Olya Kuryshchuk was a fashion design student at Central Saint Martins who did not smoke and did not drink. In a college where the social currency of the corridor is built on exactly those things, she needed a different excuse to meet people. So in 2011, she started a blog. She called it 1 Granary — after the address of the college's building at 1 Granary Square, King's Cross — and began photographing and writing about the work of her fellow students. It was, by her own admission, a project born from loneliness more than ambition.
What happened next was not supposed to happen. Within a year, the blog had attracted enough attention that "Let's print a few shoots" turned into a 240-page magazine, with the first issue supported by Comme des Garçons. The magazine featured not only student work but interviews with Christopher Kane, Nick Knight, and Hamish Bowles — names that do not usually lend their time to student-run publications. But Kuryshchuk, who had arrived at Central Saint Martins from Kiev, had a gift for persuasion and a genuine curiosity that people responded to.
The magazine, now spanning over 650 pages in some editions, is produced by students and alumni from the world's most prestigious fashion schools: Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London, Parsons in New York, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo. It brings together established photographers, stylists, and art directors to work with students, creating the kind of cross-generational collaborations that the fashion industry talks about endlessly but rarely produces.
But 1 Granary outgrew its magazine years ago. It is now a multi-dimensional platform that includes a showroom representing over 60 emerging designers, a recruitment and mentoring programme, an events series, and VOID — a global initiative launched in 2017 that pairs young designers with legendary imagemakers and became part of the official London Fashion Week schedule. There is also Child, an agency run jointly with fashion group 247, described as a support system for exceptional young designers. The platform has helped develop businesses including Chopova Lowena, Knwls, Ranra, Paolina Russo, and Talia Byre.
The editorial voice of the magazine has sharpened over the years. The seventh issue, titled "This is not about you(th)," contained no fashion editorials at all — just off-the-record conversations with designers at various career stages and over fifty in-depth interviews with industry veterans who work inside luxury house design studios but are never asked to share their experiences publicly. Kuryshchuk self-funded that issue because no sponsor would touch something so deliberately uncomfortable. She wanted, as she put it, to create something that has an impact beyond the ephemeral validation of industry insiders.
It is also worth noting what 1 Granary has produced beyond its own pages. Its alumni have gone on to become critics, editors, and writers at i-D, System, Business of Fashion, and beyond. Steve Salter from i-D once told Kuryshchuk, with admirable honesty: "Of course we're poaching."
There is a particular irony in the fact that the most clear-eyed publication about the fashion industry was started by someone who felt she did not belong in it. Kuryshchuk has talked openly about feeling like an intruder, about not knowing the right words, about the culture of arrival that pervades fashion media. 1 Granary was built, in a sense, as the publication she wished had existed when she was trying to figure it all out — a place that was fun and inviting rather than exclusionary, honest rather than performative, and fiercely committed to the idea that emerging talent deserves more than a freelance gig and a pat on the back.
Explore 1 Granary at <a href="https://1granary.com/" target="\_blank">1granary.com