Graduation Shows 2025
What
Remains
Is
What
Matters
The graduation shows in Antwerp, the Central Saint Martins show online, and the KABK exhibition in The Hague showed how the next generation of designers is thinking, feeling, and shaping the future of fashion. The collections reflected a generation of designers who are turning inward and backwards to move forward.
The designers explored personal histories, cultural memory, and emotional truths to explore identity, transformation, and resilience. Whether drawing from surrealism, Shinto rituals, Galician craft, or Palestinian embroidery, they used fashion as a medium for storytelling and self-examination. The work was often rooted in loss, resistance, or reclamation, with clothing acting as a form of protection, ritual, or protest.
Several collections reflected on gender, fragmented female forms, aggressive femininity, and reclaimed bodies, while others address migration, invisibility, or cultural erasure. These are not trend-based collections; these are emotionally and politically charged. Clothes that are about meaning and depth, about what endures, what heals, and what can be rebuilt from fragments of what is already here.
The collections showed that fashion education is not dominated by industry cycles or commercial systems. That absence of commercial expectation allows for experimentation and vulnerability. The collections felt defiantly human, introspective, culturally aware, and emotionally courageous. They are asking not what fashion can sell, but what it can hold: stories, identities, losses, and futures. What remains is what matters, what is personal, urgent, and made to last.
Image by Riet Pedro
You can download the PDF version here
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Fashion Masters
Chloë Reners / Dot dot dot
With the Dot Dot Dot collection, Chloë Reners explored the surrealist portrayal of women by blending refined minimalism with fragmented, dreamlike elements. Inspired by artists like George Underwood and Giovanni Gasparro, she used laser-cut fabrics and distorted silhouettes to question beauty ideals and layered identities. With elegance and edge, it invites viewers to reconsider how the female form is shaped, seen, and concealed.
María Alborés Lojo’s collection was a tribute to the Galician woman, blending cultural heritage with contemporary expression. She amplified traditional craft techniques such as weavings or beads and placed them prominently on the body, on the head or back, transforming them into sculptural statements. Loose-fitting silhouettes offer a sense of freedom and strength, allowing the cultural references to stand out with intention and cultural pride.
Fashion Masters
María Alborés / Lost in tradition, found in Galicia
Black Mascara explored superficiality as both shield and performance, revealing how beauty rituals can serve as acts of control and resilience. With bold 80s-inspired silhouettes and dramatic styling and photography, the collection channelled strength through visual intensity. Clothes acted like armour, elegant yet cautionary, highlighting the tension between vulnerability and the power of clothes.
Fashion Masters
Paula van Dyck / Black Mascara
In a Violent Nature, Emiliano Alvarez Torres explored the tension between traditionally masculine and feminine elements, blurring boundaries through confrontation rather than contrast. Protective layering and exaggerated silhouettes gave the feminine garments a sharper, more aggressive edge. Oversized artificial flowers, worn as headpieces and accessories, added an unsettling beauty, flourishing amidst defiance.
Fashion Masters
Emiliano Alvarez Torres / In A Violent Nature
Sybrand Jansen’s Shattered Pieces Kept Forever was an ode to the fragile, weathered, and overlooked objects at the edge of their life cycle. Embracing cracks, stains, and the broken, the collection rejected restoration, finding poetry in what remains. It challenged conventional beauty by honouring imperfection as a form of resilience, thereby building protection and strength.
Fashion Masters
Sybrand Jansen / Shattererd Pieces Kept Forever
Central Saint Martins, London
Fashion Masters
Myah Hasbany / Lucid Life
The Lucid Life collection reimagined a Southern folk legend of a buried UFO as a metaphor for cultural denial and fear of difference. Beginning with familiar silhouettes, the garments gradually morphed into alien-like forms, reflecting a community transformed by the very thing it tried to suppress. It was a haunting, speculative journey that questions conformity and the cost of erasure.
Fashion Masters
Ayham Hassan/ IM‑Mortal Magenta: the colour that doesn’t exist
Rooted in the history and spirit of Palestine, the IM‑Mortal Magenta collection by Ayham Hassan was a tribute to the enduring resilience of those living through the genocide in Gaza. Drawing from traditional Palestinian costumes, each silhouette was built out of textures and talismanic motifs meant to protect and empower. It was both a celebration of cultural heritage and a powerful expression of resistance through beauty, craft, and memory.
Fashion Masters
Timisola Shasanya / Runners
Timisola Shasanya’s final collection, Runners, was a personal reflection on migration, memory, and cultural duality. Blending influences from Nigeria and England, she explored materiality as a way to express the in-between spaces of identity and belonging. Movement, both physical and emotional, ran through the collection, shaping garments that carry the rhythm of displacement and resilience.
Royal Academy of the Arts, KABK, The Hague
Bachelor Textile & Fashion
Riet Pedro / Queen Witch Fairy
Riet Pedro’s Queen Witch Fairy was a bold act of reclamation. Merging the archetypes of queen, witch, and fairy, she reclaimed her voice, body, and story through powerful silhouettes and material use, turning silence into a language of strength and dark magic.
Bachelor Textile & Fashion
Hiromu Takeshita / For What Remains Unsaid
The collection For What Remains Unsaid was a deeply personal, ceremonial tribute to Hiromu Takeshita’s mother, inspired by her Shinto beliefs and a confrontation with mortality. Set in a fictional funeral in space, the collection merged the spiritual aesthetics of Shintoism, like elongated sleeves and temple-inspired forms. He designed vulnerability, gratitude, and quiet strength into the garments, showing love where language falls short.
Bachelor Textile & Fashion
Bas Pol and Asira Zaí / Ik was wel vaker vrolijk
“Ik was wel vaker vrolijk” by Bas Pol and Asira Zaí was a poetic curation of everyday objects, garments and overlooked shapes, melding traditional Dutch costume with the tangible beauty found in decay and forgotten materials. It was an exploration of memory, melancholy, and quiet transformation. Forgotten items, sportswear and Dutch folklore were mixed into strong silhouettes. The Dutch-Japanese animation added a layer of innocence, resilience, and childlike emotional honesty to the collection.
You can download the PDF version here