The scenes outside Bethnal Green tube station last night resembled a Central Saint Martins fire drill. Hundreds of students and graduates queued down Cambridge Heath road, smoking rollies, clutching White Claws and wearing their own creations. Easily the best dressed crowd of the season so far, they’d turned up in their hordes to support recent grads Kai Ghattaura and Fin Forsyth at their debut off-schedule runway show.
Partners in life and in work, Forsyth graduated from CSM in 2024, while Ghattaura showed his MA collection in February this year. Familiar faces from the MA’s 2026 graduating class lined the front row, alongside teachers and family members. Inside the empty warehouse venue, the designers had erected an enormous cardboard house, while paper crowns were placed on the seats. Both elements were an ode to Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are – in which a young boy, Max, imagines his ordinary home becoming a forest full of “wild things”, where he is crowned king.
The book was brought to life when four children opened the show. Dressed all in white, they clattered down the runway carrying cardboard swords and shields, before launching into a duel. A nearby PR person soon shooed them away to make room for the first model, who emerged wearing a paper mask of a fox (or maybe a bear, depending on how you looked at it). Like kids at summer camp, the models appeared to have fashioned their looks from scraps of mismatched materials. Makeshift cummerbunds and head scarfs were crafted from bold prints, and extra fabric was added wherever possible – around the neck, around one knee, or even as arm warmers.
More masks came in the form of birds (possibly pigeons), while caps were transformed into platypus bills. Like The Lord of the Flies, the models existed somewhere between boys and nature. That said, they took on celestial new forms when dipped in glitter. One model was covered entirely in fuschia glitter, while another closed the show dripping in silver sparkle, making sense of the collection’s title, Glister. The final model also carried a giant fidget spinner, the last of several toys that were featured throughout. But regardless of whether or not Ghattaura and Forsyth had included toys, this still would’ve been one of the most joyful shows of the season. Clearly, we should all be paying more attention to what goes on off-schedule.
