Design School: More Than Fashion

When you think of a design school, it's probable that what you have in mind is a school where you learn to create fashions. And of course, there are many such academies, and that is indeed what is meant by the phrase. However, in other institutions of learning, fashion design is regarded as a subset of general creative design. After all, creativity isn't only expressed in the design of clothing and accessories. Therefore, far from being fashion design schools alone, these institutions include other types of design programs as well.

There are many instances of this sort of design school. For example, take Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. This institution is a venerable academy, having been established in 1906. While it definitely offers full-fledged fashion degrees, and has several well known graduates in the fashion world, it offers many other types of programs as well. Other schools of this sort sometimes have words like "technology" in their names, like the Fashion Institute of Technology, created in 1944 in New York. This word hints at just how much human activity is included in the concept of "design."

Along with fashion programs offered by such schools, many other types of design programs are included as well, often as many as thirty different disciplines. For example, these learning institutions may offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in such things as architecture, sculpture, industrial or furniture design, photography, animation, or even robotics. Many schools also include web and digital design in this category as well. A broader design school of this type may include fashion right along with all of these other things, because each one of these programs is equally considered a part of the wider world of design.

So what is the rationale for including fashion as just one of the programs at a broader design school? Doesn't it still make more sense to study fashion design at a school completely devoted to it? One of the benefits of teaching fashion design programs alongside literary programs or degrees in architecture, photography and so on is that as the students interact with each other, each discipline is enriched by the others. While it's entirely acceptable to go to a school that concentrates on one particular form of design, this type of "big tent" approach emphasizes the fact that no human work is done in isolation, and every creative act influences the world far outside its own sphere.

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The same sort of recognition has gradually come to black Americans in the fashion industry as well. Fashion designers like Tracy Reese and Patrick Robinson, both of whom have fashion degrees from Parsons School of Design, have achieved considerable success. Reese has two women's designer labels that have been selling at upscale stores in New York and elsewhere for over a decade.