During the summer holidays, Granary Square – the vast canalside plaza just up from King’s Cross station – transforms into an urban splash park. Children squeal as they leapfrog through fountains, their parents sprawling across the surrounding benches, sheltering in the shadows cast by the Victorian granary that has been home to Central Saint Martins for the past 15 years. Inside, however, Britain’s most famous fashion school feels unnervingly still. The institution that helped shape John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and countless others has fallen silent, its rows of sewing machines and cutting tables lying dormant until September.
“Eerie, isn’t it?” says Sarah Gresty, appearing in the doorway in a magenta & Other Stories dress that she unravelled and crocheted back together, and white Birkenstocks. The 60-something course leader – “Do you really need to know exactly how old I am? I’m ancient” – has spent more than two decades at CSM, the last 10 leading its star-making BA fashion design programme. “Come in,” she says, her electric fan sending the ends of her signature shaggy mullet fluttering around her face. “I’ll show you the studios… and then some pubes.”
Nudity, murals of John Galliano and Waitrose lunches
Only a fortnight ago, these rooms were crammed with harried final-year students racing to finish their graduate collections. Verity Capstick was casting dresses from edible lace to comment on the commodification of women’s bodies; Cameron Bisseck sculpting skirts in the form of Ridley Road Market stalls; Buzz Shatford weaving tinsel yarn into shimmering bouffant gowns, drawing on the brutal Canadian winters they experienced while performing as a drag queen in Toronto. “Sarah genuinely believes in student work,” Shatford told me at the time. “I once gave her some stickers I’d made, then noticed she’d put them on her laptop. It sounds tiny, but it’s a level of care and encouragement that stays with people.” That instinct, to treat even the smallest creative gesture as something worth nurturing, goes some way towards explaining why Gresty is an “icon”, says Esme Chancellor, whose graduate collection took its lead from car boot sales.
The architect of countless fashion careers keeps a compact wood-panelled office that serves also as a museum of CSM folklore. Pinned to the wall is, indeed, a plastic bag with a lock of pubic hair, donated by Rottingdean Bazaar, while nearby hang clippings celebrating the early successes of Molly Goddard, Charles Jeffrey and Paolina Russo. On her desk sits a frame containing cigarettes salvaged from TJ Finley’s infamous 2023 graduate show, during which he emptied a bag of stale butts across the press benches. “A lot of other universities will say, ‘Don’t forget, we need a navy-blue coat,’” she says, exasperated. “We don’t do that. What’s so special here is that students can tell a story, and tell it honestly.”
Which could be why one model appeared at this year’s BA show curled inside a Giacomo Goattin-designed wheel intended to resemble an anus. Hardly commercial, but memorable enough to become one of the talking points of a graduate showcase staged in the bowels of a Peckham car park – the first time the event had left campus since CSM relocated from Charing Cross in 2011. “Oh, it was filthy,” she says. “The concrete. The pigeons. The dirt. I just loved it. I was a bit irritated with one journalist, though, who described it as being an hour outside central London.”
The defensiveness is understandable. Gresty lives only a few streets away, in a Pepto-Bismol-pink house she shares with her husband, Arthur, an artist she met while studying, and where they raised their three children: Fastmarkets price reporter Solomon, PR Mabel and model Ruben. The floorboards are painted red. The bathroom is tiled like a disco ball. The walls are crowded with artworks collected from the extended family she has built around CSM. Nestled in her wardrobe are gift boxes from Burberry creative director Daniel Lee, whom Gresty taught long before he became one of Britain’s most celebrated designers. “God, he was such a lovely student,” she says, over a milky tea in her joyfully overgrown garden, not long after her debut shoot. “Very humble, and just a brilliant cutter. We still WhatsApp, although he takes ages to reply.”
The admiration is mutual. “What makes Sarah special is her instinct for recognising what’s unique about each person and encouraging them to push further,” Lee says over email. “She gave me confidence in my ideas, while her mentality – to work hard and never stop learning – has stayed with me.” Like Lee, Gresty came from a working-class background in northern England – “Crewe,” she says drily, “super glam” – and has an affinity for students who did not grow up in a metropolitan, creative scene.
Chainmail dress, Burberry. Knitted and felted Shetland wool top, pencil skirt (on hanger)and ribbed tassel belt (on mannequin), Finn Carter
In Gresty’s case, an early obsession with punk – sparked by The Damned and The Ruts – saw her leave home at 17 for London before studying fashion in Brighton and moving to Paris. There, while working as a van driver delivering crates of wine, she had a chance encounter with Azzedine Alaïa. The late designer bought almost her entire graduate portfolio of hand-manipulated and crocheted pieces (Karl Lagerfeld also bagged several designs, telling her they’d be produced by blind nuns in a convent), and opened the door to a decade-long career as a knitwear consultant for Chanel, Chloé, Kenzo, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Martine Sitbon and Christian Lacroix.
Her first pregnancy brought Gresty back to London, where she initially filled in for her close friend, MA fashion tutor and designer Julie Verhoeven, at CSM. (For Gresty’s 10-year anniversary, Verhoeven gave her a hand-painted balloon; the college presented her with £300 in vouchers, which she split between John Lewis – for new towels – and Eurostar credit.) From there, she rose to become the knit pathway leader, eventually taking charge of the BA fashion design programme in 2016. “It was so intimidating. I literally couldn’t sleep the night ahead, terrified about which of my own designs I was going to wear,” she says of her first day, despite freelancing with the “formidable” Donatella Versace at the time.
If Gresty inherited one of fashion’s most influential jobs, she also inherited one of its most fearsome legacies. For decades, CSM’s fashion department was synonymous with tutors such as the late, revered Louise Wilson, whose critiques became inseparable from the school’s mythos: collections torn apart, students leaving in tears, brilliance extracted through intimidation. “I knew there was a heritage to uphold, and I didn’t want to fuck it up,” she says. “But there’s just no space for that sort of culture anymore.”
And with good reason: today’s students carry burdens that previous generations rarely faced. Tuition fees have tripled and funding has been cut. London rents have spiralled. Many balance their studies with full-time jobs while living outside the capital. “There was a student this year, Milena Tosheva, who worked full time at McDonald’s,” Gresty says. “But it’s not just about the finances. It’s their life. Their youth.” Over the past decade, Gresty’s pastoral responsibilities have taken her to law courts, hospitals and police stations, often in the middle of the night. That doesn’t mean expectations have softened – quite the opposite: “If there’s something bland, undisciplined or forgettable about the work, I’ll tell them.” The difference, she believes, lies in knowing how far to push while encouraging them “to challenge absolutely everything about society” when finding their voice. “Every tutor has to understand where each student’s physical and emotional tipping point is. You want to get them right up to it – but never, ever over it.”
Gresty still insists on tutoring every student on her institution’s ever-evolving course, which now includes modules on regenerative fashion, social justice and adaptive design. “People come here from all over the world to be who they’re supposed to, so it’s important to hear what they’re concerned about,” she says, noting that it’s often generosity, not ego, that distinguishes the students who go furthest. “Hopefully they remember that I helped get them there.”
This year’s graduate Danna Reyes certainly will. “Sarah believed in me even when I was at my lowest,” she says, over DM. Her graduate collection recreated Prada’s lipstick print, but depicted bullets instead, a response to her experience as an undocumented immigrant in the US-Mexico border town of Laredo. A few days later, I come across Reyes’s Instagram Stories. In them, she’s in full graduation garb, standing stock still beside the fountains. She runs in, waits for the jets to erupt, and then spins on her heel.
Main image: Knitted dress, Sherry Rong. Sittings editor: Charlotte Rutter. Hair & make-up: Alexis Day