‘If fashion was moving to more space, that would be Ok,’ says Wilson. ‘If it was moving to the same amount of space, that would be bearable. But to be moving to less space? Well that’s inexplicable.’ PROF LOUISE WILSON OBE Course Director MA Fashion
Kappo loves the place. ‘You think It’s a shitty old rundown building, freezing cold, with windows that don’t close properly, noise and dust, whatever. But no one is precious about this place. And because you’re not precious about it, you use it. The students are really good at improvising with the space – they’ll be hanging paper dressed from the ceiling, or drawing on the wall. No one moans at you if you paint the walls or stand on tables. The building allows us to do whatever we want to do. There’s something really special about the place; I love seeing how students use the building. ' DAVID KAPPO Course Director Postgraduate Diploma in Fashion
Quotes from :
107 Charing Cross Road - LOVE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 SS2009
Text Murray Healy
Photography David Sims
'In a ramshackle building on the edge of Soho, the Fashion Department of Central St Martins College of Art and Design has nurtured generations of world-beating designers. But how much will change when the college moves to its shiny new Kings Cross campus in 2011?
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE IN THE FIRST COMMENT POSTED BELOW BY SAINT MARTIN
LOVE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 SS2009
ReplyDelete107 Charing Cross Road - ICON OF OUR GENERATION
'In a ramshackle building on the edge of Soho, the Fashion Department of Central St Martins College of Art and Design has nurtured generations of world-beating designers. But how much will change when the college moves to its shiny new Kings Cross campus in 2011?
The only remarkable thing about the exterior of the Central St Martins building on Charing Cross Road - formerly St Martins School of Art, and still referred to as such by fashion types of the old school- is how unremarkable it is. Those who know the college by the eccentric and glamorous reputations of the artists and fashion designers who have studied here might even be disappointed by the almost nondescript functionalism of its Thirties facade. Inside is even less impressive: whitewashed brick corridors, tatty woodwork, old pipes and clunky radiators - a bit like the set of Grange Hill in the eighties, when the fictional comprehensive was suffering the full force of Thatcher's cutbacks in education funding. One empty classroom, which has just been squeezed full of 40-odd students for an hour, is still stifling and humid. The next is freezing cold. The rattling crittall windows do little to keep out the noise of the gridlocked buses and cars on Charing Cross Road.
‘Look,’ says Professor Louise Wilson, OBE, course director of the MA fashion programme, opening a door into a room where a class is in full swing. ‘Look at those tables,’ she says, pointing out furniture so utterly anonymous that it seems to occupy your eyes blind spot no matter what angle you view it from. She sounds proud, though. As I’m about to learn, this ramshackle environment and its bog-standard fittings sits at the heart of what makes St Martins so successful.
These days its best known for churning out world-class fashion designers, but in the sixties and seventies it was renowned for being London’s best art school: Lucian Freud, Peter Blake, and Elisabeth Frink studied here, as did Gilbert and George, who met while at college and maybe more than anyone before them lent the institution its notoriety for creating oddball creatives. The college is famous for nurturing credible musicians too. The building’s association with rock was cemented by punk and, more specifically, the fact that the Sex Pistols played their first gig here (bassist Glen Matlock was a St Martins student). By this point, St Martins had already earned itself a namecheck in Westwood and McLaren’s list of Loves in their first punk manifesto. Other musical alumni include Paul Simenon, Joe Strummer, Sade, MIA and Jarvis Cocker (as referenced in his lyrics to ‘Common People’)
But its reputation as the world’s greatest fashion school didn’t fully emerge till the eighties. When Stephen Jones arrived here to study fashion in 1976, his choice of art college was determined by the centrality of its location. ‘St Martins at that point had a name for sculpture,’ he says, ‘but not really for fashion.’ The only designer of note that had studied there was Bill Gibb, and that had been in the Sixties. ‘In the Seventies, Kingston was the premier fashion school – their students went on to jobs in Milan, which was where it was at then. Paris was old-fashioned, and people from St Martins usually went on to Paris.’
That all changed at the tail-end of the decade, though, when a wave of enterprising St Martins graduates opted to stay put and set up shop in London – Rifat Ozbek, Katherine Hamnett and Stephen Linard, as well as Jones himself – building the city’s reputation for young, new and radical design that drew on the energies of Soho’s club underground. From the punks who moved into the lesbian club Louise’s to the New Romantics at Billy’s and the absurdly dressed hedonism of Taboo, St Martins contributed its fair share of punters; the college seemed to mesh seamlessly with the substance of equally grimy Soho – a landscape of old bookshops and fabric stores dotted between the sex shops and clip joints, as well as the cockroach-infested night-time basements.
That Soho was St Martins playground wasn’t simply a matter of proximity – these West End clubs were havens for arty misfits, dressed up and disaffected, and so was the college. When Louise Wilson arrived to study her MA in 1982, one of the things that had lured her here was the fact that ‘you though you were going to find like-minded people. The way it used to be then, the students tended to not fit in where they came from.’ Wilson graduated in 1984, the same year as John Galliano – a figure who embodied the various strands of emerging St Martins mythology: and eccentric-looking club kid with and edgy graduate collection that was still commercial enough to be bought in its entirety by Browns and worn by Dead Or Alive on Top Of The Pops.
The fashion press were certainly taking note of the quality and influence of designers coming out of St Martins by this time. None more so than i-D magazine – possibly because half its staff in its early days seem to have studied there, Caryn Franklin and Dylan Jones among them. More than any other publication, i-D showcased St Martins students and contributed to the mystique that surrounded the college. Now a course director of the graduate diploma in fashion design and a tutor on the BA at St Martins, David Kappo recalls being captivated by the image of the school spun by the magazine as a tennager. ‘Fashion for me was waiting for i-D to hit the shelves and reading it from cover to cover. That’s where I got my information about St Martins. And then to go from being a voyeur to actually studying fashion there was like winning the lottery.’
His head filled with i-D fed ideas about the college, Kappo arrived with his own preconceptions. ‘I thought that the fashion department would be all Parisian chic and pastel pinks – like Audrey Hepburn in the magazine offices in Funny Face. That’s what I wanted it to be, so ooh-la-la. Of course, it was not the pink fabulous world I wanted it to be, so I had to create that myself.’ His reaction reinforces the point that Wilson was making earlier when proudly showing off the naffness of the fashion department’s tables: the school’s crumbling, unbranded environment has very little character or identity of its own so it’s down to the students to create it.
This is why Kappo loves the place. ‘You think It’s a shitty old rundown building, freezing cold, with windows that don’t close properly, noise and dust, whatever. But no one is precious about this place. And because you’re not precious about it, you use it. The students are really good at improvising with the space – they’ll be hanging paper dressed from the ceiling, or drawing on the wall. No one moans at you if you paint the walls or stand on tables. The building allows us to do whatever we want to do.’
Kappo started his BA at St Martins in 1989 – the year, incidentally, that St Martins School of Art merged with the Central School of Art and Design, based in Holborn, to form Central St Martins College of Art and Design, as it is supposed to be referred to these days. At this stage in its history, the college was still barley known about beyond the fashion industry. ‘Everyone who came here had to find their own way here,’ he says. ‘You weren’t reading about St Martins in Metro or The Sun!’ Fashion wasn’t the popular phenomenon it is now: ‘You didn’t have Project Runway and Britain’s Next Top Model. Art school was for weirdos, and the fashion students were these rare, exotic creatures.’
Of course, it was just such a creature that the teenage Kappo was in the process of becoming. ‘The first time I got set a brief,’ he remembers, ‘my first though was, what would I wear?’ This would remain true for every brief that followed. ‘Our first port of call was always ourselves – our lives, clubs we were going to, people we were hanging out with. I only ever wanted to go to fashion college to make clothes for me. I was the centre of my world.’
Many of the students – and certainly the more successful ones – directed their own education in this way. ‘You knew what you wanted to learn. No one can ever remember having a tutorial. We didn’t want to impress our tutors, just not be shamed in front of our mates. I was never doing what I was supposed to be doing, just making stuff to go out to Kinky Gerlinky or Heaven in. All the club kids were. You knew when Kinky was coming up ‘cause there’d be a hive of activity in the cutting and making studio. The poor doorman would see all kinds of sights…’
‘Being at St Martins was like being part of a really privileged club,’ he continues. ‘There was so much going on, and I made lifelong friends here. We had Dave’s Coffee Bar on the second floor, where everyone would congregate – that’s where you’d meet the fine artists and sculptors. We’d come into the college just to hang out in the coffee bar! Because that’s where things were happening. I can remember bracing myself before going in there to make sure I looked good. You were making an entrance. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, because you had to be fabulous. The two most important things were how we looked and what our work was like.’
‘We were,’ he grins relishing the memory, ‘really arrogant-slash-confident.’
This self-belief was not lost on other art students attending institutions lower down the pecking order. ‘If you mentioned you were at St Martins, instantly you could see the change in them.’ There were typically two stock retorts: ‘You never know how to make clothes’ or ‘Everyone’s really rich there – you paid your way in.’ You still hear these accusations today. ‘All bollocks, of course. But I don’t know any course at any other art college that provokes such extreme reactions. And I loved it.’
The single most important event to bear upon the reputation of the college while Kappo was there was Alexander McQueen’s graduation from the MA programme in 1992; Isabella Blow bought his graduate collection, the broadsheets took notice and within four years he would go on to become designer in chief at Givenchy. ‘There’d been a bit of a gap since Galliano. But things really changed when McQueen graduated, and then you had Hussein Chalayan, Antonio Beradi… which was brilliant.’
Kappo went on to study the MA too, although this wasn’t his idea. He was happily working in a wig shop in Soho when Louise Wilson tracked him down and persuaded him to return to St Martins with a bursary: ‘She always says, “I saved him from that tranny shop in Soho!”’
This story is a measure of the personal investment the fashion tutors make in their teaching. Wilson has a fearsome reputation for being forthright with those she supervises. Indeed, when I arrive at her office she is finishing up a crit with a student who is receiving the verbal equivalent of having your face rubbed against a cheese grater. When I ask whether such outbursts are an exercise in toughening her students up, in ‘character building’, she looks appalled by my misreading of the situation. No, she explains, it’s because she is so emotionally involved: ‘I know my students better than they know themselves, and I’m the only one who cares enough to hate them.’
Kappo’s approach to teaching also focuses on the personal. ‘Well design is personal – it should come from deep within you. When we were students, you could gauge what people’s lives were like from their work: mine was all feathers and sequins and disco and tranny. So I get really excited when I see students who have that genuine, personal connection with their work.’
Not everyone finds the rattling windows and general NHS ambience of the Charing Cross site charming. Times have changed, and as education has been reorganised around consumer models, so the building has been left looking a bit Dad’s Army in an age of shining city academies. The abolition of student grants in 1998 put furniture and interiors at the frontline of PR on open days: who wants to waste their money sending their kids to a college with outdated plumbing?
‘In its own way I think St Martins is a victim of its own success,’ admits Wilson. ‘You look at it on style.com with all our successful students…If I was a kid applying for the MA I’d think it was this fantastic glossy thing with oodles of money. It’s not like that at all, of course, it’s grubby and dirty. But that is not the impression given by the press.’
With its star-studded alumni (Stella McCartney, Giles Deacon, Phoebe Philo, Gareth Pugh, Christopher Kane etc), the fashion department has no trouble attracting students. But not all faculties within Central St Martins enjoy such a high profile. ‘There are a lot of sites and many are in terrible disarray,’ says Wilson. And even in fashion, ‘the students moan about the buildings and facilities. They’ve latched onto the deprived air; I think some of them would be impressed by, I don’t know, a silver chair. Now there are no grants, mum and dad are paying, so they go round and look at the colleges on open days. And if you knew nothing about the subject wouldn’t you think, “Oh look, that’s a nice café”?’ Suddenly, scathingly, she’s chanting proud sitcom mum. ‘”Oh that’s nice, look, there’s a fountain…”’
So the governors of Central St Martins have decided that the bricks-and-mortar reality of its world beating college needs to catch up with the mythology. And rather than upgrade the existing buildings, in 2011 the various departments currently strewn across central London will migrate to a brand new £170m campus that’s currently being built in Kings Cross. Many of the tutors are excited at the prospect of new facilities, and no doubt some of the students are excited about the possibilities of fountains and silver chairs. But the fact that the footprint of the new building is reported to be less than the sum of the existing sites has caused alarm. ‘If fashion was moving to more space, that would be Ok,’ says Wilson. ‘If it was moving to the same amount of space, that would be bearable. But to be moving to less space? Well that’s inexplicable.’ She is also wary of the effect that a slick, predesigned environment will have on the students’ readiness to creatively wreck their surroundings.
Kappo has a soft spot for Charing Cross site. ‘Is it just nostalgia? I don’t think so. There’s something really special about the place; I love seeing how students use the building. But we have great students and great tutors and that’s what really makes Central St Martins so special.’
Wilson characteristically, is more outspoken. ‘Now that the students don’t have grants, they expect more because they are paying, but I’m not sure a new building will give them more. They’re missing the point: what they get here is the quality of the teaching, and that has always remained strong. I really believe that.’
TEXT: MURRAY HEALY
LOVE MAGAZINE ISSUE ! SS2009
I've had the opportunity to read this blog in full. To be honest, while I acknowledge and appreciate the concerns raised in regard to CSM's subsequent move to King's Cross, you're failing to consider the benefits of the move, relying primarily on sentimentality as your soul rationale. This is within your prerogative, by all means, but it's not exactly tangible and is inevitably biased.
ReplyDeleteThe London Institute was originally established during a time when educational reforms in this country were taking place. Unlike the golden era where education was free for all, in today's market, education is very much a business. This is applicable to every university, not exclusive to the UAL. Had this organisation not have existed, I would suspect CSM and its associate colleges would have lost their identity long ago, back in the 80s, whereby larger institutions were swallowing smaller to become a mere art department of the University of Westminster). I would wager, had the London Institute not have existed, the six colleges that comprise the UAL would have suffered the same fate. I'm not suggesting that the UAL is perfect, it's far from it, but your sentiment and bias toward one particular campus and school within CSM (fashion) lessens your argument. You need to appreciate that education is changing, good or bad, and CSM and the UAL need to keep up with that.
The less space at King's Cross for fashion does seem to be an issue, I'll admit. However, the move itself is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, given the necessity to maintain standards and to ensure that prospective students are given the education they deserve. I've failed to articulate my sentiment appropriately and effectively enough, but I just wanted to provide my view.
Oh yes, I'm an ex-CSM student.
Thankyou for your comment kiki. In relation to line 3/4 what exactly are the benefits of the move? You have failed to list them.
ReplyDeleteIn your argument you rely on sweeping economic and political statements regarding the education system and its reforms and 'suspect's, 'wagers' and 'what if's' with regard to CSM/UAL.
We are not relying solely on sentimentality in our argument. We are primarily concerned with the lack of space in this shiny new building and the decision making methodology employed in the sacrifice of a iconographic building and the potential dilution in the standards of our world leading courses for the greater marketability-good of the brand.
Charing Cross houses both Fashion and Fine Art. I have links to 2 fine art students blogs on this site. The fashion department have been more vocal in their objections and concerns and consequently this blog reflects this.
im a current fashion student csm and i think that this isnt an issue for people to throw opinions about why the move is bad or good. its an issue concerning the current and future students and whats the best for us.
ReplyDeletethe reason we fly across the country and pay tens of thousands of pounds that our parents work so hard for and get huge loans is to experience an amazing education in the heart of london where you get to see everything. its in the midst of sex alleys chinatown book stores theaters fabric shops and art shops and they are all a walk away. we pay all this money to be taught by tutors we hear and read about and work so hard at school so we have an opertunity to be taught by them. this is a big deal for us.
it doesnt seem that this move is so much about making our education better. i think its more about the business.
if we were the number one focus of the change in the saint martins move...we werent be moving at all.
i think after this move csm will flunk and whoever thinks that this move will make them prosper or make csm prosper i dont think has thier priorities.
all this money that we pay we should get a say in this or an opinion or something. we payed the money to have an education in csm on charing cross road not 1 year here and 3 inkings cross.