Artsthread announces winners of 2021 Global Design Graduate Show

Generated in collaboration with Gucci, Artsthread’s Global Design Graduate Show has revealed the winners of its second edition, with the competition being open to graduating art and design students of 2020-21.

A total of 5,211 students entered the initiative with their end of year projects, represented across four categories: Fashion/Accessories/Textiles, Digital/Visual Communication/Film, Product/Architecture/Interiors and Fine Art/Photography/Craft. Judges for the competition extended from all areas of the respective industries. For the Fashion/Accessories/Textiles division, the panel included the likes of Levi’s men’s design director, Steven Burns, GQ editor, Dylan Jones, and Marimekko’s chief creative director, Rebekka Bay.

Applicants were instructed to submit not only their projects but also their entire creative process for critique in front of the judges. For the fashion specific category, eight winners were selected representing a variety of specialisations.

For womenswear, Yvonne Schichtel won with her project ‘Lost and Found’, which questioned the gender labels consumers attach to objects, through a collection utilising repurposed materials. Beth Kip, on the other hand, took a more nature-inspired approach for her winning menswear proposal, ‘West Kip’. Kip reimagined traditional Scottish attire into new purposeful garments to demonstrate a circular clothing line.

Oscar Keene won in the fashion communication category, with his project ‘Fluid’. The project presented a zero-waste digital prototyping solution to slow fashion production, offering a multidisciplinary alternative to fast fashion, in consideration of queer bodies and selfhood.

‘Morphogenesis’, the winning sustainable fashion project by Bea Brücker, also explored digital design combined with biodesign techniques. In her proposal, biodesign is seen as a political movement as part of an alternate virtual world, which she uses to explain sustainable production processes.

Additional winners included Yuzhao Huang’s ‘The Spomeniks’ homeware piece, Jennifer Milleder’s ‘Before the Mirror’, looking at dandyism as a spectacle, Sina Dyks’ ‘Stimuli Wiring System’, a sustainable textiles installation exploring colour and texture, and Caitilin Yates’ ‘Cotswold Luvvies’, a collection designed using repurposed materials from midland England.