Here are the ones we’re rooting for the most
Image courtesy of Julie Kegels
The LVMH Prize semifinalists have landed, and as always, the list reads like a forecast of fashion’s near future. The annual competition (open to designers aged 18 to 40 with at least two collections under their belt) has become the industry’s most reliable crystal ball, offering a €400,000 endowment and year-long mentorship to its winner, alongside the Karl Lagerfeld Prize and the Savoir-Faire Prize. Past winners have gone from promising to permanent fixtures, including 2025 laureate Soshi Otsuki, and former winners Torishéju, HODAKOVA and Duran Lantink. The competition is known for its high-profile jury, including designers like Phoebe Philo and Pharrell Williams, and its role in launching new talent, such as 2021 winner Nensi Dojaka.
This year’s semifinal lineup feels especially allergic to safe choices. From the fuzzy, experimental knits of Nong Rak to the trompe-l’oeils of Julie Kegels, here are the names we can’t stop thinking about:
Julie Kegels
Julie Kegels is simply what a girl wants. The Antwerp-based graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp builds her collections around highly thought-through women who contain multitudes even before lunchtime – and dress the part too. She creates characters (A career obsessive who parties harder than she works, or a librarian who plays competitive tennis, to name a few) and then mocks them gently: jewelry is replaced by textile stickers of gems, and a raincoat for a handbag is stamped with the line: girl arriving at work with wet socks, evoking a young and hasty urbanite going through corporate hell when she is after all, just a girl.
After internships with Meryll Rogge and at Alaïa, Kegels struck out on her own, refining a language that all it-girls seem to understand. Her work feels almost diaristic, drifting through domestic spaces, personal memory, and absurdifies life of a modern woman with silly trompe l’oeuil prints that are executed to perfection: wood-printed leather, or furniture-like cushioned bags. Elegance is always present, but so is humor; Julie loves a visual pun, and loves delivering them deadpan more.
Tíscar Espadas
Tíscar Espadas is a dreamer, and her clothing lets you, the wearer, dream too. Founded by Tíscar Espadas Herrador after graduating from the Royal College of Art, and developed alongside Kevin Kohler, the label moves slowly on purpose. Rather than dropping collections in line with the fashion calendar, they build chapters on their own timeline, merging rural memory, craft, and character into sculptural silhouettes. The pieces feel slightly monastic and have a distinctively artisanal look, which is not just a front: the fabrics are all-natural and, when possible, organic, often from natural or deadstock fabrics sourced in limited runs across Europe and Japan. Plus, each garment is unique and handcrafted by local manufacturers. Espadas is openly critical of fashion’s disposability; her answer is a wardrobe that accumulates meaning over time rather than chasing seasons. The result is thoughtful, atmospheric, and stubbornly individual.
Kartik Research
There is a big difference in simply romanticising craft and sustaining it, and Kartik Research’s ethos strongly doubles down on the latter. Founded in 2021 by Kartik Kumra, Kartik Research approaches clothing as a social, cultural, and deeply human practice. Rooted in handlooms, plant dyes, and painstaking embroidery, the label treats traditional craftsmanship not in a nostalgia-mining way, but as a living language — one that continues to evolve alongside India’s shifting identities. References bounce from 60s psychedelic posters to 80s Indo-modernist art, from street life to political history. Every piece literally feels like research you can wear.
Kartik’s moment is very much now. One week he’s designing a tie for Zohran Mamdani’s first day as mayor, the next he’s publishing deep dives on Kantha embroidery on Substack. But what really sets the brand apart is how patiently it builds relationships. Knitwear comes from a women-run cooperative that grew threefold after Kendrick Lamar was spotted wearing one of their pieces. Denim is sourced through a tiny, hyper-local network that rescues abandoned Levi’s and Carhartt jeans one by one. There’s soft tailoring with a wink to early-2000s Yohji Yamamoto, airy shirts block-printed by the same elusive artisan Kartik tracked down after years of showing up at his door.
Nong Rak
Even just looking at Nong Rak’s knitwear gives you that warm, cosy flutter — sweet without ever veering into cloying territory, and deeply tasteful in the process. The name Nong Rak literally means “little love” or “sweetie” in Thai, elevating the charm and sincerity that already emanates from their garments. It calls to mind the intimacy we share with our pets (the hairiness, the calming spells, the ritual of comfort), yet in this universe, that affection grows into something expressive and unruly.
Founded in 2018 by Cherry and Home Phuangfueang, Nong Rak is a sensory-driven textile and garment studio rooted in material exploration, colour theory, and tactile experience. Every piece is handcrafted in limited runs from carefully sourced dead-stock yarns, vintage handwoven silks and locally dyed fibres.
For those of us with sensory quirks or tactile sensitivities, Nong Rak will likely be polarising — some will swoon over its luscious yarns, puffed up like airlifted cotton candy, while others might experience its almost centipede-like textures as a personal hell. But resistance is futile. Their ecstatic prints and buoyant silhouettes carry a strange, gravity-defying charm of weightlessness and radiance. These are clothes we want to be wrapped in, feeling their soft embrace and the labour of love that birthed them.
De Pino
French designer Gabriel Figueiredo hails from the crème de la crème of Belgian (and honestly, beyond) finesse, La Cambre. With a notable résumé spanning across Maison Margiela Artisanal and Dior womenswear (both ready-to-wear and couture), Figueiredo doesn’t stop there. In 2020, the young designer launched his own brand, De Pino, and has been shaking up Paris Haute Couture Week with his past three collections. His latest show, titled “Sex,” featured blazer and trench seriousness, paired with oversized military-like peaked hats, and the ultimate messy “walk of shame” side bangs. To die for. Carefully mastered exuberant volumes of shoulder pads form a natural affair with the sultriness of sheer fabrics, dainty peplums, and body-con pencil skirts (and one asymmetrical legged legging — phew, comfiness proves to be sexy too).
In a practice anchored in the elegance and strong savoir-faire of couture, De Pino unleashes playfulness and androgynous fun. Being sophisticated takes on a whole new meaning, one where exploration isn’t afraid of duality. Sharp and overblown cartoon-esque shapes interact with unapologetic slinky sensualities. With references hailing straight from the mid-aughts, the founding years of Tumblr rise supremacy and Balenciaga Ghesquières-era drooling, De Pino’s recognisable puffed up proportions find matrimony in the homages paid to his inspirations. Desirability holds court in a child-like innocent vision of fashion where volumes are exaggerated as if remembered from a surreal dream placed in a land we would all wish to play in.
