JCA announces shortlist for Saïd Business School contest

Professor Jimmy Choo’s JCA/London Fashion Academy has announced the shortlisted designers for the school’s Saïd Business School staff uniform competition. 

Open to JCA’s undergraduate designers, applicants submitted their design proposals before the contest deadlined earlier this month, with six chosen for the four-place final in an event run in partnership with the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

They are Valeria Peeva & Maxi Purton (first-year designers at the Academy), Nona Cunningham (second-year designer), Niamh Nowlan (second-year designer), Cherlyn Ornika & Kinar Ornika (fellow new designers) and Alexis Izinyon (now a womenswear designer).

They were chosen by a judging panel, comprising University of Oxford staff, including uniform wearers, JCA staff and Oxford Saïd MBA students. 

Tania Hanniford, Oxford Saïd’s Head of Brand, head of the judging panel, said: “We were all so impressed by the creativity seen across all the entries. Their interpretation of the brief and the confidence with which they all presented their work was truly inspiring. In the end it came down to literally a fraction of a percentage points to decide the shortlist. We now have a very hard choice ahead of us to decide on the winning design, but whatever the result, the School will soon have a fantastic new look that we can be proud of.” 

The winners will be announced on the 27 April at an award ceremony in Oxford. They will be given places on the new Oxford Venture Series, a series of three, six-to-eight-week online programmes with tutor support and live lessons. 

The series aims to help new entrepreneurs, start-ups, scale-ups and small and medium enterprises, conceptualise and launch new business ideas or scale existing ones.