LONDON — Facing an unstable luxury landscape and a highly competitive job market, it’s awfully scary being a fashion design student right now. But the soon-to-be 2025 Central Saint Martins BA fashion graduates aren’t letting that stop them. In fact, they’re using it as fuel.

Rather than being cowed by the present, six designers featured in the university’s annual graduate runway show — Yuura Asano, Isobel Dickens, Luke Hemingway, Timi Shasanya, Phoebe Bor and this year’s L’Oréal Professionnel Young Talent Award winner Myah Hasbany — have taken inspiration from childhood to create collections that make fashion’s future seem a little brighter.

While these designers might be looking to adolescence — from drawing on upbringings spent among lions and tigers in South Africa to fighting against the constrictions of adulthood by refusing to grow up — there’s no Peter Pan syndrome here. Instead, they’re tapping into youthful optimism. Amid such turbulent times, that might just be what the world needs right now.

Below, find the next wave of designers to watch from Central Saint Martins’ 2025 BA class, which has churned out legendary designers including Phoebe Philo and Burberry’s chief creative officer Daniel Lee, the judge of this year’s BA fashion show.

Yuura Asano

Print designer Yuura Asano’s collection asks: Is it more empowering to be a woman or a girl? To be a woman is to be fraught with stifling expectations about how to look, act, dress and be. In comparison, girlhood — filled with childlike wonder and limitless imagination — seems a whole lot more liberating. With drop-waist dresses; charming, carefree patterns, and swishy skirts, Asano captured the never-ending tension between the two, and highlighted the oft underappreciated strength in femininity.

“I love to wear all these girly things that people see as oppressive womenswear,” Asano explained. “I don’t think you need to put women in men’s clothes to be powerful.” Her battalion of women — and their cute, covetable clothes — haven’t involuntarily regressed into childhood. They’ve chosen it, in a fight against the constrictions of womanhood.

Isobel Dickens

A Fair Isle sweater handwoven from pipe cleaners, pale pink dresses and coats made of craft foam, and doodles scrawled across a cardboard top: womenswear designer Isobel Dickens’ final collection brings childhood memories to life. The idea spawned from Dickens’ recent trip to the town where she grew up. Once there, she found that her childhood memories had been demolished — literally.

“All these buildings I remember have been bulldozed. There’s not much left from my childhood,” she said. “The buildings don’t exist anymore, but their spirits are still there, haunting.” Her structural silhouettes, from pipe cleaner knitwear appearing to unravel to a coat’s skewed proportions, captured a child’s whimsical, shifting ideas of adulthood — and vice versa. 

Luke Hemingway

Manchester-born Luke Hemingway’s final collection took a more pragmatic approach to dreams. “I wanted to represent where I come from and all my friends that aren’t able to make their dreams come true because they lack resources and money,” explained the fashion design with marketing student. “It’s finding some comfort in not accomplishing your dreams by seeing the joy and beauty in your aspirations and journey.”

Stuffed full of memories and meaning, each look could probably spawn a collection in its own right. Take the tweed set inspired by musician and comic Frank Sidebottom. Seams taped together and screenprinted to resemble herringbone, the look explored discarding identity to achieve commercial success — and was accompanied by and first tailored to a massive cardboard man. Maybe there is beauty in a dream deferred. 

Timi Shasanya

From tendrils of textiles furiously bursting from tops and accessories to serene sails of fabric billowing around the body, Timi Shasanya’s collection gave the emotional weight of her migration journey tangible form. Beginning by revisiting Lagos, where she grew up, the menswear designer went on to Kano in northern Nigeria, where she hand-selected textiles and leather for her designs.

“Through fabric treatments, hand-dyeing, weaving and unconventional materials, I’ve translated the psychic and physical sensations of migration into garments that carry memory on the body,” the menswear designer said. Taking inspiration from Heidi Bucher’s sculptures, raw cottons and linens were blended with found objects like sleek metal poles and brooms. The result? Once-inanimate material imbued with life — and feeling.

Phoebe Bor

“I grew up in the bush in South Africa surrounded by lions and elephants, because my dad was a ranger for some time,” said knitwear designer Phoebe Bor. “When we were kids, we were taught how to make toothbrushes out of specific plants. I’ve always been fascinated by nature’s ability and what it can offer you.” Her graduate collection was pure textile magic, blending her nature-loving upbringing with her teenage years spent in London.

So-called feathers, seen springing from a lion mane-like jacket and open-knit top, were fashioned out of grass hand-wrapped in silk mohair. Sustainable and cruelty-free porcupine quills (naturally shed by the prickly rodent) jutted from one frock while resin-coated seed pods were knit into another.

Myah Hasbany

Awarded the L’Oréal Professionnel Young Talent Award by Daniel Lee, Myah Hasbany’s playful collection sprung from a story she found about a UFO that crashed in a small town in Texas, her home state. “My collection was about how this town buried this alien, something different they didn’t understand, and then the residents transformed into these otherworldly creatures,” she explained. “It’s about how burying things that are different never really works — which was kind of my experience growing up in Texas.” Using mainly handmade knitwear, Hasbany’s delightful collection took shape in alien-esque, sculptural silhouettes.

One look was even originally designed for Erykah Badu, a frequent collaborator of Hasbany’s. “She’s been working with me since I was 16,” said the fashion design with marketing student. “It felt right to incorporate her into this just because she’s been such a great mentor to me.”