RCA’s MA Fashion Class of 2025 Refuses to Dress Quietly

The Royal College of Art’s MA fashion programme is not a finishing school. It’s a pressure cooker for ideas, where garments are treated as vessels for critique as well as craft. Based in London, the RCA has built a reputation for producing designers who disrupt both the runway and the market—think Ossie Clark, Christopher Bailey, Erdem Moralıoğlu, Zandra Rhodes.

This year’s class stayed true to that lineage, working at the intersection of artistic practice and social responsibility. In the RCA’s studios, tutors push students to interrogate their own narratives, the systems they work within, and the audiences they dress. The result: collections that resist easy categorisation, and graduates who arrive in the industry with a point of view already fully formed. That spirit was clear in the work of three standouts. 

Meg Dennis’s Bowler Back explored an unspoken language between objects and their owners, collaging different hats—each with its own sentiment—into a new visual grammar. In What do I wear?, Huili Jin collaborated with model and wheelchair user Zander to reengineer garments so clothing adapts to people. One design featured trousers meant to be pulled on overhead, offering a blueprint for a more accessible fashion system. HWKIM (Hyunwoo Kim) closed with Redelinquentation, re-cutting school uniforms to explore the space between compliance and quiet rebellion, turning dress codes into prompts for self-questioning rather than conformity. 

As for the rest of the MA fashion class? Their ideas, and the questions they raise, will travel far beyond Kensington Gore.