McLaren Racing Archive Inspires Central Saint Martins

McLaren Racing has collaborated with Central Saint Martins fashion students on a project called “Designed to Race.” Forty-six students from the school’s MA Fashion course created twelve looks by interpreting six decades of the racing team’s archive.

The initiative asked what happens when motorsport heritage is filtered through a fashion student’s perspective. Students worked in small groups, each assigned a different chapter of McLaren’s history spanning from the 1970s to the present. Technology partner Dell supplied the cohort with XPS laptops to develop the work.

The Design Process

Each group received a different era from the archive, complete with its own visual references. Every team then interpreted that history through a unique design lens. Some focused on obvious archive signifiers, like driver overalls or iconic helmets. Others took a more conceptual route, translating car mechanics, chrome livery, and aerodynamic geometry into garment construction.

According to McLaren, the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey indicates roughly a third of Formula 1 followers now consider fashion and style a meaningful part of their engagement with the sport.

Interpreting the Eras

The groups examining the “Grit x Glamour” of the 1970s brought diverse viewpoints. One team, including Coco Corbisiero, She Carmona, Taylor Paige and Tony Wang, worked from a shared interest in menswear archetypes and identity. Corbisiero’s gender-fluid tailoring sat alongside Carmona’s research into British diasporic style and Wang’s textile work on memory and fragility.

Another team on the same 1970s theme-Alesia Cîdă, Evangelina Polevik, Enzo Keuning and Nura Dhar-adopted a research-heavy approach. This spanned Dhar’s background in archive-based luxury design and Keuning’s engineering-meets-nature method, which directly echoed the project brief.

Engineered Athletes

Two groups focused on the “Engineered Athlete” theme of the 2000s-2010s. One team, comprising Junya Barrett-Seward, Hayden Hamilton, Dongki Shin and Hyungjun Lim, built “engineered success” through tailoring. They drew on outerwear construction, denim, and Korean systems-based design.

The other team for this era-Viktor Hartmann, Stela Kostomaj, Johannes Warnke and Stephanie Corbyn-use materials like seatbelts for frayed draping and cured carbon fiber to create structure in a blazer.

A Global Design Perspective

The collective range of work reflects the current state of fashion education as much as it does McLaren’s history. Forty-six designers, pulling from influences like Zen philosophy, Afrofuturism, Kurdish identity, Dominican craft, and Korean systems design, were all asked to interpret 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. The students’ new pieces will be staged alongside archive garments pulled from the team’s own history.