February 20, 2026 |
London Fashion Week is renowned for putting emerging talents front and centre, cracking open the closely guarded door to the fashion industry and ushering in designers of the future. One such way it does this is the slot allocated to the outgoing class of Central Saint Martins’s MA Fashion course. The show, which features 23 collections carefully selected from the students enrolled on the course, never disappoints, delivering on talent and creativity in spades. This year was no different. With Ennis Finnerty Mackay and Maxina Brewer jointly awarded the L’Oréal Professionnel award for Young Talent, selected by our very own global editor-in-chief Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou, the show left its guests stuffed and salivating for more. Here are our top picks for the CSM MA class of 2026 collections that left a lasting impression. Bella Koopman
Ennis Finnerty Mackay – Co-Winner of the L’Oréal Professionnel Award For Young Talent
Ennis Finnerty Mackay’s background as a pattern cutter and sewer laid the technical groundwork for a collection rooted in craft but charged with provocation. His tailoring and corsetry demonstrated a firm hand – a sense of control – while liquid latex, piped meticulously onto shrunken wool silhouettes, introduced a volatile counterpoint. Exposed to UV light, the latex dried like honey or ancient amber, hardening into rock-like, three-dimensional textures that disrupted the surface of traditional suiting. Designed to degrade with the wearer, the latex darkens over time, embedding the passage of wear into the garment itself.
Researching the four stages of addiction, Mackay translated psychology into material language: restraint in structure, euphoria in gloss. The use of condoms within the construction – a response to waste he observed within the queer community as a queer man himself – further complicated the narrative, questioning boundaries, excess and consequence. What happens when something so euphoric loses its limits? On the runway, that tension was palpable. The rigid and the elastic, the disciplined and the ecstatic, coexisted in garments that felt as conceptually loaded as they were materially inventive. Emily Phillips
Maxina Brewer – Co-Winner of the L’Oréal Professionnel Award For Young Talent
For Maxina Brewer, the collection began with the act of looking – at muses, at the self, at the fracture between admiration and comparison. Lenses donated by Specsavers were crushed, cracked, and woven together into ruff-like neckpieces, scattering light across sculptural silhouettes. The effect was shimmering and fragile, an embodiment of the euphoria felt when imitating a muse – and the dysphoria that follows when that imitation reveals difference.
Brewer examined shapewear as both armour and constraint, incorporating cinching belts and hip pads to exaggerate and distort the archetype of the feminine form. Guided by the ethos of glitch feminism and the sonic abrasiveness of Breakcore, garments were broken apart and reassembled: abstract armholes, disrupted pleats and rehung hems reconfigured what a dress or jacket is “meant” to be. It was rebellion through reconstruction – a refusal of society’s rigid expectations of women’s bodies. Already worn by the likes of FKA Twigs, Brewer’s work felt unapologetically sculptural yet intimate, balancing distortion with desire. EP
Jaeyoung Bae
Jaeyoung Bae’s MA collection proposed a softened masculinity, shaped by personal history and displacement. After completing two years of mandatory military service in Korea, he left for London – a transition that sharpened his awareness of uniformity, exposure and vulnerability. Military elements remained present: heavy trench coats, baggy tracksuits secured with utilitarian belts and ribbed cummerbunds wrapped the body with quiet authority.
Yet Bae disrupted these codes with string-like cut-outs and unexpected exposures, carving softness into structure. Earth tones grounded the collection, while the tension between concealment and revelation humanised the silhouettes. In balancing discipline with fragility, Bae revealed a masculinity that felt less performative and more personal – not stripped of strength, but redefined through openness. EP
Mé Mé Yin
Mé Mé Yin’s collection stemmed from a meditation on belonging, drawing from his hometown near Hong Kong while seeking to globalise its visual language. Referencing the candid energy of local street photography, he reworked familiar garments – suits, polo shirts, denim – into something subtly estranged. Tulle and net mimicked the appearance of denim, destabilising expectations of texture and weight, while threads were left deliberately uncut, allowing garments to exist in a state of becoming.
Pockets with finger holes encouraged gestural movement, inviting wearers to inhabit the clothes with ease. Fly emblems, a nod to the abundance of flies in his hometown, scattered the pieces with quiet humour and specificity. Vibrant colours were lifted from antiquated cigarette packaging, recalling the shared cigarette culture of weddings and communal gatherings. Having previously worked within fashion houses, Yin’s technical fluency allowed him to refine these references into contemporary silhouettes. The result was both deeply personal and outward-looking – a wardrobe where memory, migration and modernity converged. EP
Oli Clarke
Oli Clarke approaches design instinctively, building sets and worlds before refining them back into wearability. Drawing from his time working in Spitalfields Market, he sources materials and objects from his surroundings, folding the found into the fashioned. Repurposed T-shirts collide with new fabrics; old wool trousers are cut into jackets; padding and sheer textiles meet in unexpected harmony.
Sports gear – American football shoulder pads and chest protectors, in particular – is reworked to introduce structure into otherwise soft silhouettes, creating a tension between protection and vulnerability. Quilted coats and screen-printed slogans reading “Cigarettes,” alongside images from his eclectic object collection, lend a diaristic quality. The old is highlighted within the new, not erased but elevated. Clarke’s process may be intuitive, but the outcome is deliberate: garments that honour their previous lives while asserting a renewed sense of purpose. EP
Grey Buscemi
Grey Buscemi’s background in economics (he has a degree in it, pre-CSM), was the foundation for his MA collection. The designer’s paper-like creations were inspired by the lack of career growth in seamstressing, and as a result, each piece was crafted without a sewing machine. Opting instead to slot pieces together, fortified by a power mesh backing, Buscemi ran the risk of garments that forewent fluidity for material innovation. But what appeared on the runway proved that sometimes those risks are worth taking. Full of movement and clear-cut shapes, it was fascinating to watch Buscemi’s alternative approach pay off in real time. BK
Zeina Issa
When designing her MA collection, Zeina Issa asked herself one question: What would she, as a young, alternative, Arab-Muslim woman, want to wear? The answer: clothes that are cool, unapologetic yet steeped in heritage. That meant chainmail mini-skirts, low-slung cowl necks and lots and lots of coin tassels. The pieces were loud, literally, as embellishments tinkled down the runway, paying homage to the women from Issa’s community who refuse to be sitting wallflowers. It seemed like the Zeina Issa woman burst onto the catwalk with one staunch assertion: her identity will not be trampled on, and she’ll look damn good whilst proving it. BK
Clay Hattam
Clay Hattam has a sense of humour. Describing his work as “prosaic and stodgy”, the MA graduate used his final collection to not take things too seriously. Choosing to play around with a garment’s functional elements, instead of getting bogged down, there were whiffs of delicious absurdity throughout – double flies or hats that protruded from the backs of jackets, etc. And why not? Fashion could use a little laugh now and again. BK
Yodea Marquel
Yodea Maquel’s vision for his MA collection was to take up space. Sculptural in his approach to silhouette, Maquel was unafraid of a little humour (something we’re, if you haven’t noticed, quite fond of over here at Ten Towers), with devilish details like a badge branding him “Very Important Person”. Despite this, the message was anything but frothy, with Marquel’s larger-than-life pieces commenting on what it means to exist as a human today, using his research to delve into views on purity from the 1600s and how they translate to today. BK
Ivan Delogu Senes
A Sardinian native, Ivan Delogu Senes looked to the traditional garments of his homeland to inspire his MA collection. Inspired by the shift from ornamental garments to post-war minimalism and utilitarianism, Delogu Senes’ experimental garments felt deeply personal. Coming from a family of shepherds, he paid homage to his background in chunky jackets that sprouted with shearling and boxy dresses with abstract woollen layers. Taking functional materials and turning them into something fresh, Delogu Senes is definitely one to watch. BK
