Claire Needs
Claire is a Seattle-based writer, editor and public relations specialist. She currently works as a Staff Editor for architecture and design magazine ARCADE NW Publishing.

She earned her BA in Communications and Media, double-specialized in journalism and strategic communications, in June 2023 from Seattle University. During Fall 2022 Claire studied abroad at London-based arts university Central Saint Martins for fashion journalism.

Her writing focuses on fashion, music, art and digital landscapes, and the various ways they shape identity and form community.

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White Show Designer Fin Maguire’s Meditation on Time and Space
_{Claire Needs | December 11, 2022}


White clothing shows the movement, weight, and details of dressmaking; pleats accentuate the fabric’s dimension through shadows on the white cloth, texture is emphasized, and a garment can be viewed, first and foremost, as a carefully sewn textile. 

Fin Maguire, a first-year fashion design student at Central Saint Martins specializing in print, is crucially aware of this fact. Draped in a structured, curved-cut cape embellished with a utilitarian pocket, with a lightweight, texturally pleated dress billowing beneath—its collar protruding from the cape, Maguire’s garment effortlessly flowed down Central Saint Martins’ White Show runway on Thurs, Dec. 8. Fin, himself, was close behind, modeling a menswear-inspired garment for fellow print student Chanhu Jeong.

“White is a blank canvas on which you can project any ideas. You have the opportunity to create something new,” the first-year fashion design students were told in their project brief for the White Show, an annual showcase of their work presented as a runway show executed by Fashion Communication students. Maguire responded to one of three broad topics: borderlines. 

Fin, like most 21-year-olds, seeks to understand time’s passing at an age that, however young, makes people feel like they’ve achieved too little and are aging too quickly.

“I turned 21 the week before [the project started], and I was just like ‘I’m 21 now, this is really scary’…I definitely felt like time was moving really fast and, I don’t know, I started panicking. I was like ‘Oh, I need to do more stuff, and be more adventurous.’”

In the process of researching for his design, Maguire took inspiration from Pink Floyd’s “Time,” examined pottery and sculpture, specifically pottery that’s collapsed in on itself, and even outer space, wormholes, and physics in time dilation—examining the variety of speeds within time and space. 
                               
                                      Fin’s sketchbook

“Maybe I have a paranoid feeling about how insignificant everything is,” Fin said regarding his research for both his White Show garment and previous projects. 

Despite a quite nihilistic initial approach, ideation morphed into beautiful, clean, soft creation. Fin makes sense of time and place in the context of a shell—a natural item that can be repurposed and reused within the organisms that reside in it—practically immune to time despite the mortality of its guests. 

Fin employed a contrast of hard and soft materials to create a shell-like silhouette. For the garment’s cape, Maguire used a heavy-weight supersuede, which held its form but also allowed for movement on the runway along the draped side—the cape was enclosed with a shard of a shell used as a button. A shirting material was employed to create the dress’s lightweight effect, pleated to extend the garment outwards underneath the harder exterior cape. Gloves elongated the illusion of an organism extending from its shell.

The White Show’s opening looks set a tone of scale for the next 161 garments, as impressively large structural items moved down the runway, some creating the illusion of a large beast like Giacomo Goattin’s piece, and others extending the models appearance upwards by means of large headpieces. Maguire’s piece, however reserved in size, emphasized the details—self-described ‘little things’— in his work that make an impact at distance, but especially upon a closer look.

Fin enjoys “really intricate, fine details, like darts or seams, or having something unusual, or unconventional, but something that’s quite interesting if you took a look at it and you broke it down. Maybe it’s just something about the fact that you wouldn’t notice if you just took a quick glance at it.”

Maguire noted that one of the reasons he chose print was for its emphasis on textiles and intricacies in garment making. For print, “the design process starts with fabric creation,” according to Central Saint Martins’ course description.

Small details in clothing creation can be found in Fin’s work and personal wardrobe. For the White Show’s presentation, and rave-like after party at Bermondsey’s underground “Venue Mot Unit 18,” Maguire could be seen sporting a cream evening blazer from Ebay.

“I had a jacket on last night, and it’s like topstitched around the lapels—its super small details, but I think it just looks so nice when you pay attention to it, and it just makes a really beautiful jacket…It says ‘Mr. Harry’s Couture,’ which, just doesn’t sound at all like it’s couture.”

Fin credits his father, a well-dressed man despite never working in the fashion industry, as his fashion inspiration growing up in the small town of Nantwich in Cheshire County. Fin describes his own style as traditional, practical menswear with a touch of formality. 

Despite initial reservations regarding age and achievement, an extensive draping process, producing 50 sketches, and long nights in the fashion studios, Fin felt content with his final piece—showcasing a full look in a runway show at 21 years old is quite a feat.