The Classroom Is the Runway at KABK This Year

This year’s KABK fashion graduates aren’t showing their collections on a traditional runway or inside some antiseptic showroom with industrial lighting and tiny glasses of natural wine.  Instead, they’re inviting you to what’s been their second home for the past few years: the classroom. The room defined by loose threads on the floor, endless coffee cups stacking up, someone panic-sewing in the corner, while another person tries to figure out whether a sleeve is existentially necessary.  This year, the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague is bringing its graduation show back to exactly that place. Room PC.002. The beating heart of the department.

There’s something refreshing about a fashion school resisting the urge to over-polish itself. KABK seems intent on showing the process: both the ambition and the uncertainty. The show itself moves through the same journey the students do during their four years at the academy: learning how to experiment, fail publicly, obsess over craft, question everything, and somehow still make it to critique the next morning. During the graduation, there’s a space for every year of the programme before arriving at the graduating collections of Mina Calori, Tim Dekker, Kamila Gałecka, Anahita Karimi, Izzy Monteiro Bühlmeier, Soňa Pichňová, Arthur Wagenaar, and Nora Vervat.

As always with KABK, the appeal is less about identifying a single aesthetic than witnessing eight entirely different internal universes coexist in one space. Some designers lean heavily into craft, others toward emotional narrative or social observation, while others seem interested in fashion as a form of ongoing experiment. The throughline is curiosity — and maybe stamina.

The shows take place 28th of May at 19:00 and 21:00, with doors opening 30 minutes beforehand, inside Room PC.002 at the academy’s Prinsessegracht building — just a five-minute walk from Den Haag Centraal railway station.