RCA MA Fashion 2026: A second body

Eli Heijink

Weaving together his journey as a transgender man with his mother’s Brazilian heritage, Eli Heijink treats clothing as a form of activism, creating connections across marginalised communities. Robin Cohen’s Rope Theory and research into diaspora and belonging inform the work, while tailoring communicates his newfound connection to Brazil. Natural fibres, heavy yarns and knotted flowers make the pieces tactile, evoking vulnerability as much as resistance, and an earthy palette reflects heritage and emotional connection. Traditional menswear meets feminine details and immersive installation, inviting people into a shared space where garments become vessels for dialogue and acceptance. As he leaves education, Heijink is excited by the possibility of creating work beyond traditional fashion spaces, using clothing to start conversations rather than simply exist as products, and by the growing number of designers using their platforms to advocate for social change. What concerns him is an industry that can still feel exclusive and disconnected from the people it represents, where diversity too often becomes a trend rather than a long-term commitment.

@eliheijink

Frances O’Leary

Fight or Flight begins with the space created around a woman’s body at the rise of modern femininity, when fashion imposed ideals of domesticity through restriction and immobility while men were afforded freedom of movement. A multidisciplinary artist from London, Frances O’Leary works at the intersection of clothing and sculpture, drawing on second wave feminist theory to interrogate expectation versus reality and society’s relationship with the female form, at a time when violence towards women and girls is a national emergency in the UK. She reimagines that historical space in wire and naturally dyed silk structures, both sculpture and fashion, referencing the perceived freedom of a kite. Reclamation and dissection are core values of her practice: she works with pre-existing objects and fabrics, hand-dyeing all recent work. Having spent fifteen years in the industry as a womenswear designer before her MA, she remains an advocate for reuse and repair, hoping to see genuine change within the next decade. O’Leary is supported by the Logitech Diversity in Art and Design Scholarship.

@frances_oleary

Lili Saito

A coffee cup or a plastic drinking straw, rooted in living experience and memory, becomes raw material in Lili Saito’s practice, an experimentation with materials in the form of garments. Cigarette packages and bin bags are captured and deconstructed to rediscover the hidden beauty and richness within daily life, yielding provocative textures and silhouettes from things most people throw away. The intention is for the audience to feel the pieces intuitively, engaging with sensibilities and emotions through visual and tactile means rather than explanation. By using familiar, practical objects as material, Saito hopes to reveal individuality and new perspectives, inviting people to find emotional resonance and memory in the mundane. She would rather communicate with the world in a private way and live an individual life, believing that a shift of perspective on the ordinary makes life more unique and meaningful – a conviction her garments extend to whoever encounters them.

@lils._saito

Yao Tzu Liang

Bachelard saw the shell as a world that guards dreams. Yao Tzu Liang feels like a pearl inside one: protected, cherished, loved. A pearl starts as an intrusion; the shell embraces it, wrapping it in layers of itself to make it shine, and though the pearl’s beauty comes entirely from the shell, people only ever see the pearl. The work is a tribute to Liang’s mother and to all who give selflessly, speaking of a quiet, timeless love. Body and shell merge to see through the shell’s eyes: to love and be loved. Creating the collection taught him that love is giving, compromising and caring for another – a lesson he distils into a single line: I love you more than myself. Leaving education, what Liang looks forward to most is experiencing the fierce competition of the fashion industry, above all his long-cherished dream of haute couture, where he aims to pursue perfection in every single piece he creates.

@l_yaozu

Malone Zhou

The city walls of Nanjing, monumental and defensive yet carrying histories of warmth and belonging, stand at the centre of Malone Zhou’s collection as its guiding metaphor. Her work asks how order and chaos can coexist to create a new sense of harmony, drawing on Chinese architecture and cultural memory to examine the tension between protection and restriction, between collective life and the individual. Working with uniforms, latex, pleating and knitwear, Zhou transforms disciplined structures into forms that feel personal and alive, while vivid colour channels the humour and emotional richness of everyday Chinese culture. The collection proposes that harmony lies in the ability to hold contradiction and imagine a self-defined language of culture. Leaving education, Zhou is concerned by the pressure for constant production and immediate commercial success placed on emerging designers, and excited by the possibility of rethinking how value is created – she wants to contribute to a fashion system in which value is shared more fairly across the people and places involved in creating it.

@malonezhou

Keyi Chen

Between the body and its surroundings lies a state that is difficult to name. Keyi Chen understands it as “alone” – something spatial, atmospheric, able to exist even in the presence of others. Tailored to her own measurements, the garments function as replicas of her physical form, painted with the tones of her skin and jewellery so that they retain intimate traces of her existence. A layer of sheer tulle obscures these details, blurring the boundary between body and environment and suggesting a gradual merging of the self into its surroundings. The pieces express a desire to be recognised while accepting the possibility of remaining unseen, reflecting the emotional distance that can persist within shared spaces. What excites Chen about the industry is also what concerns her: the internet has made it easier to share work and reach audiences, yet trends spread so quickly that fashion risks becoming uniform. She hopes the industry continues to make space for slower, more individual voices alongside the fast pace of social media.

@pobeccat

Sol Lee

The Disobedient Body questions the virtue of obedience imposed on women and disrupts patriarchal order. At its centre, the Hybrid Monster transforms the images used to stigmatise women – the animal, the monster, the sexual object – into vitality and agency. The Monster moves across drawing, scent and sculpture; within this practice, fashion functions as a sculptural form that gives it a body and enables movement and performance. Combining the traditional Korean bride with the Korean shaman, historically regarded as abnormal and marginalised, Sol Lee’s soft sculpture departs from the visual language of the female body as an object of beauty and desire, emerging as a grotesque, unfamiliar and transcendent being. Lee sees fashion as the artistic medium closest to the human body, excited by its potential to expand into interdisciplinary practice. Fashion, she worries, is still often perceived as functional clothing or commercial product; she hopes it is increasingly recognised as a medium capable of questioning social norms, and that her practice can contribute to that shift.

@so1_1ee

Cornesha Harris

Hair beads and headscarves, inherited and culturally significant, are transformed into contemporary textile forms in the work of Cornesha Harris, carrying stories of heritage and connection across places. Working under her label thenichestudio and informed by her own experience of migration, Harris explores belonging and multilocality through fashion, textiles and moving image, examining how movement and everyday ritual shape identity. By reimagining familiar objects, she asks how they preserve memory and take on new meanings, proposing that home is something we carry and continually recreate through lived experience rather than a fixed location. She is excited by the growing space where fashion intersects with film and social storytelling, and by the prospect of creating work that encourages dialogue around identity while collaborating across creative disciplines. At the same time, she hopes the industry continues to value slower, more thoughtful forms of making, with greater support for emerging designers whose practices are community-focused and rooted in meaningful storytelling.

@thenichstudio @corneshaharris

Ji Young Yun

Since childhood, Ji Young Yun has lived with obsessions, and the biggest was a fear of expansion – of her body changing, of leaving her safe zone. Asking herself why, she explored the question through bodily and spatial extension, researching the medical process of stretch marks and expressing it through performance, a study that became the foundation of all her work. Balloons let her show expansion as the beginning of a new form rather than an end; to connect them, she developed an overlock stitching technique and continued experimenting with latex as a material. Yun has always believed that fashion is a tool for transformation, and is excited to see it becoming more connected with performance, sculpture and other creative disciplines. She still feels the industry promotes a single standard of beauty and body image, placing pressure on people to fit that ideal, and hopes it becomes a place where different bodies and identities are respected – where change and expansion are new possibilities, and nothing to fear.

@j_young_yun