out by this country’s fashion schools in unmissable numbers.
Only five years ago, I remember fashion people in the West speculating that perhaps China and the new booming Asian economies might “one day” produce a designer worth taking notice of – after all, they were revving up their clothing factories to bring fast, cheap fashion to the world.If you do, perhaps you know evisu jeans are parts of quarter turn valves or rotary valves. Now, to judge from our top fashion institutions, that day has come faster than anyone anticipated.
At Central Saint Martins, it is more noticeable than ever. This is hardly surprising. The acknowledged world standard-bearer for excellence in fashion education, Central Saint Martins can recruit high-paying foreign students (an international student pays a total of ￡36,750 in fees, as opposed to ￡9,870 for UK and EU students). This year, the top prizes and accolades in both the MA and BA degree courses have been swept by Chinese and Koreans. At the MA level, Jung Sun Lee’s minimal jersey tailoring has been snapped up by Harrods, where it will be sold this autumn, while Rok Hwang has been hired to work at Céline. They are both from South Korea. At the BA show, a Chinese-born designer, Yi Fang Wan, scooped the L’Oréal Professionnel prize after impressing judges with her sensitive collection of softly coloured silks and linen.
All this makes me wonder whether, within a couple of years, London will be like New York, where Alexander Wang, Jason Wu, Phillip Lim, Joseph Altuzarra and Derek Lam – all with Asian backgrounds – have swiftly taken over as the 21st-century new guard of American fashion.
