Finalists of the 2018 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers announced

The finalists of this year's LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers have been unveiled.

Nine creatives have been selected to progress to the final stage of the prestigious annual fashion prize, after a panel of industry experts whittled down the list of 20 semi-finalists who presented their collections in Paris on March 1 and 2. This, the fifth annual edition of the competition, originally drew more than 1,300 applicants from over 90 countries.

"The quality and the standard of the fifth edition of the LVMH Prize made it difficult for our experts to narrow down the selection," said Delphine Arnault, Executive Vice-President of Louis Vuitton, in a statement. "As a result, we chose to extend the number of finalists to 9 rather than 8, since several of the semi-finalists obtained the same number of votes."

The designers who made the cut include London-based UK labels "A-Cold-Wall" by Samuel Ross, and Charles Jeffrey's "Charles Jeffrey Loverboy," as well as the US-based brands "Eckhaus Latta" by Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus, and "Matthew Adams Dolan," an eponymous line of gender-neutral pieces. "Botter" by Dutch designers Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh, "Rokh" by South Korean designer Rok Hwang and "Ludovic de Saint Sernin" by the French talent Ludovic de Saint Sernin will also be present at the final. Tokyo-based Japanese designer Masayuki Ino's "Doublet" and London-based French and American-Vietnamese duo Léa Dickely and Hung La's label "Kwaidan Editions" round out the list.

The finalists will showcase their work at the Fondation Louis Vuitton on June 6, whereby the winner of the 2018 Prize winner will be determined by a star-studded jury including Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, Maria Grazia Chiuri and multiple other major designers and industry figures.