4 min readIt’s not every day a Central Saint Martins student gets a top industry name to style their graduate collection. But last night, Macy Grimshaw showed a collection alongside her master’s class at London’s prestigious fashion school with Harry Lambert listed in the personal credits. A few years ago, her work caught the eye of the editorial and celebrity stylist, whose clients include Harry Styles, Emma Corrin, Alexander Skarsgård, and more. While finishing school, she’s been making custom pieces for him, items that have been worn by the likes of Paloma Elsesser and Emma Corrin on magazine covers and at press appearances. At 24, the fashion student already boasts a healthy résumé most any emerging designer would envy—and for good reason.
A look from her Central Saint Martins M.A. 2026 collection
Her master’s collection, titled “M by Macy Grimshaw,” features pieces that reward more than a cursory glance. Is that fringe or a smattering of cigarette butts bouncing from that model’s top as she walks? It’s the latter. The best way to make friends at CSM is via smoke break, she says, whether you smoke or not. The time-worn brick wall where everyone stubs out their cigarettes piqued her interest for its unique texture. So, she superimposed a photo of it onto a leather-molded top, then adorned it with a collection of classmates’ cigarette butts—“I coated them in resin, so there’s no smell,” she assured me.
The young designer doesn’t work with a mood board of references from her heroes’ most celebrated collections. (Though she greatly admires Jonathan Anderson’s surrealist work for Loewe, which is not hard to believe considering her own conceptual aesthetic.) She goes against what she’s been taught in school: to hit the library and comb through old collections and works of art and design for ideas. Instead, she collects inspiration from ordinary objects on the street. One dress from this collection features leather cut into a grid pattern to look like a rusty gate, which she then molded around the body and hung with old locks. Another dress, featuring that same grid pattern, has what looks almost like a candy wrapper extending from the shoulders but is really paper-appliquéd leather fashioned after a denim jacket that’s gone stiff after being hung out to dry.
A look from her Central Saint Martins M.A. 2026 collection
Grimshaw has only been working with leather since 2024, but she quickly struck up a kinship with the material and all it allows her to do. “I found a way to print on the leather and to mold it when it’s wet to create really hyperreal works of art that can sit on the body,” she explains. She’s also created her own mannequin that distorts a sample size with its exaggerated shoulders, bust, and hips. That way, her stiff pieces appear to float on the wearer. It’s amazing what she can do with this material: one of the final looks features individually cut pieces of leather printed to resemble pencil shavings—her creative way of channeling feathers without being too literal—which were then sewn onto the form of an oversized blazer and skirt.
Perhaps the prints and materials are outlandish, but she’s taking inspiration from very traditional garments. “I would just take some jeans from my wardrobe, superimpose the photographs I’ve taken onto them, and work from that,” she explains of her earlier works. But to this day, “all the garment references are from my own wardrobe or my mom’s wardrobe or my grandmother’s wardrobe.” She personally adheres to the twenty-something London uniform of oversized denim, a smaller top, and a big leather jacket—and translates that into her work.
Grimshaw was born into an artistic family (her mom’s a designer, and her dad’s an architect). She grew up an expat in Hong Kong, where charity fashion shows are de rigueur, and quickly found she was better suited to a role creating the pieces for the runway than walking on it. Fashion was a way for her to put art on the body. She came to London at 18 to pursue her fashion studies with a bachelor’s degree at CSM. That snowballed into a master’s after a quick gap year where she worked under British designers Victoria Beckham and Luis de Javier. In the past few years, her work has exploded in popularity, and the industry has begun to take notice.
“Every time I give her a brief, she would come back with a 20-page doc full of all these incredible, incredible ideas,” Lambert tells Bazaar via email, illuminating their process of commissioning custom pieces. “You can see by Macy’s show how technically skilled she is, as well as aesthetically. Her ideas are just so unique.” He recently commissioned yet another piece from her, this one slated for Harry Styles’s new album’s imagery. It’s been quite a year for Grimshaw, and she has much to look forward to. But, oh yes, in the meantime, she still has a month of school to finish first.
