10 best avant-garde fashion graduate outfits of 2018

2018 is ending and there are great expectations for the upcoming New Year. There will be new Graduate Fashion Weeks widespread almost everywhere in the globe, with new talents that are waiting to emerge under the spotlight of fashion mass media, with new creations that will surprise us for innovation and unbridled fantasy.

To celebrate what will be new in fashion and the future designers of tomorrow, I’d like to look backwards to this year finding the best Avant-garde outfits and collections created by the young pioneers of fashion design.

Who is your favorite young designer of 2018?

Just graduated at BA (Hons) Fashion 3-years course of UCA University for the Creative Arts (UK), TIHARA SMITH is a young fashion designer focused on the relationship between different cultural heritages. “The Windrush”, her final collection presented at Graduate Fashion Week in London, is a colorful dive into the warm atmosphere of the Caribbean, expressed through handmade giant embroideries in rafia on raw canvas, inlays on fur and old-fashioned lace doilies combined with irreverent and funny bags with banana-shaped handles.

 

The world seen throught the eyes of a child, able to transform the reality through fantasy, is the leitmotiv of “The Elephant and the Snake” by BENEDETTA TENAN, one of the most genuine talent coming from Istituto Secoli (Italy). Inspired by a book written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, this  graduate collection re-assemble objects of the everyday life with a fancy spirit. The collection was recently awarded with the “Jury’s Mention” at the 25th edition of the contest International Lab of Mittelmoda and partecipated at Fashion Graduate Italia 2018.

Behind the new-born brand GEOMAC DESIGN there is the young GIORGIA MCCLENNON, a Manchesterbbased knitwear designers recently graduated at UCLAN University of Central Lancashire (UK). “It’s a jungle out there” brings the huge oversize tropical leaves into the modernity of our life, exploiding with impetuous colors fantastically combined in bright contrasts, extraordinary oversize shapes and enlarged volumes in felt and hand-dyed wool, hyperdecorated with rafia fringes that recall the forest ferns.

The bold knitwear collection “Clowning around” designed by JASMINE LYNCH, graduated in Fashion and Textile Design BA (Hons) at Winchester School of Art (UK), explores the dark side of circus world. Behind the scene of the funny and colored show for children, there’s a great sadness mixed with contrasting feelings, translated by the designer through the big faces of clowns that become pop-icons with a fancy make-up and the messy surfaces that mix plain and 3-D textures.

The Spanish designer LAURA N. DEL ARCO is graduated at Felicidad Duce, the fashion school of LCI Barcelona (Spain), and realized a collection in which the body is almost totally covered by a white surface, a sort of canvas on which construct irregular shapes and work with supersized details like the giant belts or the zoomed in zip chains, underlined by a graphic pure and sophisticated vaguely recalling the late Sixties.

LAIMA JURCA, graduated at the Art Academy of Latvia, recently won the first important prize at Lodz Young Fashion Award with a collection rich of chaotic and colorful prints that mix traditional echoes, old photos of tractor and digital repetitive patterns of flowers and fruits, drastically covering the body from the head to the feet in a kaleidoscopic miscellaneous of old and new, very cool and innovative.

There are no many information about the mysterious young designer VIKA (TORI) IM. We know that she has a Master Degree in Fashion Design at KADK The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Denmark) and that her collection is one of the most original and interesting of this year. Her “mother of pearl” dress is going all the way around the world of fashion addicted in internet, because is probably the strangest and at the same time poetic way to think about maternity and femininity going up against the preconceptions and stereotypes.

Probably one of the most interesting young designer emerged this year, PLAIRE PIMCHANOK CHAIPET from Kingston University (UK), is a visionary. “2200: The Royal Cyborgs”, her graduate collection winner of the first “Swarovski Sustainable Accessories Competition” at Graduate Fashion Week 2018, is a dystopian, hyper-futuristic vision of her home country Thailand. Mixing her traditional heritage with the reasoning about the invasive pollution of that land, the young designer created a new species of human-cyborgs wearing digital prints and luxurious ruffles, covered by heavy and flashy jewelled accessories made with recycled electronic waste and sparkling crystals.

“A Surreal Rome”, the final collection presented at latest London Graduate Fashion Week and designed by HOPE MACAULAY from the University for the Creative Arts of Rochester (UK), is a visionary escape into a far past revistited through her extreme fantasy and hallucinatory dreams. The designers collage paintings of ancient sculptures and symbols are turned into messy hyper-chromatic prints combined with chunky knit pieces, enriched by embroideries of unicorns and fancy creatures made with pearls and beads or polymer clay naive decorations.

The young designer JUHA VEHMAANPERA, graduated at Aalto University (Finland) with a Master degree in Fashion Design and already winner of the “Absolute Prize for the Most Experimental Collection” at Mittelmoda Award, wants to revolutionise the stereotypes of masculinity of sportswear ridicolizing its unspoken rules. He created an ironic contrast between the classic elements of viril sport (including the use of swear words printed on super-adherent lycra pieces) and the oversize furry knitwear which barely contain the male bodies between the knit chains.

And with this Top Chart of the most Avant-garde and innovative collections of this year, it only remains for me to thank you, my dear readers, giving you appointment in 2019 with many other fashion stories and new sparkling talents…So…