Upstart Fashion Illustration Trail V&A South Kensington

Explore fresh new work from fashion designers working with Graduate Fashion Foundation, learn sketching tips, and capture modelled costumes, garments in your own style.

Designers curated by Graduate Fashion Foundation, as award winning alumni of Graduate Fashion Week 2026. Graduate Fashion Foundation is dedicated to creating opportunities for multidisciplinary fashion talent.
 
The Fashion Designers:

Rebecca Ogunribido
Graduate of Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts

 A budding fashion design graduate whose lifelong passion for fashion fuels her creativity, cultural expression, and storytelling. Having showcased her work at Graduate Fashion Week 2026, she was honoured to be selected among the top 20 designers in the international fashion show, with her designs featured on the catwalk. Rooted in her Yoruba heritage and inspired by its rich spiritual traditions, her designs celebrate the identities and symbolism of Yoruba deities. Through innovative garment design, she aims to bridge culture, spirituality, and contemporary fashion, creating distinctive pieces that honour her heritage while celebrating individuality. 

Abbie Jarvis

Fashion has always been Abbie’s language, and it has always made sense to her. Beginning her fabric journey long before her formal education, where she learnt ‘the rules’, Abbie developed her own understanding of textiles and a distinct vision of how contrasting fabrics and aesthetics could clash to create something unexpected. She believes this unconventional approach is what makes her work truly individual.

Driven by a boredom with the current beige fashion landscape, Abbie has now decided to launch her own brand: a go-to maximalist label for women who want vibrant, exciting and sophisticated fashion, and who have a desire to be seen and heard.
@abbiejarvis_design

Tabitha Windle-Hartshorn  
Graduate of University of Derby 

Did You Take Your Meds, Babe? explores the restriction, chaos and sensory overwhelm of neurodivergence through a visual language shaped by history, culture, texture and form. Grounded in my own experiences of ADHD and Autism, the collection translates overstimulation, chaotic thought patterns and Rejection Sensitivity Disorder (RSD) into something visible and, hopefully, understandable. Rather than illustrating neurodivergence literally, the garments become an internal dialogue exploring feelings of being misunderstood, overwhelmed and questioning whether it is ever possible to feel completely at ease.

Textile exploration became central to communicating these experiences, with heavy wool coatings, mohair blends, lambskin, stretch jerseys and knitted fabrics creating contrasting sensory experiences. Inspired by costume, drag and ballroom culture, the collection celebrates communities and creatives who exist outside social norms. References including Comme des Garçons’ Spring/Summer 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, Leigh Bowery, Divine, David Lynch and Yohji Yamamoto inform its visual language through theatricality, distortion and exaggeration. Stripe motifs explore themes of otherness and social difference, shifting between order and disruption. Ultimately, the collection exists within contradiction, balancing excess with restraint, structure with chaos, and visibility with masking.

The Fashion Illustrators:

Şeniz Jones
Şeniz Jones is a Fashion Illustrator and Designer whose practice explores visual storytelling and detail through expressive mark-making and gestural line work. Her work observes the behaviour of light, using it to capture and reveal the distinctive details of both the designer’s work and their muse.                       

Alexandra Grahame
Working exclusively with various forms of graphite, London-based artist and designer Alexandra Grahame transforms an otherwise simple medium into atmospheric, cinematic worlds and elusive mirages of light.  

Raafaye Ali
Raafaye Ali is an illustrator and visual designer with experience in advertising, branding and creative direction. His work spans culture, identity and social issues, and he is a recipient of the World Illustration Awards 2025. This event is part of Upstart a creative careers festival. Join us to explore and expand your creative practice, meet inspiring artists and designers from the fashion and texiles industry, develop your network and learn new skills for your creative career journey.

This event is part of Upstart a creative careers festival. Join us to explore and expand your creative practice, meet inspiring artists and designers from the fashion and textiles industry, develop your network and learn new skills for your creative career journey.

Download the programme on the right-hand side of this page.

Supported by the Adobe Foundation.