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2025 marks 60 years since Kingston’s School of Art delivered an astonishing international coup for Great Britain.
In St. Gall, Switzerland in 1965, Kingston’s students defeated continental counterparts from Paris, Brussels and Rome to claim the prestigious International Youth Fashion Design award. In doing so, they helped enhance the UK’s reputation for cutting edge design, and further enshrined the ‘London Look’ as the signature style of the Swinging Sixties.
Furthermore, this was a milestone in the School of Art’s fashion courses, led by Daphne Brooker, becoming recognised as a global leader, particularly as Kingston would win the competition gain in 1966 and 1970. This legacy endures: today Kingston is ranked No.1 in London and No.2 in the UK for fashion (Guardian University Guide, 2023).
The Community Brain will use 2025 to celebrate this story and 60 years of fashion in Kingston and beyond, exploring the role it has played in shaping the lives of its people, and their sense of place and culture.
But it will also be a moment to map fashion in the borough today and question the future of the industry. We want to understand what might emerge as the underlying philosophy of fashion at a time when concepts of ‘fast fashion’ are making way for ideas around sustainability, thrifting and upcycling.
We will do this through a year-round programme of events, research, partnership and play. Fashion shows and exhibitions will be complemented by oral histories, archival research, films, and books – as well as spectacular displays at Hampton Court Garden Festival and Kingston Market Square.
Local businesses will be engaged as we build a network of fashion practitioners in the borough. The wider community will be asked to help imagine how fashion can deliver a productive and thriving future for Kingston.
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We will engage with the borough’s diverse range of communities to ensure the widest possible range of voices feed into this project. Queer Fashion will be a focus in its own right; groups from Kingston’s diverse communities will be invited to place their own fashion stories at the heart of the project, providing a multicultural perspective on fashion in Kingston.
Vast numbers of young people will connect with the project as we work alongside a wide variety of courses at Kingston University and Kingston College. We will also tap into the School of Art’s illustrious community of fashion alumni to bridge the intergenerational gap. Together they will celebrate and record fashion as it relates to them, informing a new ‘Kingston 2025’ archive for future study.
We believe this has the potential to be The Community Brain’s most ambitious and exciting project to date. But we don’t seek ‘ownership’ over it; we wish for as many local groups, stakeholders and partners to engage and ‘play’ with the project and to make it their own.