BA MEN'S WEAR
DATE: 7th January 2019. PLACE: St Georges Church Bloomsbury. TIME: 19.00
London College Of Fashion showed 12 MA Fashion Design Technology in Menswear at the beautiful St George’s Bloomsbury church. Surrounded by colourful stained glass windows and impressive architecture, the Class of 2019 presented their collections to a packed audience, including renowned names in the press and fashion industry.
Inspiration for the collections ranged from the back-to-basics sensibilities of Rachel Brown – who sought simplicity with her minimal silhouettes – to the more abstract idea of “psychological distance”, as expressed by English scholar Edward Bullough in 1912 and explored in Jialin Chen’s final offering. Ahmed Sorour’s final collection tapped into his Egyptian roots, confronting class, gender, and perceptions of the country. The inspiration for a range of kitschy, gender-defying garments. On the darker side of things, Daoyuan Ding presented a collection that was almost entirely monochrome, with asymmetrical tailoring and wide-brimmed hats all in shades of black, grey, and the occasional brown. The darkness is no surprise though, really, with the designer citing a Freud essay and surrealist artworks as an influence
NAME: JIALIN CHEN.
Always the years between us. Her designs aimed to demonstrate how fashion design can embrace emotions through aesthetic values and bring personal experiences to life, developed from the concept of “psychological distance” as expressed by Edward Bullough (1912).
NAME: BONGSEOK GWON.
Bongseok Gwon has tried to express the struggles that we all experience to find out who we are and define what we want in life. “This project is an expression of myself in the quest to find the meaning of life”, he told us.
NAME: ZHUTI PAN.
Zhuti took inspiration from her time commuting around London on the tube, where she observed passenger standing closely with their personal space being constantly invaded. As she explained: “proxemics is a main clue for the collection, which helped me to developing my own design methodology: folding and overlapping.”
NAME: CHAO HE
Chao He plays with textures, colours and patterns in his collection, in an attempt to go beyond our understanding of fashion and explore new possibilities, as he explained: “My project is inspired on how to extend our awareness, in order to have the opportunity to explore parallel universes where we might exist.”
NAME: AHMED SEROUR
Presenting a multicolour and joyful set of designs, Ahmed Serour found his inspiration in male belly dancers, merging traditional Egyptian kitsch aesthetics with trash couture.
NAME: DAOYUAN DING
Aiming to express the vagueness of the objects and human identities, Daoyuan’s collection, titled Migratory Vagueness, tells the story that there is nothing really defined, represented by The Uncanny, in which the familiar is unfamiliar.
