Understanding Fashion: From Business to Culture

Curious about how the fashion industry has transformed and shaped Western culture over the last 150 years?

This 4-week course delves into the fashion world and investigates fashion as both a cultural phenomenon and a creative industry.

You’ll explore the interaction between fashion, society and business with top fashion designers and professors from Institut Français de la Mode.

Where does fashion actually come from? You’ll start the course by answering this question and learning about modern fashion and its contemporary relevance.

You’ll explore the rise of the fashion industry during the industrial revolution and evaluate how brands inject modernity into their designs. The course features case studies from top fashion designers such as Chanel and Gucci.

You’ll be thinking about the relationship between fashion and politics, and asking whether fashion designers and brands have the power to be social actors.

You’ll also explore fashion code and the language of fashion, considering whether fashion brands are creative languages.

In your final week, you’ll investigate fashion consumption and develop your understanding of how it works as a social marker and identity construct.

You’ll evaluate what it takes to create and develop a fashion collection, and you’ll look at the intersections between trends, seasonality and innovation.