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:
- apply discipline-appropriate technology in order to navigate the multi-channel global fashion and retail business environment;
- utilize mathematical, financial, and data literacy in apparel and retail applications;
- distinguish between consumer and fashion industry decision-making processes;
- analyze and apply elements of design relative to customer market segmentation;
- identify and propose innovative solutions to current and future industry-related problems;
- communicate fashion industry-related concepts and solutions leveraging best practice primary and secondary research;
- think critically about the impact of production and consumption habits on human, cultural, and ecological systems in the fashion industry;
- apply the professional skills (adaptability, communication, networking, organizational, planning, and teamwork) necessary to succeed in evolving career pathways; and
- understand concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the ways in which they apply to the fashion and retail industries.
