Fashion in Motion: Central St Martins graduates 2008, curator's talk

[Oriole Cullen] I’m Oriole Cullen, I’m the curator for Fashion in Motion at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Today we are having a show, Fashion in Motion, New Designers, and it features the work of three Central Saint Martin’s Graduates, Alithia Spuri-Zampetti, Kinga Malisz and Felipe Rojas-Llanos. Their work is graduate collections and we’re featuring three pieces from each collection. The three designers we chose because I had seen their graduate shows and was really impressed with their work. So we chose them individually but it’s been really great to see their work together and there’s a real synergy between the pieces, they really work with the models in the gallery and there’s a really nice juxtaposition between the sort of classical background of the museum and artefacts and these examples of sort of new designers and cutting edge design.

This show we’ve actually returned to the original format of Fashion in Motion which started ten years ago, just ten years ago in 1999. Initially we started off with just two models and six Phillip Tracey hats, but as the event grew it just got to big to manage in that format and we moved then into the Raphael Gallery for staged catwalk shows. So this is very much a kind of underground show in a sense, an underground approach. We’ve got these new designers and we really wanted to bring their work in and for people to just happen upon it and to just kind of get that surprise and shock to see these pieces moving through the gallery. And I think you can really feel that when you see these incredibly dramatic head pieces by Alithia coming first and then very quiet mood of Felipe’s boys and then these very dramatic pieces by Kinga. And so I think it’s really worked.