The collection, Synthesis, was inspired by the concept of psychological cubism, a way in which different psychological states and aspects of the identity can coexist simultaneously within a single individual. The narrative explores how we shape our own identities, especially as denizens of different countries exposed to and immersed in diverse systems of meaning. Inspirations from the designer Sardinian heritage are combined with elements of her present life in London, expressed simultaneously, replicating metaphorically cubist compositions as states of mind.
Qiuye Pan’s collection was inspired by the situation and outfits of people in the rush hours on weekdays, she took the references from backpacks, sportswear and analysis the structures, and captured the changes when fabrics wrinkle and form 3D shapes naturally during people’s movements. Qiuye Pan aimed to play with the fabrics and mixed in the sporty, functional elements to create a simple, modern womenswear collection in a playful, and thoughtful way.
Qiqi Zhang graduated from the Fashion BA course from Kingston University in 2017. Zhang has been very passionate about introducing traditional cultural elements into contemporary pieces, elevating the traditional designs by injecting a dramatic element.
In Qiwei's A/W 2018 Collection, Claude Cahun's work formed a major part of her inspiration. The key concept was developed from two main characteristics incorporated in Cahun's work.
Collection is inspired by weather vanes from my home country Lithuania, seaside town called Nida. The symbols carved in weather vanes works as visual profile from which you could tell everything about the owner and his family. Each sailor used them to distinguish himself from other sailors and identify the area or town they came from. Same as our clothes nowadays these symbols worked as a profile and helped to identify sailor’s origin, attitude, standpoints and send visual messages to others.
Rebecca Armstrong’s Graduate Collection, Shimmering and Dirty, is heavily influenced by 1990s fashion, taking inspiration from the work of photographers such as Corinne Day and Juergen Teller. These photographers pioneered a new kind of aesthetic in the 1990s that depicted female subjects in realistic terms, often labelled ‘raw’ due to their use of harsh lighting and lack of retouching. Their work in the fashion industry was pivotal to the re-evaluation of unachievable standards of beauty and poise previously dictated by mainstream publications and helped to open up a dialogue regarding the dissolution of normative ideas on the presentation of women and femininity in fashion.
Rebecca set the mood by incorporating her own experience and stories as part of an initial concept, such as foreign travel, for example the concept for her collection was inspired by a visit to the ‘Kunglia Slotten’ or Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden. The overly ornate and magnificent state rooms of the palace oozed luxe and excess; colour coordinated interiors in regal reds and greens and hanging with tapestries were edged in an overabundance of gold. 
Rebecca Aydons collection was heavily influenced by the mid 20th century; the government model for WWII was to ‘Make do and Mend’, which forced society to be more sustainable. Clothing was more valued, made to last, passed down the generations, repaired, mended and re-purposed. The classic, romanticism of the 1950’s period is heavily portrayed through the profile and detail of this era, and Rebecca has communicated this narrative in her design and silhouette.
Inspired by her twin sister, a ballerina as a child and an underwriter trainee to date. Rebecca’s collection 'The Banker & The Ballerina' draws inspiration from the Russian heritage of 'The Ballet Russe' and the androgynous style of a 1920s banker. 
Stereotypical references have labelled the women of society with what is expected of a female. Rhiannon used this as her main tool for inspiration. The equality of the sexes and how gender ideals have been developed link feminine qualities such as body image and beauty to a feminine role.
Roisin’s graduate collection was based upon crossing the ideals of fetish and femininity, whilst looking through the eyes of style icon Daphne Guinness. Her collection found her looking into over enhancing parts of the female figure through highlighting shapes from traditional metal body armour and drag padding/ shaping. This allowed her to create a protective shell encasing the female figure.
Serra’s interpretation of Against Nature sees a female protagonist, disgusted with modern society, flee to an isolated manor, decorated in a world of her own creation. In the story At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, which accompanies the collection, it maps out a day in her life. 
Rose Sparks’s collection was heavily inspired by the handheld fan, a device that has tapped into codes of mystery and concealment for more than two thousand years. It takes the sculptural elements of the fan to blur the boundaries between fashion and architecture, creating starkly geometric fantasies that become an extension of the body. In this way, each garment transcends the mundane, existing in a dimension where elegance and imagination intertwine. Here tradition is subverted to produce a boldly unconventional aesthetic that flatters as much as it provokes.
Rosey Norman’s collection was inspired by the rich, luscious textures and colours of traditional still life paintings. This contrasted with the comforting and traditional qualities of pub decor. By contrasting these two traditional and conservative aesthetics, the collection was created in the aim to be more contemporary; creating new from the old.
The concept for this collection really started with a love for the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. To me it has always been a very intriguing place as the subject matter is very dark and controversial, however I have always found that by looking closely at many of the articles inside there is something very beautiful about the make up of the specimens. The collections are there for medical display, and the museum used to house both animal and human remains. 
The collection explores the relationship with the clothes we wear and the sense of protection they give us. This originated from questioning the role clothing plays in everyday life. In the most basic sense, clothing protects us from the elements and keeps us warm and safe. But it also holds a strong emotional attachment.
Sabrina explores the vitality of different cultures through following collections. Above all, the experimental attitude is at the core of all she does, which is not only manifested in the patterns and silhouette, but also in the attempt to challenge the gender stereotypes. The opulent patterns can still be masculine, and femininity and strength coexist.
A Collectors Collection by Sally Mankee is based on the world of antiques and curios, featuring six muses who quite literally wear their heart on their sleeves as each ensemble takes inspiration from their ephemera and most treasured possessions. Every outfit contains a rich tapestry of imagery, techniques and textures, emulating the charm of antique shops and eclectic nature of curiosity cabinets from days gone by.;
The main theme of Sarah’s collection was revisiting her 13-year-old self, trying to be an Emo Goth Kid and rebelling from her Eastern European Jewish heritage. What sparked the idea for this concept was when she visited Israel, and learnt to appreciate her Jewish identity not through religion, but through the arts and culture.
Shamima’s collection ‘Conflicted Heritage’ focuses on the inner struggles that exist within all of us in various aspects of our lives, which shape us to be the individuals we are. This particular project explores her own conflicting thoughts and emotions that arise out of a need to construct an identity that considers all of the flavours of her different cultures.
Shannon Louise’s collection has captured the harsh reality of bullying, focusing on cyber bullying as it is growing with todays society on social media. Demonstrating that it is just as important as any other social and political discourse. She is wanting to change the globals perception of this accepted behaviour, which causes serious mental and physical health issues.
Kill King Thrushbeard ss2020 is a series of prints as puzzles. The idea is to have a poetic Chinese logic behind a Vaporwave-influenced aesthetic. As a sarcastic approach to the fact that western designers use oriental elements for superficial decoration, each of the prints starts from a British designer name without any deep understanding. With the detour thinking and literature-referencing logic from “SheFu”, the first print is “the MCQUEEN print".
Sijia Jiang's collection was heavily inspired by 1900s medical procedure and plastic surgery after world war two. The artificial limb for disabled soldiers, cutting lines and stitching process during the plastic surgery inspired Sijia to create details and print for the collection. Sijia created a contemporary collection exploring culture and movement. Transforming the ancient leather and metal tools into a more feminine style. 
Sixtine Gendre’s collection is heavily inspired by the military which she mainly researched through her personal heritage. Looking at portraits and photographies from her father in the Air Force and her great grandfather during WWI, she started analysing her own artistic identity through elements of her past by manipulating them to create a Couture collection led by the textiles and focused on contrast and subversion.
'Nocturnal Dreamscape' relates to the complicity of Karro’s new collection. A lot of design twists such as asymmetry and disproportion enhance each piece. The black and white collapse represents overthinking and over emotionality. The collection is very abstract if you look at the full range.
Sophie Jane Robinson’s collection was inspired by her childhood memories of visiting her paternal grandparents and their home. Homely textures, bright floral tones and make-do-and-mend way of life informed all aspects of the design and construction process from traditional crochet techniques and the use of re-imagined interior textiles. 
Sydney Umberto’s collection, titled “Faded Memories,” is inspired by her childhood memories. Suffering from attachment anxiety at a young age, she uses the things that once comforted her as the details for the collection. For Umberto, memories represent a calmness, a time where one can see how instrumental moments in their lives were. This sense of nostalgia is what drives the collection.
Tanja Novak’s collection was inspired by the First Wave of Feminism. While researching the Suffragette’s she came across images of the first female boxers from the Victorian era. These images would form the basis of the collection concept. The female boxers are dressed in corseted cutoff dresses or ruffled and loose pieces, completely impractical for any form of sport. Tanja explored different forms of combat sports, and sportswear, both from a historical and contemporary angle. 
Conversation in the language of cultures as a need for communication with the consumer. Heritage and culture haveencouraging appeal, attractiveness in the era of fast fashion. 
Timothee's influences are a mix of his own heritage, French and Algerian, and his interests, such as architecture, video games and his cats. His inspiration comes from the places he has lived in – his boyfriend's flat in New York City, and his parents place in the French countryside. Besides that, it is about objects and symbols bringing specific emotions, which he is bringing into his collection in different ways. he is using materials that portray the antagonism between traditional fabrics, reminding him of France, and contemporary fabrics, linked to the idea of New York. 
Trang Hoang’s graduate collection ‘Colonialism’ started with an image of three Vietnamese female prisoners, entrapped by ladders over their heads. They were prisoners of the French, revolutionists under the French colonial rule in Vietnam during the late 19th - early 20th century. The ladder, which Trang envisioned as the symbol of the oppression of the Vietnamese under colonialism, became her main inspiration. She started to experiment with wooden structures to create ‘cages’ into clothes.
With its collections Unravelau wants to create awareness of the environmental issues we caused ourselves in order to encourage change. The collections are a direct solution for the customer. Therefore, careful material research has to be done and zero-waste patterns have to be used.
People use media for guidance, however, in the process of making themselves different they begin to lose themselves as they are overpowered by the norms and pressure of society. ‘PICTURE PERFECT’ is about the consolation that people find in becoming someone else. Hiding flaws just because one is not stereotypically beautiful has become the current norm of today. But "different is not bad, it is just not the same". The collection gets its inspiration from the artworks of Caroline Achaintre and Angela de la Cruz.
Viktoria Tisza’s collection, Splash, is a joyful collection combining the technology developed throughout the years of playing with silicone rubber and some vivid colours. The collection was showcased at New York Fashion Week at Pier59 Studios, at Bureau Seutail Showroom during London Fashion Week and at San Francisco Fashion Community Week in September, 2018.
Vincent Lapp’s atheist vision of life settled the ground of his collection. The horror of Paris and Nice terrorist attacks always in his mind, he decided to dedicate his project to the development of political and social statement. His sister’s conversion to judaism triggered a deep interest in the conversion process and particularly in the religious symbols that have the power to attract individuals into faith. He fulfilled his focus by watching documentaries, movies, and especially the french movie Le Ciel Attendra which depicts how teenagers are lured to join jihadist movements through social media.
Vinny Lim’s collection is inspired by the idea of distorted fear and anxiety. Fear is an emotional response from our brain when a person is facing a certain situation. Since it is a response from the brain, what if the brain is sending a false signal which causes false and inaccurate responses - an emotional distortion. So is the fear you’re experiencing, a lie or the truth?
To create her SS19 graduate collection, entitled “L’amor perduto”, Viola Menchini took inspiration from topics that affected her personal life when she moved to the city and started to be in the fashion field: loneliness and today’s idea of love and relationships.
WANG HE YI - W. H. Y’s graduate collection ‘The Waste Land’ draws inspirations from a dramatic scene in the British avant-garde movie A Clockwork Orange (1971) - a cat lady doing yoga before a murder falling upon her. The tension and message of this scene were chosen for elaborating the dialectical emphasis in both ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy and western modern avant-garde aesthetics. The discovery of the Aesthetics of Ugliness is a rebellion of beauty-centred conventional ideology, which opens a whole new world to our human beings.
Wiam Salt’s inspiration for her collection originated from British Female workwear focusing on the incorporation of the Yemeni culture; by using her awareness of the culturally accepted clothing styles. Wiam was able to create a stunning collection of garments suitable for the target audience. There are several main elements to the Yemeni culture such as the architecture, landscapes and clothing styles which were taken into consideration when creating the collection. The idea behind the collection was to create workwear that was culturally appropriate and would suit both a Yemeni and British women celebrating the cultures together.
Wen Yue Zhang’s graduate collection drew inspiration from the cult favourite Chinese movie Farewell My Concubine (1993), which upon its release had a lasting impact on young people of Wen Yue’s generation. The film is a harrowing narrative on history, politics, romance and drama that centers around two boys who grew up as apprentices to an opera school set in the mid-1920s. It follows them on their journey of rigorous training to master the art form of the Peking Opera. 
During Xiao Qian's studies in BA Fashion Design at the University for the Creative Arts, she became fascinated with the knitting wear industry. As one of the important sectors in the manufacturing industry, it's constantly evolving with new materials, styles of knitting and machines being introduced. Enraptured by the different types of knitting machines, ideas came flooding to her. 
Inspired by the visual aspect of physical changes that occur with time, Yana’s collection focus on wrinkles and the body’s shape. Her work is based on her personal feelings provoked by the ageing process of her own skin and the anticipation of its future changes.
Yana Myronova collection is about heritage, her roots and personal background, mad modernity. It is about challenges inside and outside of her, reflecting her history and creating the future. It is her past and wanting to break apart from this past somehow that has determined her to want to create something new. 
Yayi Chen’s graduate collection “ in tran · sient ” takes root from her personal experience and observation growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Spain. “ in tran · sient ” is a collection of fashion, performance and film in collaboration with London-based artist Cathy Mou, which aims to question the overlooked and objectified labouring body of Chinese women in the European immigrant community. 
Following her pre-collection 2019 ‘The diary/ies’, where she described her imagined muse who was one of the twin spies, Yebin's final collection ‘Chapter 2. The Workbook’ was focused on the spies’ missions. The final goals of the missions were not revealed, however, the rules, process, and indications were secretly portrayed in her final collection.
Yehua took primary inspiration from three elements: Rococo, Mari Antoinette and Crinoline. His collection mainly consists of oversized black suits, ruffled see-through blouses and white crinolines. Most importantly, he considers crinoline to be crucial in his collection for its resemblance with a birdcage, a symbol of limitation on absolute freedom. His collection had a focal point: the total self-liberation from negative feelings or opinions that people had on him, and the need to be sociable in order to blend in with the rest of the society. At first, the disrespectful attitudes received from many others had made Yehua feel slightly uneasy, and maybe even marginally upsetting.
Yen Wong’s graduate collection, Sunny Side Up! centers around the perfect 1950s-60s woman and the immense social pressures placed upon her to constantly project perfection. This eventually leads to an eventual manic episode, where perfection and panic is distorted. The collection heavily references classic couture and tailoring silhouettes as well as construction techniques from that time period, playing with exaggerated silhouettes and voluminosity. 
Rituals of Self Healing is a fashion collection portraying the process of self-healing in mental health. After exploring different ways of self-recovery through material studies, I am proposing three "rituals" of healing through textile elements. My initial inspirations derive from a Japanese practice, Kintsugi, which celebrates the beauty in scars and imperfections. Then, I researched modern ways of self-healing and interviewed a psychiatrist for advice on crafting as a healing method. At last, I combined my research and innovated "healing" textiles with the usage of physical healing materials in the current health industry.
In this collection, Ying Yang explored the lifestyle changes of first generation Chinese immigrants who are basined in Chinatown, New York. After being an immigrant herself and moving to NYC with family at the age of 13, Ying questions where she truly belongs to. Feeling like an outsider from both NYC and China. The collection involves a lot of personal emotions, with the garments documenting records of the designers’ own stories.
“LOVE” a topic that has been heatedly dissected and debated and has become a never-ending source of enquiry, a subjective emotion that has been time again in pop-culture, sociology, psychology… As Plato and Socrates saw it, love was a mental disease, echoed by Haddaway’s infamously catchy song, ‘What is Love? Baby don’t hurt me’. 
First of all, my first starting point for this project was about what I thought was fashion. I've always thought fashion was in the middle of art and commerciality. With this as a starting point, I researched artistic and commercial fashion. It was my early concept that I tried to make this collection by finding their midpoint. But as I talked to my tutors, I realised that this was not clear about the middle point or neutrality.
Zarah Ahmed was first inspired to design her collection 'HYPER BODY', after happening upon British artist Jenny Saville's styled paintings of voluminous nude bodies. It was from there that she started to reflect on her own body image and attitudes to bigger bodies within wider society. Body positivity and fat-shaming is only now becoming an important issue in fashion. To put her own individual spin on the topic, Zarah took inspiration from artists, like Ernesto Neto, that interpreted the body into bulbous fleshy sculptural artworks. Inspired by the conceptual artworks, she worked with experimental materials like sponge, latex and beads, to create her own 3D and 2D artworks.
In this collection, taking a closer look and getting a deeper understanding of the daily wear of the female city workers. To explore a more comfortable and casual way of wearing ‘white shirt’. Also, inspired and extracted from the free rules of modern music by John Cage and some other experimental artists.Specifically, the main direction of her collection is researching, manipulating and transforming the white shirt technical details. Open slit, overlapped, misplaced, hidden pockets, oversized, attached layers, the addition of these delicate details make the whole collection more diverse and unique, just like the surprises of daily life and the temporary escape from the boring repetitive work. She got the inspiration from John Cage’s experimental music scores which are not like the traditional scores --- unique, irregular, free.
Read more
