McLaren × Central Saint Martins: six decades on the runway
Forty-six CSM designers turn McLaren’s racing archive into twelve looks, from a Hunt-inspired corset to a Senna-coded jacket.
Papaya knitwear, a racing-blueprint corset and a jacket that nods to Senna’s helmet. McLaren opened its archive to Central Saint Martins, and the students ran with it.
McLaren’s history comes with a ready-made colour palette and some very particular shapes. Designed to Race gave 46 MA Fashion students at Central Saint Martins access to that material. Working in 12 groups, they produced 12 bespoke looks spanning six decades of the team’s racing story.
The project reached the runway at the McLaren Technology Centre on 16 September 2026, with Dell Technologies as a partner. Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris were there to see the archive take a different form. The event photographs put the fashion show inside McLaren’s own world: race machinery, papaya lighting and the drivers in the audience.
History becomes a silhouette
One group used the blueprints of James Hunt’s 1970s car to build a corset. Its rough finish made the engineering reference feel worked on rather than polished away. Another look picked up the yellow of Ayrton Senna’s helmet and the texture of wet-weather tyres, turning racing memories into the language of a jacket.
Papaya also found its way into knitwear, with British yarn and a wax treatment changing how the colour behaved. The Engineering Athlete took another route: flowing black tailoring designed by Junya Barrett-Seward, Hayden Hamilton, Dongki Shin and Hyungjun Lim.
Those approaches give the project its interest. A helmet colour can become a jacket. A technical drawing can become the structure of a garment. The reference remains readable, but the designers have enough room to make a new shape from it.
The names behind the looks
The Engineering Athlete’s design card is a small detail worth keeping in view. Four student names sit above the look’s title and the decades it draws on. At an event with a globally recognised team and its star drivers, the card brings the people doing the design back into focus.
Designed to Race was a showcase of bespoke work. These looks were presented as a student design project, with no retail collection announced in the cited coverage. The runway is the result: a racing archive pushed through a fashion-school studio, with all the unexpected decisions that invites.
Inside Designed to Race
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Sources: Formula 1’s show report; McLaren’s five-look study; Arcadia’s event coverage, with Jason Lloyd and Kate Green photography.
