Graduation Shows 2022
Visions for the Future
During our review of the graduation shows in 2022, we saw some overlapping topics. For this report we focussed on three art and design schools; the Royal College of Art in London, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and Central Saint Martins in London.
From the RCA we selected five projects. Here the focus was both on community and society in relation to us humans and the digital, VR and how it relates and manifests itself in the physical world.
In the fashion collections from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp the (after) effects of the pandemic were a driver of inspiration. The period of being without family, social events and togetherness were translated into nostalgic collages, historic interpretations and thinking about the future of the world in general. Darkness and the idea of destruction and extinction were translated into collections. What is the role of fashion in a future that is dark and how does it affect society and people?
The work of the graduates from the Material Futures course of Central Saint Martins focussed on rethinking systems. How we make materials, how we construct objects and how we think about the afterlife of materials. Craft and nature played a bigger role than VR and AI, the projects explored a future of thinking long-term about what we create.
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You can download the PDF of the report here
Royal Collage of Art, London
Architecture
Throughout history, communities that are often excluded from traditional forms of discourse and protest, have often turned to the collective intimacies of quilting in moments of need, as a method through which to express themselves. Quilt City seeks to critique and challenge the ways in which public space. The project proposes a quilted urban strategy, deploying intimacy, collective, care and time, to allow for an unhindered use of urban space.
Anna Russell
Quilting community
Expression of protest
Develop over time
Architecture
Xuanru proposes a new way of contemporary living as well as suggesting a new society formed by the less powerful individuals in Tokyo, inspired by the hikikomori lifestyles, a form of severe social withdrawal. He reimagined Shibaura House, a co-working space in Tokyo, a building with a simple grid format layout, domesticity, high transparency and ambiguous boundaries. How to create a transitional place attractive enough to lure some hikikomori out, find their selves, build their own community, and set their own social values?
Xuanru Peng
A new society
Social withdrawl
A grid layout
Textile
We exist as soft bodies in hard places. This project explores how material language can be challenged by creating new relationships through form. New relationships can provide materials with new opportunities. The hard shapes are softened by curves while the soft materials are made more voluminous by using metal strips, inflating them, using foam or filling them with stuffing.
Liv Wilkinson
Contrast
New material relationships
Soften surroundings
Jewellery & metal
Bin Wen combines jewellery with virtual reality technology to create a boader sense of what jewellery can be. He calls himself a virtual jewellery artist and tries to combine physical jewellery design with virtual design to convey the artistic concept of his works. Bin uses his image as the basis for designing virtual characters and creating cyborg-style mechanical prosthesis.
Bin Wen
Virtual reality
Cyborg prosthesis
Layered
Innovation Design Engineering
Georgia Mackenzie is a trained biomedical engineer, focusing on gender-inclusive design through exploring visualisations of stigmatised women’s healthcare conditions. She created digital artefacts as physical conversation tools for patients, and AR overlays of internal organs. The AR software explains internal anatomy and what’s going on inside the body.
Georgia Mackenzie
Biomedical
Visualisations
Conversation tools
Antwerp fashion masters
The collection Unapologetic Feast is about losing manners at a dinner party. It’s a collage of madness, desire, liberation and sugar shocks. The collection is a manifesto of letting yourself go in a primal and savage way. It’s about going wild.” She hand-painted the fabrics, merging art with her sense of expression. The references Alise used are a mix of childhood memories, dinner party culture and historical costumes.
ALISE ANNA DZIRNIECE
Primal Behavior
Childhood Memories
Break the rules
Igor Dieryck has always been fascinated with uniforms, how they make everyone equal and how they change our manners. His graduate collection YESSIR explores the worlds of the uniform wearer, the strictly tailored suit at work versus the Adidas tracksuit at home. “I want to highlight those who are ignored or concealed in our system. I want to give them a voice to be powerful.”
Igor Dieryck
Power of clothes
Sameness vs individuality
Give people a voice
Permanent Error was inspired by a book by Pieter Hugo, a series of photo’s taken in the early 2000s in Agbogbloshie, one of the most polluted cities of e-waste in Ghana. He explores the dark side of humanity. The shapes were inspired by draping and casual workwear used to protect the body. In Permanent Error he used blue more than any other colour, symbolising hope while staying protected.
Yonghao Xie
Dark side of humanity
Protect the body
Blue to symbolize hope
Simply Bloom is a love letter to the designer’s parents, whom he was not able to physically meet during the two years of COVID. He explored his parent’s past, their love letters and photos. To translate this into garments, he used a technique called plain weave. He used materials inspired by their wedding looks, and translated the rectangle shape of letters and photographs into fabric scraps collaged together.
Ching-Lin Chen
Missing family
Translating memories
Textile Collages
With his collection Extinction ahead, the Korean designer Yeongho Ko wants to raise awareness about the world we live in. Every time we switch on the news we see alarming topics like global warming and the war in Ukraine. To put this into garments, he used some ideas and imagery of destructive holes and skeletons. He mixed this imagery with his own punk aesthetic to create an image that symbolizes his thoughts about the future of the world.
Yeongho Ko
Destruction
Punk aesthetic
Holes and skeletons
Central Saint Martins
Material Futures
Post McQueen examines the concept of creative preservation and legacy via artificial intelligence through the work of Alexander McQueen. Consolidating his collections into a dataset, an algorithm was trained and then deployed to generate over 500,000 images of what his work might look like through the logic of neural networks. The lines of what it means to be human and alive or not are being blurred, can legacy be sustained through artificial means and can it evolve further?
Danielle Adams
Preservation
Neural networks
Evolving legacy
Inspired by ancient glass-making processes, Lulu Harrison created tiles and vessels from local and waste materials sourced in and around the River Thames. Invasive quagga mussels were used to make glass. By incorporating these 21st-century waste materials into glass making, this project represents the idea of Future Archaeology and rethinking the way we view glass, and waste today.
Lulu Harrison
Ancient processes
Local waste
Future archaeology
300 Million shoes are discarded into landfill every year. Harvesting Footwear aims to act for and in communion with nature by developing a viable biodegradable trainer, harnessing only plants as material resources. Considering also the complexities of footwear manufacturing, this project aims to simplify the current production by proposing a trainer in one part made with a single process, a mould. When recycled, the trainer replenishes the plants, the soil, and the nature surrounding it.
Raphaël Nahmias
Biodegradable
Plant-based
Redesigning the process
We should rethink everything: the kinds of materials we source, how we manufacture, and what we use the resources for. This project is a symbiosis between fashion, natural processes and mathematics. Slime mould, a one-cell living organism, was taken as a prototype of the life cycle of clothing. Inspired by observing this remarkable living organism, an artificial intelligence created a series of proposals to develop a range of principles and techniques for creating textiles.
Victoria Afanaseva
Bio-manufacturing
AI and mathematics
Natural systems
Synthetic colourants are made from fossil fuels and some have been found to have harmful effects on both humans (as carcinogens) and the planet (as pollutants). This makeup collection uses mushrooms, lichens, yeast and mould pigments. Fungi are an underexplored source of sustainable colourants that are non-toxic, biodegradable, light-fast, and some even have cosmeceutical benefits.
Jesse Adler
Sustainable colourants
Non-toxic
Renewable resources
You can download the PDF version of the report here