MERGING aesthetic and performance Myat swells into a show stopping world where the two become inseparable and beauty is not passive but activated and confronted.
In a collection titled Antechamber Central Saint Martins graduate and Burmese designer Erica Myat deepens her exploration of spectatorship and control positioning the runway not as a stage but as a system. The environment she constructs resembles a panopticon a spatial arrangement where visibility itself becomes a form of discipline. No single viewpoint is stable and the act of looking carries responsibility. The audience senses that attention is not neutral but participatory.
Myat complicates the traditional hierarchy of fashion presentation. Rather than models existing as distant images to be consumed the viewers are placed within the same field of vision. To watch is simultaneously to be watched and the comfort of anonymity dissolves. Garments therefore operate as mediators between body and gaze shaping how exposure is experienced and negotiated. Transparency concealment and revelation become tools that regulate power across the room.
Within this framework the clothing performs as much as the bodies that inhabit it. Sheer textiles exposed structures and restrictive forms echo the psychological tension of surveillance. The wearer appears both empowered and vulnerable occupying a space where self presentation and external perception constantly overlap. Myat suggests that identity is constructed through observation that the self is partly authored by the presence of others.
Antechamber ultimately becomes less a fashion show and more a social experiment. The collection asks whether visibility can ever be separated from control and whether the gaze can be reclaimed rather than merely endured. In dissolving the distance between observer and subject Myat reframes fashion as a site of negotiation where power circulates rather than settles.
by Ellis Dowle