Design some Fashion London 2015 new

Excuse me for saying it, but I’ve been impatient for something radical, new, knock-your-breath-out delightful, and astonishing to come along in women’s fashion. Menswear is basking in the limelight of its own innovation recently, making me envious. By contrast, womenswear designers, for all the collections they’re showing practically every week of the year, are under such enormous pressure to perform and sell nice clothes (and I do empathize) that the creative voltage has been feeling to me as if it’s running on a dimmer. What fashion constantly needs is jolts to the system from people with clear minds and the pure luxury of time to percolate new ideas—but where are those rare creatures? In school, it turns out! Over the past weeks, the best of London’s 2015 womenswear graduates have been showing uplifting, vivid viewpoints on color, the body, dynamic movement, and a powerfully fresh sense of sexiness. Even more surprisingly, they’re springing straight out of college with preternaturally accomplished skills in photographing, videoing, and packaging images. Fengyi Tan, a student from Bejing; Tugcan Dokmen, who is Turkish; and Paula Knorr, from Germany, made a startling impact on behalf of the international cohort at the Royal College of Art, alongside the standout home-grown British graduate Hannah Williams; all young women. From the Central Saint Martins MA cohort came Matty Bovan, and the baby of them all, 21-year-old Josh Read, who graduated with a BA from Kingston University; both young men who have snagged 2015 LVMH Graduate Prizes which give each of them a year’s employment, at Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, respectively. But more important than the name-checking is the content of their work, and where it originated. The new designs from the Royal College of Art center on thinking about beautifully bold, senusous presentations of the female body. Williams decided she’d dispense with pattern-cutting and sewing and solved the problem with silicone, plaster, acrylic, and crystal components, seemingly freshly poured over her models’ limbs, all the way to the dripping fingertips. Knorr questioned her women friends about their secret feelings about their femininity, and channeled her research into wet-look, gossamer-weight fabrics tailored to drape, cling, and flutter over lithe, empowered physiques. Tan wanted to experiment with movement and elasticity, and called in dancers and a choreographer to show her elegantly modern elongated, stretchy, and Perspex headpieces. Dokmen sublimated her thoughts about masculine and feminine traits into a beautiful sequence of pastel-colored wrapped tulle dresses that bested the traces of striped polo shirts beneath. In all, it was a tour de force from a young generation with a lot to offer in terms of articulating new feelings, forms, and freedom of expression. The difference for them, though, is that they’re emerging at a time when the cost of their education (university fees in the U.K. tripled under the Conservative government) means they’re deeply in debt. This isn’t a generation which rushes out to set up their own businesses, in the tradition of young London-taught designers before them. That has stopped. These brilliant kids—excepting Bovan and Read, who are spoken for in Paris—need work. Intelligent employers ought to be circling them right now, because whoever absorbs their energy could get a really good shot at defining the future.