Pathways

In the BFA Fashion Design major, you have the opportunity to pursue one of four pathways: Womenswear, Menswear, Fashion Product, and Fashion Textiles. While all of the pathways share many fundamental practices of garment and collection development, research, materiality, and systems thinking, each one focuses on a specific area of fashion design.

Inclusive design is embedded throughout the curriculum. Students work across a range of body types and engage with diverse expressions of gender within their practice, ensuring that technical mastery supports a broad and current vision of what the discipline can be.

The pathways are complemented by program electives in the curriculum. Pathways are informal course groupings within the major, and do not appear on students’ transcripts or diplomas.

Womenswear

The Womenswear pathway develops technically rigorous designers skilled in the construction methods, patternmaking systems, and design conventions specific to womenswear. Students engage the full breadth of the field, from soft dressmaking and draping to structured tailoring, while building the research fluency and visual sensibility they need to articulate a distinct creative point of view, all while engaging with the history and evolving present of the discipline. The pathway invites students to reconsider body, silhouette, and garment in new contexts, pushing beyond convention toward necessary redefinitions of form.

Menswear

The Menswear pathway develops technically rigorous designers skilled in the construction methods, patternmaking systems, and design conventions specific to menswear. Students build a solid foundation in tailoring, shirting, and both structured and unstructured garment making, engaging with the field’s evolving present conditions. Research-driven design is central. Students interrogate and expand the boundaries of the discipline, exploring new narratives of masculinity, dress, silhouette, and identity while grounding their work in precise technical execution.

Fashion Product

The Fashion Product pathway challenges students to expand the definition of what fashion can be. Taking a non-apparel approach to form, sculpture, and the designed object, students investigate fashion at its edges, drawing on traditional making methods alongside technological innovation to produce inventive and unexpected outcomes. Research and process operate as sites of discovery, supporting the development of rigorous and conceptually driven work.

Throughout the pathway, students engage with questions of access, use, and fashion’s relationship to the body and systems of production. Experimental approaches to objects, images, and communication are central, with outcomes spanning material, digital, and experiential forms.

Fashion Textiles

The Fashion Textiles pathway enables the development of a highly specialized practice at the intersection of material innovation and fashion design. With craft and process as primary drivers of design thinking, students explore textile development through dyeing, print, weave, knit, and emerging technologies, generating new possibilities for fashion in relation to the body and beyond. Deep material research is central, informing the development of a garment-based collection while also opening toward unexpected outcomes in both apparel and non-apparel contexts.

Questions of sustainability, labor, and material systems are embedded throughout the curriculum. Students engage critically with how textiles are produced, sourced, and used, developing practices that are both technically inventive and socially aware.