On June 15, the Manifattura Campus of Florence hosted twenty graduate designers from fifteen countries, each presenting the culmination of four years dedicated to building a creative language in one of fashion’s most rigorous training spaces. Among them, Emilie Wenckstern stood out completely. Her collection, No More Humanclaimed the Best Polimoda Collection 2026 prize, awarded by a jury consisting of a fashion director Tuomas A. Laitinenphotographer and conceptualist Eugene Rabkinbody confidence advocate Danae Mercerdesigner Eva Horsesand an actor Simona Tabasco. When pressed which look will be remembered the most, Rabkin was immediate: the last bit of No More Humanwhich seemed to distill the entire collection’s central tension between constructed identity and sculptural form.
In its essence, No More Human interrogates a question that becomes increasingly urgent in 2026: if one had a body, would one still be human? The collection addresses how digital culture has disrupted our relationship with the physical form. Bodies are now created, processed, manufactured before they exist in the physical realm. Identity is no longer something inherited or discovered. It’s designed. And if the skin becomes a surface, if the body becomes a canvas for construction, then at exactly what point does it cease to be human?
WencksternHer background ideally placed her to explore this area. Before you reach the Polimoda in 2021, spent years working in an art studio, cultivating skills in sculpture, photography and installation. This artistic rigor permeates her fashion practice. He didn’t get to design dresses. He arrived to construct a world, a world where clothes function as sculpture, where the distinction between fashion and fine art dissolves. Her references read like a manifesto: surrealist sculptor Hans Bellmer (bodies as fragile objects), photographer Paul Quicker (ultra-refined digital skin renderings), Alaïaobsessive body consciousness, Margielaits destructive impulse, and Schiaparellisurreal challenge.
No More Human it unfolds in six looks, structured around two complementary registers of material that reflect the duality inherent in its concept: fragile whole vs. controlled, imperfectly placed vs. designed. The first register constructs architectural bodies. Oversized jackets flourish with balloon sleeves. Mini skirts are paired with matching boots. The structured shoulders rise like the sculpture itself. However, this is where the disturbing detail emerges: each surface is covered with a cracked finish applied to felted wool, evoking broken porcelain. The result is visceral. It is recorded as an error. These are clothes that look damaged, broken, but somehow more fascinating precisely because of their fragility. Silk knits introduce ridges that read as veins and joints (the body as a system, reduced to parts), while transparent tapes and digital print elements interrupt the custom form like interferences, like garbled code.
The second registry is moved to skin. Glossy, toned, molded directly to the body. The cutouts and asymmetrical circular openings refer to mannequin joints, the points of articulation where a doll’s limbs connect. The boots extend upwards, erasing the boundary where the leg ends. One loses the distinction between clothing and body, between clothing and prosthetics. It’s both beautiful and deeply disturbing, which seems to be just right. Throughout, a recurring detail haunts the collection: a necklace that rises to hide the mouth like a half-mask. Wenckstern articulates the stakes clearly. If a doll has a mouth and eyes but cannot communicate, perhaps it is the voice, the ability to use it, that still distinguishes us. Silence becomes a marker of the artificial. Silence becomes inhumanity. The color palette is muted and precise: whites, beiges, soft pinks, synthetic skin tones. These are the colors of rendering engines and digital avatars, hues that hover between leather and synthetic material, between organic and artificial. They feel both intimacy and coldness at the same time.
That which exalts No More Human beyond the conceptual exercise is its technical execution. Wenckstern collaborated with Ostinelli Seta on printed fabrics. Each piece was developed within Polimodahis workshops under his guidance Luke and Lucie Meierwho returned to the school where they had trained together twenty-five years before, alongside the headmaster Massimiliano Giornetti. Cracked surfaces required precise application. Casting the skin required absolute control. The proportions, exaggerated but never cartoonish, required the discipline that separates conceptual fashion from truly exciting fashion. Danae Mercerspeaking from her expertise in body confidence, noted what she was left with: not just the idea, but the skill evident in the leather construction, the craftsmanship beneath the idea. The concept is brilliant. The execution confirms that he is not a theoretician playing in fashion. she is a designer with something to articulate and the technical vocabulary with which to articulate it.
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Fashion is always about the constructed body. Yet No More Human arrives at a specific cultural moment. Bodies are created by AI now. Filters reshape faces in real time. Identity is increasingly something that is curated rather than experienced. WencksternHis collection captures that strange modern anxiety: the fear that we are becoming less human, or that humanity itself is being completely redesigned. However, there is no despair here. Anti, No More Human he finds beauty in strangeness, in idealized forms that bear “less and less relation to the reality of the human form.” Cracked surfaces suggest damage, yes, but just as much depth. Sculptural silhouettes suggest artistry, but just as much elegance. The muted palette suggests distance, but also intimacy.
Discover more about the Emilie Wenckstern graduate collection in our gallery:
After four years in Polimodaafter translating sculpture and photography and a deeply personal visual language in fashion, Emilie Wenckstern has created something rare indeed: a graduate collection that functions as both an artistic statement and a portable reality, one that will resonate far beyond the Florence campus where it debuted.
