Humanesque, by Savannah College of Art and Design designer Nathan Batra, earned him Emerging Fashion Designer of the Year at the 2023 International Design Awards. The collection also won Gold in women’s prêt-à-porter, avant-garde and women’s haute couture, among further honours for its textiles. Batra worked with a design team of Hank Woodward, Pedro Ramos, Do Hyeon Lee and Fermin Uriz.
The collection fuses Batra’s past in medicine with his path in fashion. His years in medicine are not simply background; they shape his identity and design ethos. In merging science and art, he arrived at bones as a central theme, representing both strength and vulnerability, and carried that duality into his textiles through fabric manipulation and unique patterns.
The result is an abstract interpretation of skeletal structure: ribbed, contoured and layered surfaces that read as both armour and anatomy. Humanesque shows how knowledge from outside fashion can give a young designer a vocabulary of his own.
Official award record: International Design Awards winners
What holds us up is also what reminds us we can break.
International Design Awards, 2023 — Emerging Fashion Designer of the Year