Pathways

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.

View examples of student work from each pathway.

Collection

The Collection pathway challenges you to consider approaches to body, gender, age, and size in order to develop new narratives, definitions, and terminologies within a clearly defined visual aesthetic beyond traditional contexts.

Fashion Product

The Fashion Product pathway provides you with the opportunity to build connections between fashion and lifestyle, embracing craft methodologies and technological advances inclusive of AI and AR to develop a range of new products considering function, environmental context, and user needs.

Materiality

Enables you to focus on the application of material and textile innovation to fashion design in relation to the body and beyond. Courses aim to help you 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 you to explore new fabrication techniques. Deep hands-on research exploration towards applied materiality outcomes including both garments/wearables and non-garment/non-wearable outcomes are encouraged.

Systems & Society

The Systems & Society pathway challenges you to critically engage how fashion relates to contemporary issues facing society. In this pathway, you explore a diverse range of systems design and critical thinking approaches in order to develop and actually construct new types of fashion systems and models that can make a positive impact on our world. Emphasis is placed on designing with a deep consideration for human beings in all aspects of the fashion system.

Systems & Society opens up new opportunities for you to engage as a fashion designer across the entire value chain with an emphasis on circularity. You explore interdisciplinary methods to address specific design challenges in society and are encouraged to develop deep, empirical research methodologies in order to generate diverse types of outcomes and communicate innovative, speculative proposals for what new types of fashion systems could be.