Few institutions in global fashion command the reverence, mythology, and persistent scrutiny of Central Saint Martins. Each year, the CSM BA Fashion show is more than a parade of new designers: it’s a seismic reading of our social, political, and artistic landscape—a living diary stitched in silk, trash, denim, latex, and inherited memory. The 2025 showcase stands among the most electrifying in recent memory, an event both riotous and deeply reflective, politically charged and personal to the point of confession. Here, garments become literary forms, and the runway a stage for stories of resistance, survival, and hope.
This comprehensive literary exploration traces the key narratives and methods that defined the CSM 2025 BA collections. Through immersive description and critical literature parallels, it considers how these young artists wielded fabric as language: to confront migration and displacement, interrogate disability and queer identity, reclaim colonial histories, and imagine dystopian or utopian futures. The result is a tapestry of works where protest, memory, and speculative fiction interweave—each thread a challenge to the old order of fashion and a claim for what it might yet become.
The Show as Text: Fashion’s New Literary Form
To view a graduate fashion show as literature is not mere metaphor at CSM. This year, the runway became a moving anthology, with each collection conceived as a short story, manifesto, or fragment of speculative fiction. These were not just clothes, but texts—each designer a novelist, each model a character traversing a chapter of communal reckoning.
Myah Hasbany: Alien Mutations and Southern Gothic
Myah Hasbany—recipient of the L’Oréal Professionnel Young Talent Award—summoned a Texan fable into fabric. Her starting point: the 1897 Aurora, Texas UFO crash, a local legend steeped in mystery and rural superstition. Yet, Hasbany’s vision was not archival, but hallucinogenic. Models shimmered in layers of iridescent latex and metallic mesh, their bodies transformed by oversized balloon appendages and cocooning textiles. The effect was grotesque, yet somehow seductive: the body mutating under invisible, extraterrestrial radiation.
This was Southern Gothic updated for the Anthropocene, referencing Flannery O’Connor’s worlds where moral decay festers beneath polite surfaces. Like O’Connor, Hasbany’s silhouettes hinted at secrets and shame, but her grotesquerie was also defiantly queer—mirroring Kafka’s tales of metamorphosis, and Margaret Atwood’s speculative bodies under social siege. Her finale, a 12-foot balloon dress swelling like a chrysalis, encapsulated both birth and containment—a direct critique of Texas’ culture wars, and a symbol for the cycles of queer visibility and erasure in conservative spaces.
Ayham Hassan: Craft as Resistance
In stark contrast, Ayham Hassan’s collection stood as a testament to handwork and heritage. A Palestinian who crowdfunded his education at CSM, Hassan’s work functioned as an act of preservation and resistance. Metallic armor triangles flashed atop fluid linen—symbols of both protection and vulnerability—while a singular, magenta-and-grey knit, crafted by his mother and sent from afar, became a talisman of longing and separation. Each garment wove together the threads of home, exile, and protest.
The references here were literary as much as textile: Edward Said’s Orientalism resounded in the deconstruction of Western visions of Palestine, while the desperate journeys of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun haunted the silhouettes—figures at the edge of visibility, waiting at borders. Hassan’s work spoke to the power of handicraft as living archive, evoking Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness where embroidery and memory resist erasure. Outside, activists chanted, holding banners against both Israeli policy and the fashion industry’s own complicity. Within, Hassan’s garments became a manifesto in motion—a reminder that fashion, too, is a battleground for justice.
Hannah Smith: Adaptive Fashion as Liberation
Hannah Smith—this year’s first runner-up—reimagined the wheelchair as both mobility aid and aesthetic extension. Her sculptural pieces utilized wrought-iron gate motifs and looping leather ribbons, exploring what she called “the organic and mechanical nature of disabled identity.” Smith’s models floated, their wheelchairs draped with woolen tailoring that cascaded like regal trains, subverting centuries of sartorial exclusion.
In literary terms, Smith’s vision echoed Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—the notion that illness, or disability, is not merely to be “overcome,” but can be transformed into power, beauty, and narrative authority. Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection—a celebration of “corporeal deviance”—resonated in every float and fold. Smith’s runway was not an exercise in pity, but a radical declaration: the disabled body is neither tragedy nor taboo, but origin and center.
Mason Tomsett: Queer Satire and Scottish Masculinity
Few collections sparked as much laughter—or discussion—as Mason Tomsett’s sly satire of Scottish machismo and homophobic bravado. His models swaggered in kilts stitched with football jersey stripes, their underwear emblazoned with “BUM BOY”—a reclamation and inversion of schoolyard insult. Tomsett’s humor was sharp, but never cruel: his garments conjured Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, outlaw sexuality wielded as rebellion, and Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, where gender is neither binary nor burden, but something exuberant, unfinished, and free.
The visual puns and layered references spoke to a new queer consciousness in menswear: one that both mocks and mines the codes of national and gendered identity, queering them with affection and irreverence. Tomsett’s closing look—a “kilted” football jersey trailing tulle—became an anthem of joyous defiance.
Dieter Vlasich: Mayan Textiles and Decolonial Design
In a feat of cross-cultural collaboration, Dieter Vlasich worked alongside Yucatán artisans to build a collection out of pre-Hispanic geometries, natural dyes (from logwood, cochineal), and reconstructed Mayan weaves. The silhouettes—part warrior, part priest, part futurist—embodied Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, the reality of living between cultures, languages, histories.
Vlasich’s process rejected fast-fashion’s extractive logic in favor of exchange, reciprocity, and ritual. Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics—the theory of survival under erasure—was stitched into the very seams, each garment a question: what histories survive, and at what cost? On this runway, the colonial archive was not merely referenced, but rewritten.
Nostalgia vs. Dystopia: Time as Material
Isobel Dickens: Haunted Childhoods
Isobel Dickens’s work was haunted by absence—specifically, her bulldozed hometown, now reduced to memory and debris. She reconstructed these psychic ruins with pipe-cleaner knits and foam coats, garments that suggested both play and trauma. Her silhouettes referenced Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, where childhood nostalgia is bound up with loss and exploitation, and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a meditation on decay and the narratives embedded in ruins.
The effect was both eerie and tender: clothes as memento mori, carrying the weight of homes that no longer exist, towns flattened by time or policy. Dickens’ collection insisted that fashion is not merely a marker of now, but a vessel for the ghosts of places left behind.
Linus Stueben: Robot Dogs and Loneliness
In a departure from memory, Linus Stueben conjured the digital now—and the alienation that often defines it. His Y2K-on-acid ensembles came paired with a robotic dog on a leash, a gesture both comical and deeply poignant. These were clothes for a world of screens and simulations: reflective plastics, synthetic fur, and glitchy prints.
Stueben’s references were philosophical as well as pop-cultural: Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto—the blurring of human, animal, and machine—wove through every look, while Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation provided a model for fashionable numbness, the desire to escape into artificial worlds. The result was not dystopian in the classical sense, but mournful—an elegy for touch in a world that touches only through proxies.
Phoebe Bor: Nature’s Cruelty and Beauty
Phoebe Bor drew inspiration from her South African bush childhood—her designs constructed from eucalyptus leaves, grass feathers, and upcycled natural detritus. Her work oscillated between the brutality and beauty of the wild, a tension captured in every silhouette. Here, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace—nature as an indifferent, sometimes hostile witness—met Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, a meditation on loss and the solace of the wild.
Bor’s nature was not romanticized: it was harsh, even cruel, but never passive. Her runway invoked a landscape both sanctuary and snare, suggesting that fashion, too, is shaped by the environments—physical and psychic—that we inhabit.
Fashion as the New Avant-Garde
At the 2025 Central Saint Martins BA show, the future of fashion was not simply forecasted, but written into being. These designers did not present mere collections; they authored worlds—some utopian, some apocalyptic, all fiercely alive with narrative energy. Their work unfolded at the intersection of protest literature (Hassan, Smith), magical realism (Hasbany, Bor), queer theory (Tomsett, Stueben), and historical witness (Vlasich, Dickens).
In an industry often derided for its pursuit of spectacle and sales over substance, CSM’s new cohort proved that the radical, the literary, and the political still have a place on the runway. Each garment became a page, each walk a sentence, each collection a chapter in the ongoing story of fashion’s capacity to critique, resist, and remember.
As Timisola Shasanya—whose own collection traced migratory flows and urban melancholia in London, echoing Teju Cole’s Open City—summed up with precision:
“Garments can carry memory on the body.”
In 2025, this memory is not nostalgic, but urgent: a record of survival, protest, and hope, etched in thread and silhouette, marking the body as both archive and manifesto.
