A particular standout was the work of Ayham Hassan, a student from Ramallah in the West Bank who crowdfunded his way to Central Saint Martins and produced a powerful collection that showcased the astonishing beauty of Palestinian craft, and went back to artisanal traditions whose roots have been displaced by conflict. (Hassan described the collection as “a contemplation on the reality of genocide and the quest for liberation”; it felt especially resonant given the groups of students protesting for Palestine outside of the show venue.) There were metallic, armor-like triangles that spoke to traditional designs offering a form of spiritual protection, as well as an extraordinary piece paying homage to the village of Abu Shusha that was destroyed in the 1940s, fusing geometric patches of historic woven patterns from the region with layers of distressed organza; meanwhile, an enormous length of textile in gray and magenta, here worn as a floor-sweeping headscarf, had actually been knitted by Hassan’s own mother. “My mum can’t make it today obviously, because she’s in the West Bank,” he said before the show. “So with this, it feels like she’s here.”
The evening’s top three prizes, which were judged by Burberry’s Daniel Lee—who sat front row at the show, tapping his foot to the madcap pick-and-mix of musical soundtracks selected by the students—all went to worthy winners. The second runner-up was Haseeb Hassan, a British-Pakistani designer whose sophisticated designs were impressive. Taking inspiration from sources spanning everything from Madame Grès’s draping to vintage Pakistani postage stamps, he confidently distilled them into a collection that married graphic impact with exceptional craftsmanship: his riff on a South Asian shalwar kameez, here cut from a dusty blue leather and decorated with Arabic calligraphy, was a highlight, as was a closing look in a drapey, pleated white fabric that featured abstracted green motifs that echoed the Pakistani flag. “What mattered most for me was collaboration,” Hassan said after the show, noting that he worked with artisans in Pakistan to produce the shoes, crochet prayer caps, and woven tassel drawstrings. “It was a way to honor their craft and ensure the collection stayed grounded in where I come from.”
The first runner-up prize went to Hannah Smith, whose thoughtful approach to adaptive fashion was showcased in a collection that took inspiration from the curlicue details on wrought-iron gates to create pieces that “use the wheelchair as an asset, or a fluid extension of the body,” she said before the show. Just as striking were her technical experiments, slicing leather into knotted ribbons that floated behind the models with a feather-light ease, or cutting and draping a traditional woolen tailoring fabric across the back of a wheelchair to form an elegant train.