MA Footwear

This MA course will provide students with a unique creative and technical platform to develop their own unique personal interest and methodology through design and technical skills, as well as their individual conceptual and critical thinking. The course aims to explore the link between the impossible and the achievable, to challenge aesthetics, to question function and challenge the discipline in order to redefine it.

We seek to recruit students from a wide variety of design and cultural backgrounds who will be a unique force of free-thinkers who challenge boundaries, within a laboratory of experimentation and investigation. This will include both graduates and practitioners from within industry with previous knowledge and skills in the area of footwear design, and self-motivated individuals with relevant materials and technology-based skills who look to challenge themselves.

Building on a wealth of knowledge and machinery heritage, the course puts an emphasis on the footwear tradition and craft that the Cordwainers heritage embodies, but also actively explores and questions technologies and materials of the future through availability of the latest technology. In this environment students will build on their previous background knowledge and skills to create innovative footwear, extending existing norms both conceptually and technologically, through either bespoke handcrafted or mass production manufacturing. The outcome of this can be commercial, innovative, radical, conceptual and/or avant-garde; students are challenged to respond in an innovative way not to what footwear is, but instead to look to what it can be.


Course Structure

15 months - 4 terms - Level 7 - 180 credits

Term One

• Creative and Technical Innovation (40 credits)
• Research Methods (20 credits)

Term Two

• Collaborative Unit (20 credits) - find out more
• Technical Analysis and Development (40 units)

Terms Three and Four

• Masters Project (60 credits)
• Travelling across London

The renowned London College of Fashion library is at our John Prince’s Street site, and you will need to travel to this site, and possibly others, during your course to use the library, which is open seven days a week in term time, and for tuition and special events.


Course structure

The information outlined is an indicative structure of the course. Whilst we will aim to deliver the course as described on this page, there may be situations where it is desirable or necessary for the University to make changes in course provision, for example because of regulatory requirements or operational efficiencies, before or after enrolment. If this occurs, we will communicate all major changes to all applicants and students who have either applied or enrolled on the course.

Please note that due to staff research agreements or availability, not all of the optional modules listed may be available every year.
In addition, the provision of course options which depend upon the availability of specialist teaching, or on a placement at another institution, cannot be guaranteed. Please check this element of the course with the course team before making a decision to apply.