Course Catalog

The course aims to equip students with a knowledge of the fashion cultures that contribute to continued evolution in fashion industry systems, including the characters, business models and other diverse influences that shape fashion.
Using the international fashion calendar as a framework for study, the course will consider the role of fashion as an innovator, in business modeling, planning, communication, market research & analysis and creative entrepreneurialism as well as in the area of product and trend. Students will be encouraged to question how fashion has influenced other parts of the creative industries sector. The course will examine market segmentation and trend scouting in fashion, including an understanding of the influence of local trends on global products, (and vice versa) and the fashion industry's need to quantify trends.
Paris has long been revered as the first fashion city, and retains its position as a vital “research centre” for retailers, brands and designers. Set within a maelstrom of contemporary fashion cultures that include universal blogs and market information overload, Paris offers students an excellent laboratory for a study of the fashion paradigm that will be utilized in this module.
The course offers students an opportunity to examine the synchronicity of multimedia and global cultures with fashion (current forms such as blogs, branding campaigns and viral marketing as well as historic – movies, magazines, art). You are encouraged to develop an understanding of key drivers to the fashion industry machine, from sourcing and manufacturing to design, forecasting and retail. Primary research will form an important part of this course and students will be strongly encouraged to visit shows, trade fairs and stores within a structured line of investigation related to project briefs.

This course analyzes the rhetorical-cultural aspects of global advocacy, such as how to fashion persuasion that speaks to multiple national, ethnic, religious and political audiences about issues of transnational importance and which have the same or similar persuasive goals. Case studies will be used to move back and forth between theory and practice, where studying the practice will inform the theory, and vice-versa. The course will answer important questions for global advocates.

This theory/practice hybrid course will enable students to build a foundation of practical digital skills while critically exploring how they are implemented. Students will develop competence with a selection of data tools and be prepared for greater digital literacy. In parallel, the use of these digital tools will be problematized in relation to recent cultural, economic and political transformations.

This two-part course examines how and why Paris became the center of the contemporary fashion world. In part one, through reading, history and cultural theory and visiting certain key sites in Paris, students will develop an in-depth understanding of a city which is often considered to have been the template for modern urbanism – the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, to use Walter Benjamin’s expression. In part two of the course, the emphasis shifts: the rise of the great couture houses becomes the focus. When did couture emerge, how it transformed in the twentieth century, what is the place of the couture today with the rise of ecological concern with it sustainable fashion? How did the couture house fit in the changing cultural environment in Paris, with wider aesthetic, social and moral concerns? In taking Paris Fashion Template, students will be cognizant with the city’s evolution from the seventeenth century onwards and have strong sense of the business and institutions which did so much in making the city a center what is now a global industry.