H&M has named 26-year-old, South Korean designer Minju Kim the winner of its international H&M Design Award. Kim is in her final year as a graduate student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. She unveiled her collection Tuesday at Stockholm’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.
She will receive 50,000 euros, about $67,250 in US Dollars, and H&M will develop pieces from the collection to be sold at select H&M stores in early fall. The Swedish high-street retailer invited students from 19 fashion colleges in eight European countries to take part.
Kim said her collection, titled “Dear My Friend” was inspired by Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito.
“Drawing is the most important process of my designing,” she said in a statement. “When I research, I visualize how I would transform it into images and as a next step I turn the images into my own drawings, and that becomes the basis for the collection.”
