This season’s Fashion East show took place at Mills Fabrica, the repurposed Victorian warehouse which is now home to sustainable innovation across the arts and tech in Kings Cross – an apt location for the incubator’s latest trio of design talent: Standing Ground, Karoline Vitto and Jawara Alleyne.

At Standing Ground, designer Michael Stewart kicked off proceedings with a presentation that saw his shapely, sculpted gowns rendered totally still. Pleated ripples of fabric curved around the body, creating deep hip lines and ruffles of cinching on the waist of dresses perpetually frozen in time. Tones were light and airy, slipping sunshine yellows and Dorothy slipper reds next to dusky browns and towelling whites, and this was just the starter to the meal.

Karoline Vitto then charged forth with her celebration of “the most controversial and overlooked aspects of the female body.” In midi-skirts, bra-tops, body-con dresses and flowing head wraps, the Brazilian designer sliced and diced her fabric in frenetic fashion, skimming across bodices and with wild and wavering curves, patching the heavy viscose jersey back together with curly, plated fastenings. Elsewhere, loose trousers and bikinis with skimpy spaghetti straps spoke to the wonderfully sordid world of Y2K, embracing low-rise waistlines and plump mid-riffs galore in actually inclusive fashion.

Then, Jawara Alleyne closed the proceedings with a high-energy exploration of pirate histories in The New World. Working primarily with squares and strips of fabric in order to reduce waste, the designer’s diverse identity as a Jamaican-born, Cayman Islands-raised and now-London-based designer played out in draped skirts and flowing chiffon trousers, giving beachwear an entirely new, pin-fused sensibility. Guiding each cut and wrap was an elaborate tale of shipwreck, with Alleyne imagining a collision between a super yacht and a pirate ship on the shores of a public beach, whose inhabitants look on in horror and fascination. As for the resultingly deconstructed Pirate couture? It was loose, lethal, and swashbuckling-ly sexy.