This innovative program has trained five generations of designers who have shaped the global industry. Employing design thinking and creative problem-solving strategies, you explore form, silhouette, material, and process — including social and environmental imperatives — to create beautiful, sustainable, and responsible fashion for a complex and evolving field. You are encouraged to explore the broadest contexts and applications of the field.
This program is part of Parsons' School of Fashion. Learn about the BFA Fashion community to see what students, faculty, and alumni are doing in NYC and around the world at parsons.edu/bfafashion.
Fashion Fundamentals
Offered both in New York City and at Parsons Paris, the holistic design-led curriculum encompasses concept and research through 2D, 3D, and 4D processes. You learn to balance hand-making and digital skills with an integrated approach to design, which hones your technique as you refine your creative vision. Core courses emphasize self-discovery, and the curriculum includes instruction in visual communication strategies and material research and employs a systems thinking approach to fashion. In art and design history and theory courses as well as related studio classes, you acquire essential research, writing, and critical reasoning skills while developing conceptual foundations for creative inquiry. Electives in subjects including business and media studies broaden your understanding of the industry and the cultural contexts of making.
Refine Your Craft
Your senior-year thesis is self-proposed and provides you with the opportunity to express your design philosophy in one of many formats, including a collection of garments or fashion products, material research, a written exploration of fashion-related social and cultural contexts, a documentary film, or a fashion presentation. Professional faculty, lecturers, and critics engage with you on creative, intellectual, and practical levels while external collaborative projects develop your design sensibility in an industry-focused context. Past partners include LVMH, Kering, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Gianfranco Ferré, Swarovski, Coach, and Luxottica.
Pathways
In this major, you will have the opportunity to explore four pathways: Collection, Materiality, Fashion Product, and Systems & Society. These pathways are designed to enable you to develop a specialized, differentiated approach to fashion design that resonates with your personal interests. 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 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. The Materiality pathway enables you to focus on the application of material and textile innovation to fashion design. Courses aim to help you generate new possibilities for fashion through the integration of new technologies and sustainable approaches with foundational methods of dyeing, knit, print, and weaving. 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. The Systems & Society pathway challenges you to critically assess fashion relates to contemporary issues facing society. In this pathway, you will explore how to use human-centered, systems design approaches in order to develop and actually construct new types of fashion systems and models that can make a positive impact on our world.
Future Opportunities
After completing the Fashion Design program, 89 percent of graduates found employment in the first year and 11 percent went on to other endeavors. You graduate ready to play a variety of roles within the professional field of fashion, including design, creative and research practice, styling, visual merchandising, textiles, marketing and public relations, and production.