Leave it to Saint Martins for ambition. The L'Oréal prize winner from the school's 2013 BA Fashion course, Mao Usami, sent out a collection that chewed the audio cassette of time through its warped layering and soundtrack. Cassandra Verity Green offered fishbowl backpacks and handbags, complete with live piscis happily swimming about, whilst Narae Park glued plastic bottles to shoes creating a noisy tribe. Inspired casting came from James Buck and Nicholas Daley, featuring artist Andrew Logan and DJ Don Letts, the man who brought punk together with reggae – and chose the soundtrack he walked to.
Drawing a crowd including Céline's Phoebe Philo, Giles Deacon (who moonlighted as master of ceremony) and Fashion East's Lulu Kennedy, 40 students got their moment, edited from the internal show days earlier.
Highlights apart from Usami, Green and Daley? Beth Postle opened with Liam Lynch's 'United States of Whatever' bathing her painted pop art collection in give-a-fuck? swagger. Rym Beydoun's mix of Islam and Nikes was wholly original, the designer telling us, " I wanted to rethink and redesign the Islamic veil. I aimed to change the scarf garment from its common conception to an empowering tool for women. My muse is the avantgarde Muslim girl who dares to mix religion and modernity in this multicultural world." Ed Marler, a Dazed favourite, cemented his status with a full-on men's and women's collection that was effortless in that it was so inuitively him. That stand-inside-your-art authenticity he shares with his mentor, Louise Gray. And it's exactly what fashion needs.
