From Gilbert & George to Stella McCartney, Central Saint Martins has trained the country's coolest artists and designers, but can it retain its radical edge now it is moving out of Soho and into King's Cross?
In a studio that reeks of chemicals above London's Charing Cross Road, a small group of second year students are putting on a fashion show with a twist. Danish designer Henrik Vibskov, who is wearing voluminous black trousers and unsuccessfully trying to open the window, has commissioned them to express the concept of a panopticon prison through the medium of menswear.
Two young men stand motionless in front of a screen. One is wearing trousers in violently clashing prints and a hat that looks like it was made of broken white clay pipes; the other has donned a baggy navy jumper with a ochre splodge on it. A short film is projected over them that goes from black-and-white close-ups of a male nude to threatening psychedelic fuzz. They're "clothes for a distorted body", explain the students, pointing to bits that stick out at the elbow and the knee. Christopher New, head of BA fashion menswear, admires the jumper's intricate weave and asks about the meaning of the yellow blob. "Sometimes we do classic tailoring as well," he tells me, moving on to the next group of students, whose interpretation of the panopticon concept involves the recreation of a rave in the college's basement.
This is Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), which for decades has been the place where Britain's brightest young creatives have come to develop their talents (it evolved into its present incarnation in 1989, when the Central School of Art and Design merged with Saint Martins School of Art). It was at Saint Martins that Gilbert met George in 1967, the Sex Pistols played their first ever show in 1975 and Jarvis Cocker met the Greek girl who "had a thirst for knowledge" and inspired Pulp's Common People. In the mid-80s, the Charing Cross Road building became renowned as the furnace in which the world's leading fashion designers were forged, a reputation that persists to this day. Sarah Burton and Riccardo Tisci, 2011's most talked-about designers, both studied here, as did Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, the men they replaced (or are poised to, in Tisci's case) at McQueen and Dior. A list of other CSM alumni would take up the rest of this article, but includes such cutting-edge artistic talents as Polly Harvey, MIA, Sade, Mike Leigh, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Jonathan Saunders and three-quarters of the Clash.
This week marks the end of an era, as CSM leaves its two buildings in central London and moves to a new premises in King's Cross, just across the road from the Guardian. The move won't be welcomed by Professor Louise Wilson, legendary course director of MA fashion, who believes that the very grottiness of the Charing Cross Road building has helped drive her students – from McQueen to Christopher Kane – to succeed. "You feel that you're better than this corridor," she says. "In the new building you want to hide. All our secretaries loved it when they saw it and I thought: 'Yeah, you would.' I didn't want to point out that they're never going to meet a man because there's nothing around there. But it's not an issue whether or not we like it – we're going."
A party for alumni at the Charing Cross Road building will celebrate the occasion, where Pulp will play. The bash has been organised by former student Katie Grand, now editor of Love magazine and one of the most sought-after stylists in the world. "They should tell you on your first day that everyone you meet you're probably going to be working with in 20 years' time," she says. Her early-90s peer group included Luella Bartley, Giles Deacon, Stella McCartney, Antonio Berardi, Hussein Chalayan and Phoebe Philo – as well as Anita Pallenberg, who enrolled as a mature student. "I remember my first day at college," says Grand. "It was like that scene from Fame with everyone jumping around and being terribly intimidating and fabulous."
Right from the start, eccentricity seems to have been woven into the place's DNA. Antony Gormley, who studied sculpture for a year from 1974 before deciding that the place wasn't for him, remembers one tutor, Patrick Reyntiens, who wore medieval costume. "He didn't believe in modern trousers with pockets so he had to have a little purse that he hung from his very wide leather belt. He was literally in hose, so he was wearing tights, and then this sort of doublet at the top." Grand remembers one student being warmly praised for making a print out mice blood, while Christopher Booth, now menswear designer at Balenciaga, got stuck straight into making jackets designed for Siamese twins: "I was like, 'Yeah! Creativity!' and the tutors appreciated that." Walking around the collections made by this year's final year, you see that anarchic sprit lives on in the work of Ryohei Kawanishi, who has created giant-sized items of knitwear representing WikiLeaks and Twitter.
Some students have had mixed feelings about this tendency to elevate the conceptual over the practical: Philo, now the celebrated designer of French fashion house Céline, famously said of her time at CSM that: "I just wanted to make a pair of trousers that made my arse look good, rather than a pair that represented the Holocaust or something." It's also characteristic of the place that when you ask the head of the college, Professor Jane Rapley, which former students stick in her mind, she settles on Chalayan, famous for burying his collections in the ground and making dresses that turn into tables.
Yet this unashamedly arty thinking is what gives CSM its edge. Moreover, it gets tangible, often commercial results. Though they only showed their work in February, three of this year's MA graduates have now been snapped up by red-hot Parisian fashion house Lanvin; over on the BA course, Italian Vogue is already sniffing round 25-year-old Flaminia Saccucci, whose collection of sharply cut latex dresses printed with flowers and tyre marks have won her this year's L'Oréal Professionnel Young Design Talent award. It's not just fashion designers either: Glen Matlock, who dropped out of a foundation course to join the Sex Pistols ("I've always regretted it. Vivienne Westwood said I was mad"), claims Pretty Vacant was inspired by his time there: "Marcel Duchamp and his readymades – that's how I got the idea. I borrowed the riff from an Abba song, and I thought it was cool because that's what Marcel Duchamp did. Pretty Vacant, with that moronic riff, is somehow Dadaist. I wouldn't have got there if I hadn't been to art school."
Yet will the creative buzz survive CSM's move from the bright lights of Soho to the building site that is King's Cross? Even more than the college's reputation, the central location has been the main draw for generations of students. In the 70s, Matlock remembers seeing Lucian Freud in the district's illicit drinking clubs. Mark Titchner, who studied fine art from 1992, divided his time between the record shops and the galleries: "To be able to go to the National Gallery and look at a work and not much else was very luxurious." Booth points out that Soho contains invaluable resources for fashion students – the fabric shops on Berwick Street to make the clothes, and the sex shops for "research". The college is intimately linked to London's clubland – designer Gareth Pugh remembers putting on a fashion show at a strip club called Moonlighting in Greek Street and discovering that a corridor led to the college's library. Grand says that hanging out with the staff of Covent Garden shop The Duffer of St George in her lunch hour taught her as much as some of Saint Martins's more avant-garde projects.
It was in the mid-80s that Soho became youth culture ground zero, making Saint Martins the hottest place on earth. Artist Isaac Julien, who studied fine art and film and graduated in 1984, remembers an dizzyingly fertile time when young creatives broke down the boundaries between artistic disciplines, high art and club culture, couture and street fashion. Fashion students such as Galliano would work on their creations all day, then go out in them at night to Club For Heroes and Le Beat Route, where they would be photographed for emerging style magazines such as the Face and i-D. There were talented young people on every course: graphic design student Robin Derrick, now the outgoing creative director of Vogue, was in charge of the college magazine; Peter Doig was studying fine art, and students such as Julien were rebelling against their tutors' idea of film studies to embrace MTV and popular culture. Julien remembers his peers as a generation who knew they were going places and felt ready to seize any opportunity that came their way. "It was incredibly difficult to get on a course," he chuckles. "So you felt that it was an achievement just being there and that you were expected to culturally lead in some fashion. If you were in the centre of London, you were at the centre of things. Who'd want to be at Goldsmiths?" – positively out in the sticks in New Cross.
These days, however, London's cutting-edge club scene has long shifted east, and today's students don't seem fazed by the move out of Soho. "It's nice to go to a big new building because it's so annoying that our libraries are separate," says 20-year-old first year menswear student Ellie McDonald. "It's fashion and fine art here and then everything else at Southampton Row" – CSM's other central London building, 10 minutes' walk away in Holborn. Soho isn't what it was, either: the Crossrail project has flattened the West End's best club and gig venues, and King's Cross at least offers a building which, as Rapley puts it: "hopefully won't leak, the windows won't fall out, lumps won't fall down and nearly kill people and we might be warm". The move is part of a long-term strategic plan to bring together the Univerity of the Arts London – CSM's parent organisation – on to a single site; by the time next term starts, it will hold 3,000 students and 800 staff (two other buildings whose leases haven't run out will still be in use, at Clerkenwell and Archway).
Of course, next year will also bring increased tuition fees: CSM will charge £9,000, replacing the £8,500 a student currently funded by the government. Rapley says that CSM is "quite obsessed" with the worry that brilliant working-class students such as Lee McQueen – whose father was a cabbie – will no longer be able to afford to come, though they're at pains to point out that CSM will be no more expensive than any comparable institution. What art schools traditionally provided, Rapley says, "was an opportunity for the renegade to come through. Our most obvious classic one is McQueen, although I have to say we just helped along the way – he was going to get there one way or another." Initiatives to improve access include bursaries for students who can't afford the fees, and outreach programmes which bring students from poor backgrounds into the college in order to encourage them to apply.
While both Rapley and Wilson say that CSM isn't for everybody ("We might destroy you," says Rapley, faintly alarmingly), when I ask what advice Wilson would give a student who wants to go, she simply says "apply. I'm always frightened that it's those people that don't apply are the very ones we want to apply. It's perception as well – we're considered a very good college, and it can be something as innocent as the art teacher saying 'you won't get in there' that puts them off. Actually, they might."
Yet the college is all too aware that students have never been so hard-pressed financially. Wilson says that it's not unusual for people on her MA course to have already racked up £50,000-worth of debt during a foundation course and three-year BA, which in turn affects their work: "The pressure disallows them to take as many risks as they would have previously." A self-described "rightwing despot", she points out that the barriers to entry for working-class students were erected under Labour, when grants were abolished. "Education has had seismic cuts for years, and soon it's going to be on its knees," she rages. "The grants disappeared without so much as a murmur – that's already affected education because people from other social strata can't enter it, for that dynamic mix."
Yet despite everything, CSM is determined to preserve the spirit that has made it such a powerhouse of creativity. "I think the place stands for a certain anarchic idea of permanent revolution – of every generation overturning the orthodoxies of the previous one," says Gormley. "It's so important for the national culture that there right in the heart of the city there are people poking fun, asking: 'Is this the way we want to look? Is this the way we want to make things? What's important about being alive?'"
CSM's philosophy, says Wilson, is revealed in the fact that it doesn't even have an archive. "That means you're hanging on to the past, and we're always trying to creating the new and not redo it. Fashion's transient – it moves. And besides, the students aren't interested – they do their research, but they certainly don't look back at old shows that we've done. We're very hot on having knowledge and then rejecting it."
Downstairs by the library, two students are making another project, which involves photographing each other with cardboard boxes over their heads. As I pass by, they rope me in, put a box on my head, and snap me waving goodbye, Wilson's parting shot ringing in my ears: "Without art you don't have society. It underpins so much. Without creatives we're a bit buggered."