Before the Runway: Backstage at Fashion Scout’s Ones To Watch Edition 03
Seven emerging designers, the final minutes before the runway, and a view of London Fashion Week from the other side of the curtain. A runway gives us the finished image. Backstage tells us how it arrived there.
On Sunday 20 September, Fashion Scout closed its three-part Ones To Watch programme for its 20th anniversary London Fashion Week season with Edition 03, bringing together BAM-BAM, Diamanté by Venuka, Hurricane B, KOFFI MAAKO, NMCG, Raxada and Yukito Lim.
HUMBLE previously looked more closely at three of those designers, selecting BAM-BAM, Yukito Lim and Raxada for their distinct approaches to material, memory, craft and identity. For this story
There is no selection this time. This is backstage.
Before the clothes become a show
Backstage compresses the machinery of fashion into a surprisingly small space.
Hair is being corrected while another look passes behind it. A garment is adjusted seconds before it disappears towards the runway. Models wait, dressers move, make-up is retouched and pieces that may have taken months to develop suddenly exist inside a sequence measured in minutes.
Across Edition 03, seven independent design languages occupied the same backstage environment. BAM-BAM, Diamanté by Venuka, Hurricane B, KOFFI MAAKO, NMCG, Raxada and Yukito Lim arrived through different cultural references, personal histories and methods of making, yet behind the curtain those distinctions exist alongside the shared practical reality of putting on a show.
That contrast is what makes backstage photography particularly revealing.
The clothes are still the subject, but they have not yet been isolated from the people making them work.
Seven designers, one room
Fashion Scout's Ones To Watch has always been built around designers at a formative point in their development. Over two decades, the platform has supported more than 1,500 designers from over 70 countries, using London as a meeting point between emerging creative practices and an international fashion audience.
Edition 03 continued that logic through seven very different voices.
Rather than asking them to form a coherent aesthetic, the strength of the presentation was in allowing those differences to remain visible.
For Raxada, that includes a relationship with the landscapes, mythology and ancestral craft traditions of Asturias. Elsewhere, the programme moved through radically different approaches to silhouette, textile, identity, cultural inheritance and experimentation. Backstage, however, hierarchy temporarily disappears.
A designer's idea, a stylist's decision, a make-up artist's hand, a hair adjustment, the final fastening of a garment and the person about to wear it all occupy the same frame. Then the curtain opens.
What remains in these photographs is the moment immediately before fashion becomes presentation.
HUMBLE previously looked more closely at three of the designers in HUMBLE Selects: Three Names From Fashion Scout’s Ones To Watch Edition 03 , focusing on BAM-BAM, Yukito Lim and Raxada.
