“Fashion”, argued Roland Barthes, in The Fashion System, “is a kind of machine for maintaining meaning without ever fixing it,” a mode of conversation that speaks even when we think we are saying nothing at all. 

In 1974, St Martins School of Art (now part of Central Saint Martins), launched its BA in Fashion Communication, known affectionately as “FC”. This year, FC celebrates five decades of forward-thinking engagement with FC 50!, a new exhibition at TANK’s GPS gallery. Featuring a vast array of archival objects, from zines to albums to editorial images, the show celebrates the suppleness and sophistication of fashion as a language, as well as the bold creatives defining new ways to narrate a fashion story. At a time when digital fatigue is reaffirming the importance of physical media, it is also a love letter to the possibilities of print. 

At TANK, we have always questioned how print publishing might respond to fashion’s endless capacity for reinvention. From our earliest pocket-sized issues to our recession-era flirtation with ring-binding, we have emphasised the importance of format as a means of storytelling. Just as FC has moved beyond a traditional journalistic into the realms of curation, moving image and digital media, so too have we pushed at the confines of what a magazine is. 

Positing the fashion communicator as interlocutor, the exhibition emphasises the pliancy of the course, encompassing everything from historical fashion theory to our incipient AI revolution. The encouragement not just to passively absorb fashion but to analyse, critique and explore what goes into the making of an image is reflected not just in the scrappy, wildly creative student projects that form much of the exhibition. You can see traces of FC’s radical openness in its forward-thinking alumni, with past alumni including Campbell Addy, Kay Barron, Karen Langley and Ib Kamara. Half a century on, FC continues to produce the next generation of fashion’s most radical thinkers and image-makers. Here’s to the next 50.