The industry-aware BA in Fashion Studies is built on a shared core, offers students fashion product development and fashion merchandising concentrations, and culminates in a year-long, hands-on capstone experience–wherein students in both concentrations team with local producers to design, prototype, source, manufacture, bring to market, and actually sell their own designed and developed apparel.

Along the way, students are purposefully introduced to the fashion industry, design principles, trend research and forecasting, social media practices, textile and apparel identification and evaluation, global fashion history, fashion math, and other essential baseline knowledge and skills.

Curated elective clusters allow students to meaningfully deepen or broaden their studies and/or engagement in areas such as apparel construction, visual merchandising, wearable technology, surface embellishment, costume supervision, and a host of other revolving offerings.

Students are encouraged to minor across the college in programs such as the following in order to further contextualize their study and make themselves more marketable:

• Marketing
• Public Relations
• Journalism
• Business & Entrepreneurship
• Art History

Those teaching in the BA in fashion studies program seek to maximize returns on student intellectual, creative, and practical investment, and are committed to helping graduates enter secure meaningful, fashion-related careers.

As a result of successfully completing program requirements, students should be able to:

• use discipline-appropriate technology in order to navigate the multi-channel global business environment;
• distinguish between consumer and fashion industry decision-making processes;
• identify, analyze and apply elements of design relative to market segmentation;
• evaluate consumer, fashion and design theories in order to propose solutions to existing and potential industry-related problems
• use best practice primary and secondary research to communicate fashion industry-related concepts and solutions;
• understand the evolution of production and consumption in the fashion industry with regard to its impact on human, cultural, and ecological systems; and
• apply the professional skills (organizational, planning, communication, networking, adaptability) necessary to succeed in an entrepreneurial or corporate career.