Fashion Examples
New Fashion
Students who study fashion with the School of Art and Design are offered a unique opportunity to bridge divides and engage practitioners across fields and areas of research. “For over ten years, only a couple of fashion-related electives have been offered, with students consistently asking for more,” says Susan Becker, clinical assistant professor. The new fashion concentration offers an opportunity to explore the wide variety of subject matter in the field of fashion, from history and social psychology to sustainable manufacturing and brand development. Students investigate the elements and principles of design as they apply to fabric and the body and explore fashion’s role in understanding, forming, and presenting identity and communicating culture. The fashion concentration encourages students to develop their own personal apparel design process, including a strong working knowledge of the various modes of research, ideation, and design sketching and illustration. Courses that emphasize sustainability introduce students to various aspects of the fashion industry, from design and production to manufacturing, promotion, branding, and sales. Projects like Found Object Fashion and Reclaim-to-Wear challenges students to create clothes made entirely from discarded materials and remnants, giving them the opportunity to exercise their own design process within the context of sustainability. Situated within Studio Art, the fashion concentration affords an interdisciplinary experience where students develop their own unique path. Students learn to critique work using multiple theoretical frameworks, explore contemporary art and crafts production, and acquire practical skills in apparel design and fashion industry best practices.
Alcaeus Lam, Introduction to Fashion, Reclaim-to-Wear Project