This Racing Team Gave Its Archive to Fashion Students, Here's the Result
Forget the paddock. This September, the McLaren Technology Centre is getting a runway.
McLaren Racing has tapped Central Saint Martins for a new project called “Designed to Race,” an initiative built around a question: what happens when motorsport heritage gets filtered through a fashion student’s eye?
The answer, in this case, is 12 looks pulled from 46 students on the school’s MA Fashion course, working in small groups and each assigned a different chapter of McLaren’s six-decade history. The eras span the team’s full arc, 1970s color-blocking through to the current Papaya moment, with reference points ranging from the obvious to the unexpected. Some groups leaned into archive signifiers fans would clock instantly, like James Hunt’s off-duty uniform of driver overalls or Ayrton Senna’s yellow helmet. Others went more conceptual, translating the mechanics of the cars themselves, chrome livery, aerodynamic geometry, the literal engineering of speed, into garment construction. Throughout the process, technology partner Dell supplied the cohort with XPS laptops to develop the work from research to finished pieces.
According to the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey, McLaren cites that roughly a third of F1 followers now count fashion and style as a meaningful part of how they engage with the sport, according to the team.
Each of the 12 teams was handed a different chapter of the archive, every era got its own visual references, and every group interpreted that history through a completely different design lens. The groups looking at the “Grit x Glamour” of the 1970s brings together students Coco Corbisiero, She Carmona, Taylor Paige and Tony Wang working from a shared interest in menswear archetypes and identity, with Corbisiero’s gender-fluid tailoring sitting alongside Carmona’s research into British diasporic style and Wang’s textile work on memory and fragility.
On the same theme, Alesia Cîdă, Evangelina Polevik, Enzo Keuning and Nura Dhar bring a more research-heavy point of view, spanning Dhar’s background in archive-based luxury design (by way of Proenza Schouler and Ralph Lauren) and Keuning’s engineering-meets-nature approach, a fairly literal echo of the brief itself.
Elsewhere, two groups will be working on the theme of “Engineered Athlete” focusing on the 2000s–2010s. Junya Barrett-Seward, Hayden Hamilton, Dongki Shin and Hyungjun Lim build “engineered success” through tailoring, drawing on outerwear construction, denim and Korean systems-based design. While Viktor Hartmann, Stela Kostomaj, Johannes Warnke and Stephanie Corbyn approach the era by utilizing seatbelts for the frayed draping of their skirt and carbon fiber cured to create structure in their blazer.
Taken together, the range says as much about where fashion education is right now as it does about McLaren; 46 designers, pulling from Zen philosophy, Afrofuturism, Kurdish identity, Dominican craft and Korean systems design, all asked to sit inside the same six decades of motorsport.
The full collection will debut at an exclusive show inside the McLaren Technology Centre ahead of London Fashion Week, with the students’ pieces staged alongside archive garments pulled from the team’s history.
