Pathway outline - Fashion History and Theory

This pathway develops your understanding of the history of western fashion from the Renaissance to the present day, and provides you with a sound theoretical framework within which to analyse that history. The subject's interdisciplinary nature is addressed using a range of methodologies to analyse sources, drawing on approaches from cultural theory, material history and other fields. Fashion is studied as image, object and text. You'll be asked to consider the design, manufacture, promotion and consumption of fashion and to explore these areas within social, historical and cultural contexts.

While this pathway analyses fashion history, it also engages with the contemporary fashion industry. You'll work with students from other fashion pathways on projects that will enrich your understanding of the design process, cut and construction, and communication and promotion to make stimulating connections between theory and practice.

Stage One

This stage lays the foundation for the development of your skills, knowledge and ideas through practical or technical workshops, lectures and seminars. While focusing on the unique aspects of your chosen pathway, Stage One introduces you to related pathways, encouraging you to research, explore and develop individual strengths and approaches.

Stage Two

This stage carries you deeper into your pathway, allowing you to develop a variety of approaches through individual and often experimental responses while acquiring the discipline demanded by professional practice. Through a combination of studio work, formal tutorial guidance, seminars, lectures, external projects, competitions, critiques, personal research, independent study and team projects, you'll explore the breadth of your subjects and develop your individual talents in relation to them. During this stage you'll benefit from the learning experience gained from helping our final year students prepare work for the degree shows.

You may also have the opportunity to go abroad (at your own expense) during this year to visit trade shows or fashion collections relevant to your field of study.

At the beginning of the summer term, students on the four-year programme are involved in the planning and preparation for their work placement. Exceptionally, three-year full-time students may apply to transfer to the four-year mode to do a work placement. Such applications have to be made via the Placement Administrator.

Stage Three

The focus during Stage Three is on the further development of your individuality and independence as you initiate, develop and complete your final degree project. Your course work helps you locate, explore and exploit your strengths while identifying areas that may require further attention or focus.

In the summer term you will show work in a degree examination exhibition.

Cultural Studies

In Stage One you'll attend lectures on a range of cultural themes, including course-specific options and broader aspects of popular culture, art and design. This gives you an opportunity to discuss cultural issues and to develop your communication, research and writing skills through encounters with students from other courses.

Within your cultural studies programme, elective studies complement and underpin your main study area.

In Stage Two you begin work on your degree dissertation research. This allows you to carry out an extended body of research on a subject of your choice in negotiation with your tutor. The dissertation is a written project involving structured analysis of a chosen aspect of visual, textual or spatial culture that is completed in Stage Three. It may be weighted at 20 or 40 credits, balanced with your main study practice. Your dissertation consolidates your research and writing skills, offering you a unique opportunity to develop a cultural study of your own.

Personal and Professional Development, (PPD) helps to prepare you for employment and career development by providing you with skills to enable you to take responsibility for your own learning. The core study of all the fashion pathways also helps develop many of these transferable skills, which play their part in equipping you for a professional career and the generic activities of creative practice.

PPD is integral to BA (Honours) Fashion Communication and is embedded in many aspects of both the studio and cultural studies programmes as a planned part of their structure and learning content. PPD activities take place in all Stages of the degree course and aim to improve your capacity to understand what and how you are learning and to help you to review, plan and take responsibility for your own learning. A considerable number of the skills learned in the academic context of BA (Honours) Fashion Communication have a wider value and use in other areas of life. These transferable skills are highly valued by employers.

Industry collaborations

Working with paying clients on live briefs will give you valuable commercial experience which may mean your work being taken forward for production or, if so desired, in the purchase of your intellectual property. All paid projects are conducted within a carefully developed legal framework, which includes student agreements to protect your work and help you realise its commercial value.

Recent client projects in the Fashion programme include: H&M | Diadora | Pringle | Umbria Cashmere | Philips | Derry - City of Culture 2013 | Dr Martens | Dyloan | Bally | Italian Trade Commission | British Horseracing Authority.

Once you’ve graduated, you may be picked as part of a small team to work on a live creative brief, organised by our Business and Innovation department, under the supervision of an experienced tutor. This can be a valuable first step in working professionally in a chosen discipline and has resulted in graduates being hired by clients.