Fashion Design BA Honours

Course content

What will you study on the BA Fashion Design?

In your first year you will focus on developing technical skills, including pattern cutting and garment making, alongside your creative design skills. In your first project you will learn the techniques behind good shirt design then work on your own shirt-inspired creation. Throughout the year you will keep an online research journal to reflect on fashion in contemporary culture and this will feed into your other projects.

Your second year further develops your technical skills, including a menswear tailoring project and a 2D to 3D translation project where you recreate an outfit by a designer and create a range of your own designs based on this. You will also spend six to eight weeks on a work placement in the run up to London Fashion Week, gaining hands-on experience working for a designer. Our students have recently worked for leading industry names like Burberry, Peter Pilotto, Louise Gray, and Giles Deacon on their placements.

The third year gives you time to focus on the specialisms you have developed over the previous years and hone your skills for your final portfolio of work. Your final collection can be based on anything you are inspired by and there are opportunities to attend masterclasses in working with materials like jersey, leather and fur. The final year of your degree fully prepares you to enter the fashion industry with your own design identity.

Modules

This project runs during the first term and will introduce you to essential, core fashion design skills. It will provide a comprehensive grounding in concept and design development, underpinned with technical workshops exploring basic flat pattern-cutting and garment production skills. You will be introduced to the pattern-cutting studios where much of your work will take place, promoting a culture of studio working practice, fostering discourse and a sense of fashion community.

During the second term, you will explore intermediate flat pattern cutting and garment production skills through a series of technical workshops. Facilitating an understanding of collaborative practice within the fashion industry, you will typically work in teams, either within the programme or with other disciplines, to produce collaborative responses to fashion briefs. You will develop a greater awareness of your own role as a designer within the broader fashion design process, promoting an interdisciplinary experience, cross fertilisation of practice and knowledge transfer.

This module runs year-long. It will introduce you to the visual research skills essential to fashion design, investigating contemporary and historical fashion, through a range of cultural resources including magazines, film, gallery exhibitions and museum collections. You will consider the way in which project work is presented and communicated to an audience through a variety of outputs including social media, printed matter and online content. You will explore ways of organising and presenting your visual research, using digital and traditional methods, such as hand drawing and relevant computer-aided design tools.

Throughout this year long module, we will introduce different ways of looking at and thinking about fashion, providing an introduction to historical sources and narratives as well as key cultural and contextual theories. You will be encouraged to draw connections between fashions from the past and the present to encourage you to understand the rich cultural and social meanings of clothing and adornment in Western traditions. We cover a broad range of visual and material research methodologies, enabling you to be resourceful and explore different archives and historical collections in a hands-on way.

This project will provide you with an opportunity to explore menswear design and garment construction. We expect you to develop innovative, individual responses to personal research through the production of a contemporary menswear collection. During this term 1 project, we will introduce bespoke tailoring techniques, exploring both traditional and contemporary methods. Advanced pattern-cutting workshops relevant to contemporary menswear will underpin the production of your individual project work.

To support you in the identification of possible career networks and areas of employment, this module incorporates a period of work experience within a chosen field of the fashion design industry. Taking place at the beginning of the second term, a six to seven week internship will provide the opportunity to apply the specialist and transferable skills you have acquired so far in a professional setting. You will reflect on your experiences in the workplace through the production of a visual diary of your experiences that will be presented to your peers and tutors on your return to University.

Following your internship in term 2, you will be given a range of opportunities to enable direct engagement with fashion industry practice. We encourage you to consider how your own design practice demonstrates awareness of professional standards and client expectations. You will experience researching, designing and presenting your ideas to a specific client or design company by working on live industry projects and competitions

To build upon the core academic research and communication skills introduced in the Fashion History and Theory project, you will develop your specialist knowledge and understanding of critical issues in contemporary fashion, related to the production, consumption and mediation of fashion as a global aspect of both culture and industry. We will cover key economic, social and theoretical concepts and explore how they influence the material, visual and consumer culture of fashion, challenging dominant historical narratives and unpicking fashion’s mythologies from a global perspective. You will develop your own independent research interests in contemporary fashion culture and industry, and a critical awareness of the fashion industry, helping you to position your creative work in an ethically-informed and culturally competent manner.

This OPTIONAL module allows you to undertake a year-long internship in the fashion industry, returning to undertake take your final year as a fourth year of study. You will utilise an employment experience to provide an insight into the work methods and operation of a fashion business or freelance role in a field of fashion design and production. You will carefully document the experience, engendering an understanding of the principles of reflective practice and their application in a professional context.

This project will allow you to engage with the identification, organisation and development of a substantial, in-depth, self-directed dissertation with a clear and sustained critical argument. We encourage the pursuit of a research topic related to issues explored in your own practice in any area of fashion. You will further develop critical awareness and self-reflection of historical and/or contemporary contexts of your discipline and research topic, building on primary and secondary research skills embedded in Years One and Two and developing your ability to identify, analyse and critically evaluate appropriate sources and research methods.

This module will run throughout your final year, consolidating all previous learning to produce individual and creative fashion responses to personal research and concepts. You will work on negotiated briefs, exploring your own identity, working towards the development and production of your final collection and portfolio through negotiated, self-directed project briefs.

You can find more information about this course in the programme specification. Optional modules are usually available at levels 5 and 6, although optional modules are not offered on every course. Where optional modules are available, you will be asked to make your choice during the previous academic year. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.