thinkparsons@newschool.edu
212.229.5150
Program Contacts
Anna Lerner-Zwick, Director
Deshon Varnado, Associate Director
What our students, alumni, and faculty are doing in NYC and worldwide
In the Fashion Design major, you have the opportunity to explore four pathways: Collection, Fashion Product, Materiality, and Systems & Society. 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. 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.
The Collection pathway challenges you to consider approaches to body, gender, age, size, and other qualities in order to develop new narratives, definitions, and terminologies within a clearly defined visual aesthetic that goes beyond traditional contexts.
The Fashion Product pathway provides students with the opportunity to build connections between fashion, the body, and habitat. Students learn to use craft methodologies and technological advances including artificial intelligence and augmented reality to develop a range of new fashion-led products developed with function, environmental context, and user in mind. We consider fashion products in the broadest sense, examining societal impact and responsibility, ethics, performance, narrative, and storytelling as conceptual manifestations, locators, social signifiers, and potential platforms for change.
The Materiality pathway enables students to focus on the application of material and textile innovation to fashion design in relation to the body and beyond. Courses are designed to help students generate new possibilities for fashion through the integration of new technologies and sustainable approaches with foundational methods of dying, knit, print, surface treatments, embroidery, and weave while challenging them to explore new fabrication techniques. Hands-on research exploration leading to applied materiality outcomes, including both garments/wearables and non-garment/non-wearable results, are encouraged.
The Systems and Society Pathway challenges students to critically examine how fashion relates to issues facing contemporary society. In this pathway, students explore a range of systems design and critical thinking approaches in order to develop and construct new types of fashion systems and models that can make a positive impact on the world. In the Systems and Society Pathway, emphasis is placed on designing with a deep consideration for human beings in all aspects of the fashion system. Systems and Society asks students to investigate fashion design as part of a system of interrelated components, which may include but are not limited to raw materials, sourcing, technology, labor, production practices and methods, design, garment development and making, media and communication, public distribution, wearers and users, business aspects of fashion, garment and product care, end of life of garment and product, and waste. Students are encouraged to develop deep research methodologies in order to produce diverse outcomes and communicate innovative, speculative proposals for what a fashion system could be.
The New School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.