Fashion Design

Undergraduate Courses - Milan

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The course trains Fashion Designers with stylistic and creative competencies combined with the ability to define innovative products, develop stories and place a final product in the market.
The different collections and the production of prototypes are the main areas of expertise provided to students throughout the three years of study.
The course offers two specialisations: Fashion Design, aimed at training professionals able to translate their personal narration into a collection of garments and accessories, and Shoes and Accessories Design - taught exclusively in Italian language, which provides a specific training about design and production techniques that considers the peculiarity of the product.
 
Career opportunities - Fashion Designer, Shoes and Accessories Designer, Textile Designer, Product Manager, Knitwear Designer, Embroidery Designer.
 
Title –This BA is recognized by Italian Ministry of Education Research (MIUR) as an Academic Diploma Level I and awards 180 credits.

  • Credits
    180
  • Start date
    October 2018
  • Duration
    3 years
  • Attendance
    full-time
  • Language
    English

Check the pages dedicated to the creative professions: Fashion Designer.

Context - The world of fashion faces continuous and rapid changes. In the past few decades, the professional once defined as Couturier has given way to a complex and flexible role covering different fields within a multifaceted process: the Fashion Designer.

Methodology and structure - The study path is structured so as to provide students with all the tools required to properly and efficiently create a fashion or accessories collection and place it within the contemporary market. The whole process focuses on the application of one Design Method - the typical Made in Italy one - which constitutes the basis of the whole process, taught to students from the first year until the Final Project. 

Regarding all the different collections studied, a particular attention is paid to the acquisition of pattern-making and sewing skills, textile, leather technology and processing, design techniques, fashion illustration, the production process of garments and accessories. 

Complementary to the technical and methodological disciplines is the particular focus on cultural studies that identify the language of fashion as a historical, artistic and social phenomenon, as a flow of trends and codes, as a creative and visual narrative and as an economic system featured by a production chain and by specific marketing and communication strategies. Students have the possibility to choose among different workshops (changing every year) such as hand embroidery, written analysis of trends, hand knitwear, fur. 

Within the specialization in Shoes and Accessories Design, in addition to designing the collections dedicated to the different types of accessories (women and men), intense workshops ensure a proper use of the tools and machines, for the acquisition of pattern making techniques and bag and shoe manufacturing. Moreover, the course offers a focus on specific technical drawings, the processes of production and use of different leathers and skins, as well as metal hardware design for accessories. 

  • I year

    • Style and History of Art and Costume

    • Design Methods

      This course provides students with the analytical tools they need to examine the nexus between a product and the processes behind its creation. This theoretical groundwork allows students to understand and manage the disciplines that contribute to designing a collection. Every design process is a confluence of functional, technological and formal aspects: the course goes from how the idea is formulated to the development of the actual object. 

    • Technical Drawing

      Familiarity with technical drawing provides students with the basic tools for communicating their work and representing the design process. Students learn the graphic idiom necessary to get the expressive independence. The course deals with all the fundamental phases involved in a correct design representation of clothing and accessories: from freehand illustration to preparatory sketches for the study of a figure’s proportions and on to technical drawing.

       

    • History of Fashion 1

      The evolution of style and fashion in the Western World from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The course analyses the social and technical processes that featured the main changes in the fashion world by looking into case studies of Fashion Designers and their collections. 

    • Pattern Making and Tailoring 1

      Model making is the gradual acquisition of familiarity with the techniques for making a collection, both in its constituent components and as a whole. This course provides students with the theoretical and practical tools they need for building models, using the materials most suitable for the scale of the project and the various phases of study. A 3D overview enables the idea to be examined and checked on its consistency in terms of physics laws and elaboration techniques. 

    • Graphic Design 1

      Using graphic composition programs to acquire IT literacy makes it easier for students to express an idea and enables the digital tools of representation to be correlated with the notions of visual perception. Teaching the use of the leading image processing programs enables students to maximise the impact of a concept, manage 2D images and modify their contents. 

    • Textile Culture 1

    • Fashion Design 1

      The workshop activity includes an intensive session devoted to the reproduction of a historical outfit. 

       

    • Figurative Anatomy

    • Arts Semiotics 1

  • II year

    • History of Fashion 2

      The course is focused on the historical development of fashion during the second half of the twentieth century. The evolution in trends and styles is tackled from a historical, cultural, social and economic standpoint, providing students with the tools they need to understand the language of fashion, highlight its mechanisms and identify its key phenomena. 

    • Drawing Techniques and Technologies

    • Pattern Making and Tailoring 2

    • Graphic Design 2

    • Textile Culture 2

    • Fashion Design 2

    • Arts Semiotics 2

    • History of Photography

    • Business Thinking and Management 1

  • III year

    • Pattern Making and Tailoring 3

    • Fashion Design 3

    • Design Methods for Visual Communication

    • Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts

       

       

    • Business Thinking and Management 2

    • Theory and Analysis of the Film and Audiovisual Presentations

    • Fashion Design 4