Over the weekend, 14 masters students studying fashion at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts presented their final-year collections via a series of installations and a runway show. For the uninitiated, the Royal Academy is one of the few major, major fashion schools, nurturing everyone from the famed Antwerp 6 (Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, et al, and incidentally the subject of a major exhibition at the city’s excellent Momu fashion museum in early 2026) to Martin Margiela to more recently Demna. It’s where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a glimpse of the future.
It’s not the first time I’d been part of the external jury judging their work; I first did it back in 2010. (I got a reminder of doing it the night of the this year’s show as one of my fellow judges, Belgian model and jeweler Anouck Lepere, turned up to cheer on the 2025 group.) Fifteen years later I was happy to be doing it all over again, yet you don’t need me to tell you how much fashion has changed during that time, because everything has changed. Everyone working in it is grappling with what’s going on, but so too are students, poised to enter the industry at a moment of cataclysmic change. In some ways more so: they’re weighted with the expectation that they might have new and innovative ideas about how to conceive and make fashion—disruptive, as we once all called it—while challenging industry norms from the outside. That’s a lot on their shoulders.
It was heartening then to see how the Royal Academy’s Class of 2025 responded to all of this. Quite a few created deeply personal collections which spoke to their own life experiences. Perhaps in the era of social media’s self storytelling, that’s not surprising; you are your own best inspiration. Also interesting: How the class of 2025 was the first to come through post-Covid. The heaviness of the pandemic, and the world right now generally, saw them eschew overtly political narratives (as one might expect, given the harrowing world climate) in favor of what might be deemed more frivolous subject matter. An examination of superficiality and pretentiousness was actually a starting point for some of the designers. That’s not a criticism, by the way. When everything can feel so overwhelming, maybe the natural reaction is to double down on finding some joy and lightness in difficult times.
With 14 very different points of view, it’s not so easy to find some common ground. But I liked that there was, on the whole, an ambitious and often accomplished sense of construction and decoration. It can feel a little reductive to talk about trends, but some common themes prevailed: dramatic, conceptual volumes; the interplay between the external and internal make of clothing; corsetry and wiring; blousons, shirts and sweaters as vehicles for creative expression; lots of color; and, shoes in exaggerated cartoon-like proportions. But everyone, as you will discover with the 14 students below, everyone has their own story to tell. Oh, and lastly: Congratulations to you all!
Collection: Lost in tradition, found in Galicia
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