LCF MA FASHION 2026: THE BODY UNDER PRESSURE

Yulu Hou

What does it mean to worship productivity? Yulu Hou sees in contemporary work culture the same mechanisms as religious devotion (discipline, repetition, restraint) and her collection makes that parallel visible. The nun’s habit and the office uniform are merged and deconstructed: suits, white shirts, and tailored trousers, read as instruments of conformity and institutional authority, are fused with elements of religious dress to expose how labour functions as a secular belief structure. Dress, for Hou, is never innocent. It disciplines the body and constructs identity, rarely operating as genuine personal choice.

@hyl.yulu

Huakun Zhu

Layers intersect like bodies in a close hold. Working through reverse folding, Huakun Zhu interprets the lovers’ embrace in fabric – knitted surfaces echo the warmth and softness of skin, while the structure underneath holds what words don’t say. Intimacy here is restrained yet present, not spoken but held, pressed, and breathed into material.

Lynn Zhao

The Soft Warrior begins in the shower: a space Lynn Zhao treats as a private emotional refuge, a place to stop performing toughness. Running water becomes armour for tears. Drawing on medieval armour segmentation and the logic of water in motion, she builds soft, protective silhouettes: curved seamlines, arched panels, a faulds-like waistline, sculpted bust lines, and shower-curtain ring buckles holding everything together. Jersey and wool give sculptural weight without hardness. Colour works as an emotional thermometer – deep burgundy for pressure and heat, watery green for rinsing and dilution, washed pink and pale yellow for bathroom light and skin coming back to itself through steam.

@lynnzhaoofficial

Karolina Kalisciak

Karolina grew up in a Polish household where women made and men built, and where craft was never decorative but how things got done. ‘FUEL’ takes that inheritance seriously. Through leatherwork, visible construction, and knotting, she brings forward the processes that garment-making usually keeps hidden, and by producing her own leather strings, she extends the act of making into the smallest components of each piece. The collection is a tribute to the hands behind physical work – slow, skilled, and rarely credited – and to a way of understanding labour as something powerful in itself.

@lolakalisciak

Tiger Peng

Tiger Peng is a Canadian multidisciplinary designer working across fashion, music, and furniture. Private Ensemble was built at Fold, the east London techno club, where fracturing lights and bodies in shared momentum shaped the collection’s visual logic. The work moves through arrival, immersion, and return: protective outerwear coded in queer sartorial safety gives way to inner pieces that respond to heat, pressure, and light. Custom titanium oxide treated leather recalls ice-cold rain on overheated skin. Jerseys and wood artefacts take form through tension, constructed on the moving body. The collection is forged in motion; in the distortion and liberation of bodies moving through the night, and in the underground currents that make those spaces possible.

@tiger_pengg

Xinhao Wang

Tennis has always been about more than sport. From its aristocratic origins to the global stage, it carries a cultural language of control and freedom, elegance and athleticism held in constant tension. ‘ROTATION’ works with that history, merging traditional tailoring with sportswear construction to produce menswear that can move without sacrificing precision. Colours come from the court itself; stretch performance fabrics and suiting textiles are combined; elastic panels replace conventional darts.

@xinhaowang.wang

Kechen Yu

The butcher divides, sections, and reassembles. Kechen Yu applies that same logic to tailoring, treating the male body as a site of structure and fragility to be dissected and reconstructed. Curved darts, padding insertions, and layering expose construction as anatomy, while the starting points – butcher uniforms, bovine anatomy, Francis Bacon’s paintings – root the work in something visceral. Padded leather, structured wool suiting, cotton shirting, and technical interlinings are worked in a palette of deep burgundy, red, and dark brown. Pad-stitching, quilting, and experimental cutting push against each other, holding brutality and tailoring discipline in an uneasy balance.

Jinxi Lei

Can’t walk in high heels? Maybe you’re just wearing them wrong. Jinxi Lei started with a question about the stiletto – why does something so impractical hold so much power – and ended up somewhere larger, confronting the absurdity of choosing fashion as a path at all. The heel’s calm, hardened elegance is absorbed into the garments: its curves reinforce the shoulders of a tailored coat, contour the hips of tailored trousers, and in a blue jersey top, a line drawn from the heel’s base is enlarged in steel along the collarbone. Colour and material do the rest – a deep blue after sunset, an eloquent silence.

@jinxi.lei

Geraint Brian Lewis

British Fashion Council MA Scholar Geraint Brian Lewis made ‘Reckoning’ from collapse. The collection emerges from his experience of being hospitalised for anorexia nervosa – from childhood shadows and the slow brutality of lived trauma. Clinical masks press close, stealing breath and voice. Deep, familiar blues bruise and endure. Latex constrains; wool and cotton console and protect. Shirts cut from bedsheets carry the memory of nights spent awake, resisting disappearance. The garments hold where life fractured and slowly reformed. Reckoning doesn’t soften the past or romanticise illness. It claims space for male vulnerability and survival, and the right to take up space in a body once taught to disappear.

@geraintbrianlewis

Zeting Xu

Serifed treats the pattern as a typographic stroke. Zeting Xu translates serif morphology – its curvature, its terminal points – into menswear through pattern-cutting, asking what happens to silhouette when a garment is conceived as a glyph. Paper-like textiles ground the work between material experimentation and commercial feasibility, and pine soot ink on washable paper recalls the matte, fibrous quality of Gambierred Cantonese Silk. Ink and paper become interdependent: form and surface speaking to each other, garment construction operating as inscription.

@x_zeting

Jiyuan Fan

The hanger is where a garment waits. Jiyuan Fan takes that overlooked object as a structural proposition – a visible system of support where skeleton and garment become one. Human Hanger moves through tailoring, 3D printing, wood carving, and textile experimentation to find a new balance between rigidity and softness, foregrounding the usually hidden architecture of how clothes hold their shape.

Qian Tan

Qian Tan’s starting point is a walk up the hill at Ronchamp, France, to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut. The climb demands lightness: light steps, an inward stillness, a kind of presence. Inside the chapel, weight is placed gently and space breathes through minimal points of contact. Tan translates that spatial experience into garments, working with the character of materials rather than against it. Crisp cotton builds internal structure while soft wool, knit, and velvet are allowed to settle around it like air. Through gravity and the physical relationship between layers, she finds flow, something that floats without effort.

Yuting Zhou

‘FLUIDITY’ is built around a form of female strength that doesn’t announce itself. Yuting Zhou approaches power through softness, not as something loud or dominant, but as something felt over time, in the way structure forms through motion. Softness here is not ornament but architecture. Light, layering, and transparency allow the garments to respond to the body rather than impose on it. Form emerges through movement, breath, and wear. The work opens space for something to pass through, unhurried, open, and resilient in its own register.

@ytng700091