Equal parts chaos and charm, rebellion and polish. These eight designers are set to flip fashion on its head.

Fashion&rsquo;s next wave isn&rsquo;t coming from boardrooms or heritage houses; it&rsquo;s brewing in the classrooms. Central Saint Martins, the London breeding ground that gave us McQueen&rsquo;s savagery and McCartney&rsquo;s sharp polish, and Institut Fran&ccedil;ais de la Mode, Paris&rsquo;s avant-garde engine built on couture&rsquo;s bones, are once again spitting out disruptors. This new class doesn&rsquo;t care for fashion&rsquo;s tired binaries of art versus wearability. They&rsquo;re making clothes that are witty, unruly, and unapologetically fun, designs meant as much for the street as for the spotlight. In other words, they might just be the ones rewriting the rulebook.

Matthew David Andrews turns personal history into performance art. His collection revisits the 1958 flood that swept through his Essex hometown, reframing it as an allegory for growing up queer in a place that resisted difference. The setting? A carnival washed mid-celebration. His fabrics literally dissolve, while hats equipped with water systems create rainfall that strips garments down to new colours, his way of revealing the self beneath the surface.

Menswear gets personal with Timisola Shasanya. Her collection threads her migration story, Ireland, Nigeria, and the UK, into clothes that speak to displacement and reinvention. Tailoring is fringed and wrapped; knits hide sticks; sheer fabrics swell like floating plastic bags. Materials come from her immediate world: metal scraps, household brooms, plus research trips back to Lagos and Kano, the heart of Nigeria&rsquo;s textile industry. It&rsquo;s part memoir, part experiment, all anchored in place.

When most people say &ldquo;think big,&rdquo; Myah Hasbany hears &ldquo;think intergalactic.&rdquo; The L&rsquo;Or&eacute;al Young Talent winner built her latest collection around a UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, and the imagined fate of a town that secretly buries an alien. The 23-year-old designer charts a visual transformation across her lineup: garments that start grounded in the familiar before morphing into silhouettes that look almost extraterrestrial. The finale? A latex balloon skirt wrapped in a textured shell, co-created with Straytukay, a designer with Rick Owens&ndash;level edge, that lands somewhere between eerie and couture.

Tidjane Tall opened IFM&rsquo;s Class of 2025 show with a collection that felt equal parts homage and manifesto. Defined by elongated silhouettes and a shock of colour crowning each look, the lineup honours Fran&ccedil;ois Benga, the queer Senegalese cabaret star who lit up 1920s Paris. Tall first found Benga in a single photograph, bare except for embroidered briefs, and turned that discovery into a bridge to his lineage, rooted in La Boyle Noire, the Ivory Coast cabaret founded by his grandfather. The result celebrates Blackness and Black joy with a bold, intimate charge.

Candice Morin builds tension into her work: softness versus structure, intimacy versus armour. Her collection is textured and tactile, layered with fabrics that embrace and protect in equal measure. At its centre is a beaded leather-strap onesie, a year-long experiment that began with wooden car-seat covers and grew into a study of how material strength can meet texture head-on. It&rsquo;s a wearable vulnerability, equal parts maternal and muscular.

Lyrone Journo turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. Her collection elevates everyday objects, books, parasols and towels by sculpting, twisting and draping them into wearable art that&rsquo;s daring without tipping into costume. Accessories push the disruption further: 3D-printed jewellery reimagined as sculptural forms, and headpieces styled like a towel turban, only revealed on closer inspection as bundles of knitwear, clipped into new shapes. It&rsquo;s a street-ready surrealism that makes you look twice.

Izzy Dickens&rsquo; fashion story runs through two temples of craft: Kiko Kostadinov and Maison Margiela under John Galliano, where she sharpened her now-signature weaving technique. That discipline collides with play in her graduate collection, especially in pieces pulled from childhood sketches. Standouts include a sculptural foam coat and dress with oversized, cartoonish proportions, the kind of silhouettes kids instinctively draw. For Dickens, it&rsquo;s craft colliding with memory, made monumental.

For Amandine Leost, furniture isn&rsquo;t background; it&rsquo;s narrative. Her debut pulls from the stillness of domestic interiors, particularly the comfort of a grandmother&rsquo;s living room. Exaggerated silhouettes echo &rsquo;70s armchairs, while fabrics recall sofa covers and faded dish towels. But it isn&rsquo;t just nostalgia. For Leost, it&rsquo;s about capturing the fragile elegance of time passing, and the strange tenderness of holding on to what&rsquo;s already fading.

8 Emerging Fashion Designers to Watch in the Avant-Garde Space

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