For Cici Zhang, fashion is a form of the most personal self-expression. And for her graduate collection, she visualised a spiritual world in which Mother Nature lent a hand to form the flowering, organic shapes that came to symbolise her inner self.

The idea of digital distortion has never been more prevalent than in 2020, a year plagued by misinformation and fake news. For FIT student Yitao Li, she channelled that distortion into her graduate collection of misshapen, multi-coloured garments.

Drawing inspiration from the elements and his favourite childhood animation, Oscar Ouyang’s gutsy final collection, Wind, Current, Flow, uses knitwear to inform his futuristic world.

Graduating from the Royal College of Art, Dimitris Karagiannakis is using fashion to explore “notions of womanhood and femininity, transness, and the body,” drawing inspiration from Greek mythology and spiders to create a metamorphic design.

To LCF grad, Saule Gradeckaite, fashion is her way of expressing creative subjectivity towards an objective environment. Inspired by a Lithuanian cop show, her graduate collection challenged the critical gaze towards East European Hooligans (aka ‘gopniks’).

For his graduate collection, London College of Fashion student Daniel Vass went into full-blown clownery mode, and in the age of Boris and Trump, doesn’t it just seem fitting?

Graduating with a collection of female flora, Arianne Scott is the Central Saint Martins final year student using the nostalgia for another’s past to influence her garment design.

Inspired by familial ties and self-identity over lockdown, Jack Fieldhouse’s final photography project, Class of ’86, explores his parents’ university experience through the medium of self-portraiture.

Celine Kwan is the Central Saint Martins graduate combining furniture and fashion to create her own living room utopia with “garments that look beautiful while being worn and can also be admired [when] taken off.”

Inspired by the masculine figures in his life, Kadeem Lamorell is the Parsons graduate using knitwear to understand “why masculinity is such a deeply held and important concept” in the African-American and Caribbean communities he grew up in.

Diverging from a science degree, Justine Janot switched to fashion to be able to “create characters and environments from a more 3D point of view.” Her graduate collection is the antithesis of that, combining traditional making practices with digital design in a collection of hybrid feminine silhouettes set against the backdrop of a hostile, dystopia.

Meet Central Saint Martin’s best and brightest fashion designers, communicators and journalists from this year’s graduating class, a group of students caught in and persevering through a pandemic and global landscape that no one could have ever predicted.