Miss Sixty and Central Saint Martins launch Future Denim Lab winners

Alexander Ziemba and Shane Elias took the first Future Denim Lab prizes, but the more revealing story is what Miss Sixty is building around them: a pathway from student experiment to denim that can actually be made, recovered and remade. Launched in June 2025, the five-year partnership between Central Saint Martins and Miss Sixty, led by Professor Kate Goldsworthy, is built around circular and regenerative materials, recycling, recovery and reuse.

The inaugural winners were announced in London on June 18, 2026. Ziemba, an MA Fashion student, won the Miss Sixty Future Denim Discovery Prize, while Shane Elias, from BA Fashion Design: Communication, won the Miss Sixty Future Denim Design Prize. The awards were not framed as an internal school showcase. They were judged as a live industry proposition, with Terry Xu, Katie Grand, Katie Rawles, Professor Goldsworthy and denim specialist Paolo Fuligni on the panel.

That distinction matters. Central Saint Martins says the lab sits inside its Material School and connects to research-led teaching and experiential learning, with a full-time PhD studentship also part of the programme. The shortlist stretched well beyond the two winners, with work by Louise McArthur, Maya Brown, Ruth Lloyd, Tom Saville, Sophia Layk, Josie Blundell, Audrey Levy, Chuxuan Yu, Luke Saul and Matteo Dunkley. The spread of BA, MA and research-led projects suggests a working studio culture, not a single splashy competition.

The projects themselves point toward a specific kind of denim future. Central Saint Martins highlighted work using recovered indigo pigment, bacterial pigment and yarn experiments, microbial colour systems for textile screen-printing, and bacterial re-imaginings of denim. That is where the lab’s real value may sit: not in celebrating student talent for its own sake, but in testing whether these ideas can survive the distance between a fashion school and a production floor.

Miss Sixty brings commercial gravity to the experiment. Founded in 1991 by Wicky Hassan, the label describes itself as the first brand focused on women’s denim. Pairing that heritage with Central Saint Martins, and with the wider strategic relationship between UAL and Trendy Group, gives the Future Denim Lab a clearer mandate than most sustainability collaborations. It is not just teaching circularity as an ideal; it is asking which materials, methods and design ideas can become brand IP, and which can move beyond the winners into the industry’s next denim standards.