Fashion

Fashion is designed, articulated, manipulated, and stimulated in both physical and digital spaces. It aims for a state of change, where you are open to new and emerging thinking and to unlearning. It is also at its best when guided by diversity, inclusivity and cultural awareness. We must perceive systems and structures and express our fashion identities with an awareness of how our values are embedded in our outputs.

This programme creates an environment where you can look to reform the dominant fashion paradigm, focused on making clothes (line-up, to collection, to fashion show), to one that is a response to environmental concerns, social responsibility, geopolitical and economic challenges. We are now at a critical crossroads.

Throughout, you will also have the opportunity to reflect upon, discuss and strengthen your own authentic identity, and help others to do the same.

There are points of intersection where you can engage with peers across platforms. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the School of Design’s interdisciplinary Grand Challenge, which enables you to work collaboratively to develop projects that anticipate and respond to key societal concerns.

The programme uses the following learning and teaching methods:

• Briefing: a session that presents key information to students.
• Group Tutorials: a meeting between students and a member of staff to review progress.
• Critiques: a group review of student work.
• Independent study: students studying individually and/or collaboratively without supervision.
• Individual tutorials: a one-to-one meeting between a student and a member of staff to review progress.
• Lectures: presentations delivered to an audience of students.
• Orientations: sessions offering students an overview of a service and how to access it.
• Seminars: themed group discussions between a group of students and a member of staff.
• Technical inductions: a session that enables students to use technical facilities safely and responsibly.
• Negotiated technical learning: a scheduled session providing technical support for a specific student project.
• Technical workshops: interactive group sessions that focus on the development of a particular technical process or skill.
• Workshop: interactive group sessions that focus on the development of a particular process or skill.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

• Change Agent commences with provocations by existing disruptors and advocates of urgent territories who ask you to debate your own values and critical thinking about Fashion. The talks for the Change Agent unit include:
  • Waste Lands - identifying local and global understanding of Fashion’s wastelands.
  • Inclusion and Accessibility - designing for those with visible and/or invisible disabilities.
  • Digital Dignity - debate the economisation of self and the digitized aesthetic self. In parallel to the lectures, there will be a series of seminars based on the talks, where you will be invited to discuss any deeper insights you may have gained, and what text you might choose to read and connect with. This will assist you in establishing your initial questions and research about your MA.
• Change Perspective is a progression from Change Agent where we continue to provoke and challenge existing norms about the Fashion industry.
  • Our future embodied experiences across geographical and temporal scales can be studied in a way that connects both the emotional and the practical elements of Fashion, to bridging between our individual identities and our planet.
  • The unit looks to reform the dominant fashion paradigm, focused on making clothes (line-up to collection to fashion show) to one that is responsive to environmental concerns, social responsibility, geopolitical and economic challenges. We are now at a critical crossroads.
  • These areas are intended to stimulate contemporary thinking. How do we lead in Fashion when we cannot always see the consequences of our decisions? Community work, co-creation led by prototyping through iteration is expected, all informed by discussion and debate.
  • This should be seen as emerging work that begins to express your voice as a designer of a future ecology of Fashion design.

Term 2

In Term 2 all School of Design students will participate in the Grand Challenge, School-wide unit. The aim of this unit is to connect and challenge all students in the School through the introduction of a ‘wicked’ design problem that requires a cross disciplinary approach to problem solving which may involve external international partners. This unit and lecture series has been hugely successful in connecting and disrupting disciplines, people, philosophies and approaches to design thinking whilst providing our student body with very unique networking opportunities.

• Advanced Practice gives space to further articulate your unique perspective, system and aesthetic for fashion, that may have emerged during your first term and the units completed so far. It will be a time to identify spaces in the landscape that require new responses, and to consider how fashion might change behaviours.
  • In this time, we would ask that you to reflect on your decisions as we live and are being asked to approach fashion and our identities within a culture that is multi-layered, multi-dimensional, globally complex on socio economic levels, in a world that has varying and changing principles. How might we develop new levels of fashion? That leads on a pluralistic level, aware of the ethics of contracts and cultures both in very real ways, as well as the hyper-connected, digitized visions being laid down.
  • This might include non-hierarchical thinking, trans & post-humans, all gender identities, inclusivity with an intersectional breadth, debate about the position of non-human agency, taking an open view to economics that includes all and offers alternatives.

Terms 1 & 2

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA. This unit aims to support you to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College.

These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 3

The Independent Research Project (IRP) is an opportunity for each student to take responsibility for their practice by developing their own brief. Through the programme, you will have been encouraged to experiment with a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary ideas and practices.

Through focused self-study the IRP enables students to apply that learning to a unique project and body of work. While this should be informed by your studies it should not be seen as fully conclusive; it is an emerging work that is now apparent and unambiguously your own voice as a designer.

Students will be mentored throughout the IRP to help them develop their voice and their project. There will also be opportunities to make connections with peers throughout the IRP. A ‘Final Engagement’, will ask professional experts to critique your choices through a series of talks, post a public exhibition.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.