IFM BA FASHION 2026: MEMORY AND MYTHOLOGY

Paul Molina

Paul Molina’s collection explores the tension between inherited identity and imagined selfhood through the lens of adolescence. Drawing on family garments, domestic textiles, and the silhouettes of previous generations, the project builds a visual language rooted in memory, intimacy, and transmission. This domestic archive is disrupted by references drawn from cinema and literature, where night becomes a space of projection, desire, and distortion. The resulting wardrobe oscillates between sleepwear and structured garments, childhood proportions and adult tailoring. Exaggerated volumes, aged fabrics, and instinctive gestures of tying, wrapping, and adjusting suggest an ongoing process of self-construction. As he leaves IFM, his greatest concern is finding a place within an industry crowded with talented graduates competing for a limited number of opportunities.

@paul.mlnn

Louis Broissin

Louis Broissin’s collection takes its starting point from a phrase he hears repeatedly: “Bonjour Madame.” Rather than treating the expression as a simple form of address, the project examines the way it unsettles and expands ideas of identity. The collection explores the coexistence of femininity and masculinity, not as opposing forces but as states capable of existing simultaneously, gradually dissolving rigid boundaries between genders. Through this process, identity becomes more fluid, personal, and detached from conventional expectations. Broissin is excited by the opportunities ahead while remaining conscious of the uncertainty surrounding a long-term career in fashion, a field he sees as continually balancing freedom and pressure.

@louis_broissin_

Noémie Landragin

Noémie Landragin’s collection is a tribute to boredom as the starting point of creativity. Drawing on childhood notebooks filled with doodles and the rhythm of repetitive, absent-minded gestures, the project traces a shift from tailoring into draping, from the disciplined to the abstract. Handcrafted textiles – pulled tweed, melted plastic knitted pieces, and hand-drawn prints on sequins – carry this sense of lightness and spontaneity into the garments. As she enters the industry, Landragin is most excited by the prospect of collective creative work, moving from the singular decisions of fashion education into the exchange of ideas between designers, pattern makers, ateliers, and textile developers. She leaves school with optimism, shaped by the kindness and collaboration she experienced there.

@noemielandragin

Alisa Danish

Alisa Danish’s collection, Shape Follows Movement, originated from childhood memories of learning to ride a bicycle with her father and her continued relationship with cycling as part of everyday life. Observing a disconnect between elegant clothing and garments genuinely designed for movement, she developed a collection for women navigating the city without interruption, moving between work, social, and cultural spaces. The bicycle is an inspiration and a design framework, informing silhouettes derived from the cyclist’s forward-leaning posture. Ideas of balance, motion, practicality, and independence are translated through shape, gesture, texture, and uniformity, using techniques including plissé, laser cutting, and flou. The collection also reflects the bicycle’s historical significance as a symbol of freedom and mobility for women.

@alisa_danish

Samuel Ferrand

Samuel Ferrand’s collection is an homage to the Dominican Republic and an exploration of how cultures transform over time. Rooted in scenes of everyday life, family, and celebration, the project examines what is inherited, what is imagined, and what is reinvented – a tribute to life itself. Informed by the idea that the Caribbean holds an ability to transform pain into rhythm, Ferrand accumulated layers, colours, and motifs until he began weaving his own materials to reconstruct an idea of paradise. The collection offers an intimate reading of a territory shaped by migration, exchange, and diversity, where identities circulate without ever being fixed. It’s a space of encounters in which multiple stories coexist without fully merging. As he leaves IFM, Ferrand is eager to keep creating in new environments and with new perspectives. He is conscious of how much he still has to learn about garment construction, and hopes to bring a sense of joy and openness to a sector of fashion that can sometimes feel austere.

@samuel.frrnd

Yaojia Cen

Yaojia Cen’s collection examines menswear not as gender identity, but as a structure of authority, function, and control. The project begins with the order found in 1930s French commercial illustration, in which the male body is arranged through shoulders, posture, symmetry, and fit. Against this logic, Cen introduces the proportions, joining methods, and prints of children’s garments – drawn from her own childhood photographs – inserting them into adult tailoring to destabilise the codes she identifies as powerful. Deconstruction, jersey materials, and the blurred, fragmented colour language of painter Wendelin Wohlgemuth work together to soften tailoring’s authority, producing silhouettes suspended between masculine structure and childhood ease. As she leaves education, Cen is excited by the possibility of building a visual language that can exist beyond the school context, and hopes to work within a slower, more critically engaged fashion environment – one in which research, construction, and emotional complexity retain space alongside commercial imperatives.

@557619_

Elona Clement

Elona Clement’s collection examines how childhood games and clothing silently shape ideas of femininity and influence how women are perceived. Beginning with ostensibly neutral spaces – play, LEGO, everyday objects – the project exposes the expectations embedded within them. While the female wardrobe is habitually reduced to decoration and aesthetics, Clement challenges this by monumentalising feminine details often dismissed as cute or decorative. Oversized shoulders and voluminous silhouettes transform naïve, childlike imagery into instruments of power, creating a visual language that is impossible to ignore. As she enters the industry, Clement is motivated by the underrepresentation of diverse women within fashion and is determined to contribute to a more visible and inclusive practice. She is particularly sensitive to the continued focus on women’s bodies and appearance within the industry, and hopes to be part of a generation that moves beyond these standards.

@elonaclement

Smilla Carlsson

Smilla Carlsson’s collection brings together the raw atmosphere of a Swedish fishing village and the world of Ingrid Bergman. Drawing on Bergman’s white satin eveningwear, fish-egg pearls, broad shoulders, and cool elegance, the collection transforms Smögen from a real place into an emotional landscape. The project explores how cultural simplicity can shape both dress and femininity, imagining emotions carried through clothing in the same way memories are carried through scent. Refined yet relaxed, the garments balance glamour with practicality, like choosing a swimsuit over a bra simply because it feels comfortable. Carlsson is excited to begin working while remaining open to paths beyond traditional fashion design. She is particularly interested in fields that engage multiple senses, such as perfume. 

@smi1la

Yaouen Chausseblanche

Yaouen Chausseblanche’s collection, Arouezioù, uses knitwear to explore the richness and diversity of Brittany beyond folkloric stereotypes. Drawing on traditional Breton costumes, embroidery, headdresses, and local symbols, the collection creates a contemporary and mystical wardrobe through organic, chaotic silhouettes. Hand knitting, crochet, embroidery, and felting are combined with translations of traditional Breton motifs into knitted structures and surfaces. Techniques associated with Breton craftsmanship are reinterpreted through knitwear. Chausseblanche is particularly interested in preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge while exploring overlooked local resources and innovative materials. At the same time, he is concerned by the return of narrow beauty standards and the limited visibility afforded to emerging designers.

@y.aouen

Nathan Flous

Nathan Flous’s collection explores childhood and adolescence through their duality between innocence and brutality. The Little Prince, a major source of inspiration he grew up with, allows him to represent an idealised image of childhood, contrasted with an alternative American youth of the 1990s and 2000s, more raw and trashy, shaped by cinema and popular culture, particularly the films of Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, and Gus Van Sant, including Gummo, Kids, and Elephant. This tension is expressed through the handling of materials, opposing rough or worn textiles with softer, graphic, almost abstract ones, and is reflected in the colours, the proportions of the silhouettes, and in seemingly naively random garment combinations. As he enters the industry, Flous is most excited to finally experience it from the inside: after several years of studying and working on school projects, he is looking forward to joining a team, finding his place within a studio, and understanding how collections are developed on a larger scale. He acknowledges the uncertainty that comes with entering professional life, noting that finding your place in such a competitive industry is a real challenge, but also what makes it exciting; he remains eager to discover what role he can play, what kind of environment he can grow in, and how he can build his own path within the industry.

@nathan.fls_

Arthur Vieillard

Arthur Vieillard’s collection draws direct inspiration from the figures of Andrée Putman and François Sagat. Through their stories, the project examines how each of us responds to the relentless flow of images online, and how we oscillate between the desire to be seen and the desire for anonymity. Clothing becomes a mechanism, for attracting the attention of others, or for disappearing from view. The nightlife world that shaped both figures runs through the collection’s palette and casting choices, lending it an atmosphere of nocturnal glamour and ambiguity. Vieillard studied architecture before arriving at IFM, and brings a structural sensibility to his approach to form. As he leaves education, he is eager to keep designing and to learn from those with more experience, while remaining hopeful about finding collaborators who bring the same generosity and curiosity he encountered at school. He is also an advocate for greater physical diversity in casting, and used street casting for his own collection.

@arthur_vllrd

Viola Neuls Humphreys

Viola Neuls Humphreys’ collection examines the relationship between body and garment, and the tension in their unavoidable confrontation. Tailoring and shapewear – seemingly opposing systems – are brought together as intersecting methods of control, shaping and reforming the body simultaneously. Everyday moments of discomfort, a fallen bra strap, a tight elastic, are drawn to the surface and treated as inescapable facts of dressing. Constraint becomes not a means of confinement but of reconstruction. As she enters the industry, Neuls Humphreys is drawn to its continuous movement and innovation, while hoping for a culture that slows down enough to champion the craft and dedication embedded in each garment. She is excited above all by people – how garments make us feel, and the stories they carry.

@Viola_Neuls

Hyacinthe Nasli-Bakir

Hyacinthe Nasli-Bakir’s collection, Le beau j’en ai fait mon deuil, was developed in dialogue with Sophie Calle’s project Les Aveugles, in which visually impaired individuals were asked about their perception of beauty. Working alongside educators at the National Institute for Blind Youth, Nasli-Bakir began to investigate how clothing might be experienced beyond sight. Gesture becomes the organising principle of the collection, translated into constructional elements that guide and frame the tactile experience: raglan sleeves, piping, openings, and cut-outs that echo the pattern and reveal the body in motion. Soft materials are chosen to deliberately unsettle the eye, while vibrant colours and dissonant prints draw on the sensory and psychedelic aesthetic of Miles Davis in the 1970s – combinations that appear incoherent but ultimately compose their own form of harmony. As he enters the industry, Nasli-Bakir is concerned about the risk of losing creative autonomy within large organisations, where commercial pressures may reduce the designer to an executor rather than an author.

@hyacinthe.nb

Corentin Glorian

Corentin Glorian’s collection draws a connection between the golden era of Haute Couture and the culture of the Instagram selfie. Researching the fashion photography of the mid-twentieth century, he found a persistent parallel in the way women are presented then and now – simultaneously as objects of desire and of identification. The project centres on the ambiguity of the influencer’s morning selfie: apparently effortless and intimate, yet carefully constructed behind the image. To realise this tension, Glorian combines Haute Couture savoir-faire with the archetypes of homewear, working primarily in traditional silks including gazar and mikado, and layering them within garments to influence the behaviour of the fabric from the inside. As he enters the industry, Glorian is unsettled by the growing precarity of stable employment, with freelance and interim contracts increasingly becoming the norm. He remains, however, cautiously hopeful – believing that widespread instability may ultimately open space for deeper structural change.

@korathan

Elizaveta Pashina

Elizaveta Pashina’s collection, Where the Body Ends, explores the female body through fragmentation and abstraction, drawing on Man Ray’s photographic collages. Suspended, dislocated, and reassembled, the body becomes an image that resists literal reading, existing between presence and absence. By abstracting the figure, the collection shifts away from objectification and fixed ideals toward something more elusive and self-defined, with garments acting as incisions, voids, and sharp lines that suggest rather than reveal. Oversized sculptural silhouettes hold space around the body, transforming clothing into moving collages, while structure and fluidity remain in constant negotiation through angular cuts, controlled volumes, and resistant draping. Sensuality emerges through restraint, fragility and strength coexisting in a statuesque presence where the body is continuously imagined rather than shown. As she enters the industry, Pashina is excited by the opportunity to collaborate with people who challenge and expand her perspective; having worked largely independently throughout her studies, she is drawn to the prospect of bringing her own vision into dialogue with an established brand’s DNA at a high-end fashion house. She finds creative exchange inspiring, seeing how different ideas and references can combine into something stronger than one person could achieve alone. At the same time, she is conscious of the industry’s pressure to constantly produce and follow commercial trends, and hopes to find a space that values experimentation, craftsmanship, and more thoughtful design processes, where fashion remains emotionally engaging and culturally relevant rather than simply consumed.

@pashinaelelelel

Yongqi Liao

Yongqi Liao’s “Fissure 27.956° N, 115.156° E” explores the misalignment of memory. After leaving his hometown in rural Jiangxi, China, for eight years, Liao returned to discover that the places, people, and objects he remembered no longer corresponded to reality; as the village gradually declined, the memories attached to it began to disappear, becoming impossible to fully recover. Through photography, surface rubbings, and material collection, he traced these fragments rather than attempting to reconstruct them. The collection combines handwoven ramie, archived industrial ramie, knitwear, and jacquard textiles, with folding, displacement, and distortion becoming a physical language for memories that can never return in their original form. As he enters the industry, Liao is excited by fashion’s potential to communicate through material, construction, and process rather than image alone, offering a space where memory, craftsmanship, and lived experience can be translated into something physical. He is concerned, however, by the pressure for fashion to become increasingly fast, polished, and instantly consumable, and hopes the industry continues to value slower forms of making, allowing space for uncertainty, experimentation, and stories that cannot be understood at first glance.

@wuawua_wua

Saulė Milonaitė

Saulė Milonaitė’s graduate collection explores the transformation of the common and ordinary into something extraordinary. Bringing together bread, a symbol of accessibility, sustenance, and everyday ritual, and eveningwear, traditionally associated with exclusivity and occasion, the project blurs the boundaries between necessity and excess, labour and glamour. Drawing on the rituals of baking, garments are shaped through gestures of kneading, tying, draping, and folding, embracing the messiness of creation and challenging ideals of perfection. The process of bread-making informs both textile manipulation and pattern-making techniques, transforming acts of labour into forms of embellishment, and through humour and critique, the collection questions performative glamour, inviting a more playful and practical relationship with dressing up. As she enters the industry, Milonaitė is concerned by the difficulty of finding stable employment, noting that endless internships and unpaid opportunities have become so normalised that a job can feel like a grand dream rather than an expectation. At the same time, she remains driven by the perspective that first brought her to fashion: coming from a background where everything needed to be functional and have a purpose, she continues to find excitement in working with materials, solving problems, and making fashion feel more accessible and relatable without losing its grandness. She believes fashion should be approached with more humour and self-awareness, and is inspired by smaller brands building a more open, playful practice while remaining creatively ambitious. Milonaitė hopes to contribute to that shift from within, working toward a future where fashion feels more accessible, grounded, and closer to the people who wear it.

@saulexmilonaite

Jean Oltra

Jean Oltra’s graduate collection, Boy at the Door, explores the collision between the idealised American college boy and the unsettling glamour of the night. Inspired by Blue Velvet, the collection investigates tensions between innocence and voyeurism, control and desire, through the characters of Jeffrey Beaumont and Dorothy Vallens. Classic menswear archetypes are reconstructed through draped excess, handwoven tartan illusions, leather, velvet blends, and sous-vide garment constructions, creating silhouettes that appear stretched, altered, and almost melting. Distressed surfaces, exposed threads, faded suburban neutrals, bruised purples, and electric blues evoke a fragile glamour where carefully maintained façades begin to fracture. Looking ahead, Oltra is excited by the possibility of joining a collaborative creative community and hopes to see greater support for emerging designers. 

@jeanoltra

Ella Maillard de Thuin

Ella Maillard de Thuin’s collection explores the limits of the body through restrictions on movement and sensory perception. Positioned between fashion and art, the project introduces a performative dimension in which garments actively shape posture, gesture, and the way the body occupies space. Support structures, framing devices, and distorted volumes are used to investigate how vulnerability, frustration, restriction, and tension can become forms of physical and aesthetic desire. Rather than simply dressing the body, the garments act upon it, creating new relationships between movement and perception. As she leaves education, Maillard de Thuin is interested in moving towards work that is more wearable, desirable, and commercially viable, while remaining cautious about losing the creativity and experimentation that underpin her practice.

@Ell4stik

Jessica Lin

Jessica Lin’s collection draws on her mother’s experiences as a migrant woman in Hong Kong, exploring the intersection of labour, motherhood, and femininity. Traditional male workwear and Hong Kong’s working-class heritage provide the structural foundation, with utilitarian silhouettes reinterpreted through a feminine lens that balances toughness with softness and elegance. Fringed details reference domestic elements (curtains, interiors) adding movement and a subtle tenderness to the garments, while patchwork techniques create three-dimensional surfaces inspired by tiles and brickwork, translating the textures of industrial and domestic environments into fabric form. The collection celebrates women as resilient and multifaceted figures whose labour and care continue to shape family and society. As she leaves education, Lin is eager to bring her own perspective into an industry that can feel increasingly conservative and commercially driven. She is drawn to the possibilities of cultural storytelling through clothing, and hopes to contribute a more diverse range of aesthetics to contemporary fashion.

@jexcal8

Adama Dahou

Adama Dahou’s collection, Dance Yourself Clean, explores the cathartic aftermath of a night out. The project begins with the iconography of the 1920s – images by Brassäï and Otto Dix capturing the charged atmosphere of early twentieth-century nightlife – before moving into the photography of the Cobrasnake and early 2000s documentation of LCD Soundsystem. Cross-referencing both periods produces a playful wardrobe that mixes colour and print across biker jackets, tank tops, T-shirts, cocoon mantles, and bias-cut dresses. The collection depicts the silhouettes of late-night wanderers – somewhere between dressed up and dishevelled, between dirt and glitter, between seeming and being – as cobblestones blur with confetti beneath disco balls and streetlights. As he enters the industry, Dahou is frustrated by the structural pressures of fashion weeks and fast trend cycles, which he sees as compromising quality and intention in design. He is drawn to the possibility of one day running a studio collectively, and remains driven by his love of designing clothes despite a complex relationship with the industry that shapes them.

@dahou.018

Hoang Le

Hoang Le’s collection, SPACE MONKS, ASTEROIDS, combines the radical utilitarianism of space uniforms with the comfort and ritual of religious dress. Drawing inspiration from Buddhist monastic drapery, historical workwear, and astronaut uniforms, the project imagines garments as drifting asteroids carrying traces of labour, adaptation, and spiritual practice through time. Oversized protective outerwear is balanced against fluid draped forms, creating a dialogue between vulnerability and defence. Heritage materials including cotton, linen, and silk are juxtaposed with neoprene and plastic, while digital prints of Buddhist sculptures, wooden beads, and jade details merge historical symbolism with contemporary techniques. Le hopes to learn from established fashion houses and deepen his understanding of craftsmanship, studio culture, and collaboration, while remaining critical of the accelerating pace of production across both luxury and mass-market fashion.

@not_reallylehoang

Lauriane Lothin

Yiyi Zhu

Yiyi Zhu’s collection, Fake, yet flawless, explores how fantasy is never built in isolation but assembled from the objects and environments around us. Drawing on childhood memories of Chinese floral pillowcases and bedsheets, printed enamel cups, plastic ornaments, and beaded curtains, Zhu treats these everyday objects as carriers of wishes for happiness, peace, and prosperity. The collection combines this domestic imagery with the fairytale book Chanky’s Adventure, whose puppets represent the innocence of imagination. Familiar florals and checks are reinterpreted through TPU and wool jacquard knitting, vinyl printing, and reconstructed bedding patterns, forming a personal cottage fantasy shaped by Chinese domestic imagery, childhood perception, and artificial materials. As she enters the industry, Zhu is most excited by the opportunity to keep learning through making, valuing craftsmanship and the way materials, techniques, and ideas shift through different makers’ hands; she is particularly drawn to knitwear for the way it builds material, structure, and surface simultaneously. She is concerned, however, that the industry’s pace leaves too little room for careful development, experimentation, and handwork, and hopes to see craftsmanship recognised as essential to the design process rather than treated as decoration or production.

@yiyi_zhu_11

Davide Bruggisser

Davide Bruggisser’s collection examines the value of craftsmanship and the beauty found in what is slowly disappearing. Taking as its starting point the wardrobes of Swiss farmers in the twentieth century, the project reflects on rural life, fading traditions, and the preservation of handmade techniques. Laser-cut leather and hand-embroidered Swarovski crystals bring a contemporary sensibility to these historical references, producing garments that hold transience and transformation within their surfaces. Craft is the language of the collection; transience is its subject. As he prepares to enter the industry, Bruggisser approaches the transition with a sense of respect for the challenge ahead. While the competitive pace of the field is something he holds with both excitement and caution, he is particularly inspired by the prospect of working within a design team – combining different strengths and perspectives into something stronger than any individual could produce alone.

@dayellb

Virgile Courbon

Virgile Courbon’s collection examines the emergence of technology within bourgeois households at the end of the 20th century. The project focuses on the paradox of a culture often associated with tradition and ornamentation becoming one of the first to embrace technologies defined by smooth surfaces, minimalism, and the aesthetics of early computer culture. Through this contrast, Courbon develops silhouettes that place orthodox cultural references alongside postmodern and technological disruptions. The collection reflects a society undergoing profound transformation, where established codes are gradually reshaped by new systems and technologies. As he prepares to begin an internship in a design studio, Courbon is excited to continue developing both his technical skills and creative maturity. At the same time, he is concerned by the industry’s pace and the pressure it places on design teams, hoping to be part of a generation that prioritises stronger creative development over relentless production cycles.

@virgilecourbon

Adony Bigueur

Adony Bigueur’s collection, Entre Deux, explores Black identity through ideas of fragmentation, displacement, and reconstruction. Influenced by the writings of bell hooks and artists including Jackie Nickerson, Pieter Hugo, Carrie Mae Weems, and Ousmane Ndiaye Dago, the project examines the experience of existing between cultures, histories, and identities. Distressed surfaces, layered patinas, and fragile textures become traces of memory, lived experience, and internal tension. Throughout the collection, imperfection is transformed into a space of resilience and rebuilding. As she enters the industry, Bigueur is motivated by the lack of Black representation she continues to observe within fashion. Rather than discouraging her, this reality strengthens her determination to contribute to a more inclusive future.

@litemantra