CSM, RCA, Westminster and LCF all rank among the best fashion schools in the world. We have Fashion East, MAN, and NewGen, unrivalled schemes that help turn the hordes of young graduates into a select group of young designers. But of those happy few, even less will make it as sustainable -- economically and creatively -- fashion enterprises. The rest will fade away.

This is the cycle London fashion is impatiently fixed in each season. A tsunami of hype and talent that crashes on the shore every single Fashion Week, and either consumes everything in its path or quietly ebbs away. Each season, we excitedly raise someone up, before quietly moving on when the cloud of OMG hysteria fails to materialise into something solid.

But London is so thrilling a fashion city because of that hype and hysteria; because of the intensity of that search for the brightest young talent; because of the clamouring desire to find the student with the boldest new ideas.

"London is a constantly fluctuating chaos of novelty and iconoclasm."

We don’t have the craft of Milan, the history of Paris, or the commerce of New York. Not in Fashion Week terms anyway; we have Burberry and Mulberry and Aquascutum, Savile Row and Jermyn Street. As the Queen said, presenting Richard Quinn with the inaugural Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, we have Scottish tweed, Nottingham lace and Carnaby Street. But really what we have is fashion, not luxury.

The conglomerates, artisans and maisons of Milan and Paris are built on a dream of luxury; on stable, unchanging, foundations. Creative directors come-and-go like tears in the rain, but LVMH and Kering are forever.

London is a constantly fluctuating chaos of novelty and iconoclasm; it’s always coming-of-age or growing up and selling out. It’s either exploding with newness, or waiting for the next generation to impudently stomp through. A few designers in recent years have used this cycle to become bona fide Big Important Brands. Christopher Kane went from Young Scot Rebel to being part-owned by Kering. JW Anderson went from pioneering a new feeling of androgyny in fashion, to heading up Loewe. Simone Rocha went from Fashion East to opening stores in London and New York in six years, whilst maintaining financial and spiritual independence.

The trio’s impatient sprint from students to stars opened up the space behind them; but this season it feels like its been filled. A consolidation of the latest generation of wild young fashion provocateurs into genuinely excellent designers. Matty Bovan, Charles Jeffrey, Molly Goddard, Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner are stylistically, conceptually and commercially nothing alike. Nothing more has brought them together than the circumstance of time and place -- yet these five are offering some of the most insightful and exhilarating new fashion propositions in the world at the moment. These five represent the future of British fashion, the most likely to reach Simone Rocha, Christopher Kane or JW Anderson levels of success.

Their designs are about everything from race to gender to sustainability. They are thoughtful and joyful, and their formal divergences encapsulate the variety of what’s possible in London for a young designer; over the autumn/winter 18 shows it felt that each designer, in their different ways, stepped up a gear and consolidated their positions as the brightest of their generations.

At the menswear shows in January, Charles Jeffrey presented his most riotously fun experiment in melding fashion and theatre together on the catwalk. Working with the Theo Adams Company, this season he explored the social ideas of Velvet Rage -- embracing the anger of being gay in a straight world -- and his personal Scottish heritage. Two divergent ideas maybe, but Charles drew on the punky heritage of tartan, the queerness of the kilt, and the ferociousness of Pictish warpaint to effortlessly combine them. The clothes, the ideas and the catwalk spectacle worked together in harmony; it was an incredibly visceral fashion experience of the kind we are not often witness too.

Source | i-d.vice.com