Alexandra Fan – Edinburgh College of Art
The winners of this year’s Graduate Fashion Week Gala Awards were announced, celebrating the ‘Talent of Tomorrow’. Over 150 judges joined the charity across the four-day event to decide 32 award winners, including new Lifetime Patron and designer Dame Zandra Rhodes, heading up the Hilary Alexander Trailblazer award, and GFW Ambassador Christopher Raeburn, who headed up the Christopher Bailey Gold Award panel of industry experts.
This year’s GFW shining star was Brian McLysaght from Edinburgh College of Art, who walked away with three awards including the coveted Christopher Bailey Gold Award, the Conscious Design Award sponsored by Swarovski and the Hilary Alexander Trailblazer Award, for his collection inspired by the role of clothing in 20th Century decolonisation movements and entirely made from sustainable and biodegradable wood. Edinburgh College of Art students continued to impress with Alexandra Fan receiving two awards, the Womenswear Award and the David Band Textiles Award, and Rosie Baird who received the George Catwalk to Store Award.
Winner Brian McLysaght said, “It feels absolutely incredible to have won all of these awards, I’m so thankful. What really made me win these awards was the standard at Edinburgh, everybody in our class is so incredible, we hold each other to such exceptional standard. My classmates are really the people who got me here. In the future I hope to continue working in sustainable development, I’m very interested and ethics and sustainability that’s my design focus.”
Hilary Alexander OBE commenting on the winner of the Hilary Alexander Trailblazer Award, Brian McLysaght:“We chose this winner because the work stood out almost immediately and it was about the one collection that we couldn’t stop talking about and we kept on going back to. We looked at others and then we went back to it. The work was extraordinarily beautiful.”
The Menswear Award was presented to Greg Brears from Birmingham City University, the Catwalk Knitwear Award was presented to Hannah Stote from Bath Spa University, and the Clarks Footwear Award was awarded to Keri Thornton from De Montfort University for her sustainable collection. The Tu Sainsbury’s Scholarships went to Josephine Roberts from Northumbria University and Michella Knight from Nottingham Trent University, the International Fashion Award sponsored by GAP Inc. was awarded to Ivy Lan from Savannah College of Art and Design Hong Kong.
Henry Holland on the winner of the Womenswear Award, Alexandra Fan, said: “From the minute I saw it I knew that it was going to be my favourite. It blew me away, was nothing like I had ever seen before. It felt like something that was actually new, inventive, intriguing. I wanted her section of the show to continue for longer, and then when we met her, seeing her research and development and hearing her story and her reference points and approach, it just re-enforced the idea that what she had done was revolutionary.”
