Central Saint Martins’ Next-Gen Fashion Saviors

Adam Faurschou, Tasnim Chowdhury and Cal Carver are daring, confident innovators at heart. Emerging from the hallowed halls of Central Saint Martins, the three designers are pushing the boundaries of what sustainable fashion can be in 2024. Green Light meets the enigmatic trio.

By Roland Dupuy — April 2024


 

The fashion studios at Central Saint Martins are abuzz with activity, with sewing machines providing a rhythmic mechanical soundtrack to the organized chaos of patterns, mannequins, fabrics and fittings. And in the middle of it all, the student designers expertly weave in and out of the nooks and crannies between the pattern-cutting tables, ironing boards, and other miscellaneous heavy-duty atelier machinery. They may all have strikingly singular aesthetics, inspirations and methods, but for now, they all have one thing on the brain: the final collection, their first step out of the CSM bubble and onto fashion’s real-world stage.


After a tumultuous academic journey passing right through the pandemic crucible, this year’s graduating students are finally having a taste of fashion’s wonderfully chaotic, back-to-irl normality. And they’re hungrier than ever to earn their place as tastemakers of today and tomorrow. For many, preoccupations with the state of the world fuel a powerful creative drive. Ideas of environmentalism, circularity, sustainability and material lifetimes all coalesce. For Adam Faurschou, Tasnim Chowdhury and Cal Carver, these questions of kinder, more conscious fashion have resulted in widely differing answers, each opening a door to even more fashion intrigue, thematic twists, and material inspiration. Let’s dive in.


Adam Faurschou



“I love my sourdough rye bread. I try to bake one every Sunday, I have an old family recipe,” Adam Faurschou shares. To say the young Danish designer is a foodie would be quite the understatement. We’re on the steps by Regent’s canal, serenaded by artificial birdsong playing from a pair of loudspeakers — an ever so slightly eerie Hunger Games-esque detail, almost as if his thematic exploration has manifested around us. But Faurschou’s story is considerably less dystopian. Exploring the intersections between culinary culture and the physicality of ready-to-wear, his final collection is served as a seven-course fashion meal. Forget the table, this is farm to runway — and then back to farm.


Image courtesy of Adam Faurschou



“What especially inspires me with food and culinary culture is the way that it's circular, we grow the produce and then we consume it,” he explains. “Then it returns to the earth. It's this beautiful circle of organic matter,” he continues. Taking inspiration from gourmet restaurants such as Noma, Copenhagen’s world-renowned temple of high gastronomy, Faurschou eschews trends in favor of timeless, organic silhouettes. “I’m trying to see if I can find something which lies within the natural products and elevate it to a fashion context to create an appealing product, which will stay appealing,” he adds.


After cutting his teeth interning at Acne Studios and Chanel, Faurschou is now well-equipped to cook up a collection of his own. And has he ever — there’s a pair of leek boots with matching leek jacket and skirt, a napkin-draped shirt, and twisted jersey knitted trousers, among other mouth-watering pieces. There’s a strong emphasis on weaving, too. Looking at old family photos and traditional Danish farmer’s attire, he noticed a popular style of woven reed clogs, the construction of which he decided to reinterpret for this collection. 


Faurschou at work in the Central Saint Martins fashion studios
Faurschou’s deisgn process — Image courtesy of Adam Faurschou
Faurschou’s deisgn process — Image courtesy of Adam Faurschou
Faurschou’s deisgn process — Image courtesy of Adam Faurschou
Faurschou’s deisgn process — Image courtesy of Adam Faurschou



“I'm making a cardigan out of straw, and a dress out of hay. I’m platting long ropes, and then stitching them into panels, and then stitching the panels together into a garment,” he shares. Determined to make the most out of his materials in an effort to end up with as little waste as possible, he explains that he also “experimented with jersey for a more wearable variation, and leather. I've been using the off-cuts from my leather hardware pieces, and minimizing waste by turning them into these leather ropes that I'm using for belts.”


Post-graduation, Faurschou aims to channel his insatiable appetite for garment construction toward the honorable goal of making fashion better, in just about every sense of the term. 


Looks from Faurschou’s final collection — Images courtesy of Adam Faurschou



Tasnim Chowdhury



Taking inspiration from her British-Bangladeshi family heritage, Chowdhury’s final collection opens doors within the sportswear realm to new, diverse territories. Over the course of her childhood and teenage years, Chowdhury watched as her older sister developed a passion for football, and the discrimination she endured because of it. “I’m taking bits from our story, when she was growing up, around 13, the style is very early 2000’s sportswear. But I’m blending that with traditional South Asian clothing,” she explains. 

Looks from Chowdhury’s final collection — Image: Johnnie Potter



Subverting traditional British football classics such as scarves and team shirts and badges by incorporating Bangladeshi sari fabrics and familiar digitally-embroidered elements, Chowdhury celebrates football’s unique ability to bring people together, and her sister’s eventual return to the sport she loves so much. 


Venturing into the sportswear universe was not something Chowdhury originally had on her radar, but she found herself absorbed by this captivating new world. “It's very far out from any other aesthetic that I've done before. I usually have a very specific style with my work, it's very cottagecore, very nostalgic,” she shares. The nostalgia is still very much present, but it comes mixed with ideas of belonging in Britain today, as well as material nods to the Bangladeshi diaspora culture — without forgetting a swath of technical know-how she gathered during her placement year, interning at Ahluwalia and Marie Lueder. 


Chowdhury’s final collection on show day at Central Saint Martins — Image: Johnnie Potter
Chowdhury’s final collection on show day at Central Saint Martins — Image: Johnnie Potter
Chowdhury’s final collection on show day at Central Saint Martins — Image: Johnnie Potter
Chowdhury’s final collection on show day at Central Saint Martins — Image: Johnnie Potter



The materials and fabrics have all been carefully chosen so as to minimize waste, as Chowdhury notes that she feels very deeply committed to the fight for sustainable fashion. “Fast fashion, and the making of clothing in general, is destroying Bangladesh. And because it's so prominent in my country, I don't want to be doing anything that would add to the problem,” she states. 


In fact, she feels much of the fashion industry has been shamefully slow at adopting newer, less wasteful production methods, many of which are actually very simple to implement — organic dyes and off-cut fabrics, for example examples. “I have a couple of meters of this great cotton fabric that I want to dye using black beans, because they create a really nice gray, depending on how long you let them soak. I wanted to experiment with that,” she explains. “It is so easy to find easier and more accessible ways that won't harm the environment,” she concludes.


Snapshots from Chowdhury’s sketchbook — all images courtesy of Tasnim Chowdhury



Cal Carver


By adopting a highly conceptual approach to design, Cal Carver aims to bridge the gap between the physical manifestation of thought, and thematic ideas of expression and activism. “I like to write poetry. And so I just had words, things that I was collecting in my mind. I put them on these giant boards, and then I just started reacting to them in 3D by draping gestures,” Carver shares. 


Images courtesy of Cal Carver



Much of his design research is related to instances of censorship during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, and the feeling of injustice this triggered manifested itself into shapes emerging from the body, as if individual body parts were suddenly screaming out in unison. “I took over 250 different photographs of myself, with different materials around my body, and all of these gestures became about saying something with your body, like things coming out of the mouth, or emerging from the abdomen,” he reveals.


Carver’s imagined body becomes alive with speech, enabled by the vessel of the garment. But even beyond that, he noticed anatomical details in the unworn fabric, which further propelled his journey deep into sartorial semantics. “I began communicating that deconstruction, like when someone is holding the garment or the boards up, it has the look of a garment, like a shoulder or like a neckline or something. And  there is engineering that is in place to make that happen. That's been the biggest struggle, recapturing that uh initial spontaneity,” he explains, demonstrating with draped paper pieces, smocked trousers, and finger holes emerging from leather sheets, forming a glove in the middle of the raw surface.


Images courtesy of Cal Carver



Despite the visually minimalist aesthetic, undoubtedly a by-product of Carver’s time spent interning at cult New York label The Row, the collection is one rife with references and narrative details. He cites American artists Greer Lankton and David Wojnarowicz as principal sources of inspiration, with the former’s famous sewn dolls informing his construction process. “I leaned a lot into those silhouettes, her kind of really awkward, irregular anatomical dolls made of leather cloth, plaster, all these different things. She was such a fabulous artist,” he states. 


And there is an honest exploration of entropy, circularity and durability, too. “I made a lot of my materials, a lot of my papers,” he explains, adding that “it was quite intensive, really long, and quite laborious.” Carver’s considered collection of poetic thoughts, coupled with careful material sourcing, resulted in an unexpected and freeing catharsis. “A lot of these pieces are not even garments, but they kind of have the look of a garment. Some of them are just pieces of paper held up to the body, but it kind of has the shape of a dress, or has a bit of fabric or has a sleeve,” he explains. “But it's not actually something that really goes on the body properly. Which was so exciting to me because it's not at all how I thought my collection was gonna go.”