Saskia Lenaerts

Saskia Lenaerts (b. 1993) is a London-based fashion designer and researcher whose work transforms garments shaped by conflict into objects of care, agency, and cultural exchange. Working across fashion, textiles, footwear, costume design, film, and social practice, she uses material deconstruction and reconstruction as a method for investigating the relationships between clothing, memory, identity, and geopolitics.

Lenaerts holds an MA in fashion menswear from Central Saint Martins. Through her studio, SASKIA.world, and the social enterprise Rapprochement, she develops collaborative projects that reconfigure military, surplus, and discarded materials into new forms, exploring how making can function as a process of repair, connection, and collective authorship. Her practice is particularly concerned with the way material culture can mediate experiences of division, displacement, and belonging.

Her work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, fashion weeks, and interdisciplinary platforms, including Lisbon Fashion Week, RE-Selfridges, DiscoveryLAB at London Fashion Week, and Fantastic Toiles. She was selected for the Makers with a Mission Residency at Makerversity, Somerset House, and has received the L’Oréal Professionnel Scholarship, the Considered Design Award, sponsored by Johnstons of Elgin, and The Big Design Award in Tokyo.

Through fashion as both design practice and research, Lenaerts investigates how materials of division can be disarmed and redefined into vehicles for shared futures.

Saskia Lenaerts is a participant of the Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program for 2026/27.