The eight emerging designers shaping fashion right now include a Telford-raised gamer who debuted his MA collection at London Fashion Week, a Bavarian making dolls that disturb, and a Nigeria-born designer whose punky ballerina looks landed on Rosalía. What connects them is less a shared aesthetic than a shared willingness to start from somewhere genuinely personal, however unfashionable the starting point.
Postmodern ragebait and pattern-cutting in Shrewsbury
Kai Ghattaura is, by his own account, one of the emerging designers shaping fashion from the outside in. Raised in Telford and largely online, he came to pattern-cutting not through a childhood sketchbook but because, as Dazed Digital reports, his mother signed him up for an art course at his local college in Shrewsbury when he was 16, and the curriculum happened to cover garment construction. Gaming, not couture, remained the primary language. His MA collection, Seminomadic, debuted on 19 February at London Fashion Week, and the body of work he describes as “postmodern ragebait clothing” has since earned him commissions from EsDeeKid, Wet Leg and Billionhappy. His previous project, A Scattered Dream, was a rave-turned-fashion show staged in a North London industrial venue, a format that says as much about his instincts as any garment does. He is now working towards an independent show this September, a joint venture with his partner and an homage to 2016 pop culture.
Gil Hursthausen occupies the opposite end of the disclosure spectrum. Based in London, she declines to share where she grew up, when she started her brand, or whether she studied fashion at all. What she will confirm is a former career as a hairstylist and make-up artist, and a current practice she describes as “ironic and experimental.” A dress made entirely from bubble wrap gives you the register. Her most legible piece is a slogan T-shirt reading “CONCEPT WASHING” in block capitals. The mystique is clearly a considered position rather than shyness: it worked for Margiela, and it is working for her.
Trompe l’oeil, Barbies and second skins
A Letter, the label run by Freddy Coomes and Matt Empringham, recently rebranded from Aletta, the name change announced via an Instagram post in the second week of January 2026. The two met on the first day of their foundation course at Central Saint Martins and both completed placement years under Jonathan Anderson, Coomes at Loewe and Empringham at JW Anderson, before launching together with a ten-piece collection for Dover Street Market in 2025. Their trompe l’oeil work in gossamer-thin crepe produces a “stuck-on” quality, as though the garments have been cut from a dress-up doll book. Their fourth collection is due this September.
Giulia Galiberti, another Central Saint Martins MA graduate, is unusual in that she would rather go to work for Prada or Margiela than launch her own label immediately. Currently splitting her time between London and Genoa, she describes her designs as “a bridge between the possible and the impossible body,” exaggerating the female form, and particularly the breast, to surreal proportions. The influence is Barbie, refracted through what she calls “the grotesque.”
Oliver Jeanes grew up doing disco freestyle, a form of ballroom dancing in rhinestoned Lycra, in Bradford. His spring collection paid tribute to the subculture. He cites Henry Holland as the designer who first made fashion feel available to him, and Christopher Kane’s 2006 graduate collection as an ongoing obsession. He returns to Central Saint Martins for the MA course this November.
Sara Mikorey, the designer behind Hester Abov, builds her own mannequins, disturbingly lifelike and distorted, and places Mickey Mouse crucified on a dogtooth jacket. The work draws on her upbringing with three sisters in a Bavarian village, on the women of the Bauhaus, and on Raf Simons. Her 2025 graduate collection explored female adolescence as she actually experienced it: heavy, dark, and largely unlistened to.
Simon Carle’s “second skins” take trompe l’oeil to its logical limit, wrapping the body in a 360-degree printed layer that takes an hour to apply and can last up to a week. Raised in Stuttgart, he trained at Berlin’s University of the Arts. Tyla has worn his work; so has Zara Larsson, in the “She Did It Again” music video alongside her.
Yasmina Atta moved from Lagos to London at 11, became absorbed by Buffalo, the 1980s streetwear clique led by Ray Petri, and combines that with a love of 1970s Senegalese cinema, specifically Touki Bouki. In June, Rosalía stepped out in one of Atta’s punky ballerina looks, inspired by Edgar Degas’ sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.” She is currently in Tokyo, representing her own label on a photoshoot, having spent the previous year working in-house for a luxury streetwear brand in Japan.
