Rest in Peace to Fashion Professor Louise Wilson

You might not know her name, but you certainly know her influence: Louise Wilson, the director of the fashion program at quite possibly the best fashion school in the world, London's Central Saint Martins, died on Friday. As a working professor at CSM since 1992, she's helped nurture the careers of ahead-of-the-curve designers like Alexander McQueen, Pheobe Philo and Christopher Kane, and more recently, has been something of a patron saint for a new generation of the London avant-garde who have helped forge the city's much-lauded creative renaissance of the past few years, with many of the youngest, brightest and most exciting designers, like Shaun Samson, Simone Rocha and Marques Almeida, getting their start at CSM under her tough, critical eye. "It's very important to know that it's a mutual thing, that there is respect and a form of teamwork," she told the Telegraph in 2008. "With quite a few of them it can be traumatic, but there are moments in here when they do extraordinary things with their designs. There are things of beauty I get to see in this office." R.I.P.