MA Fashion: Design
MA Fashion: Design at CSVPA is an intensive, contemporary and personalised postgraduate programme which encourages the development of an individual approach to fashion design practice and the articulation of a distinctively value-driven vision. Working within the interdisciplinary and conceptually informed environment of the Graduate School, you will develop the professional skills, confidence and creative focus necessary to embark on a career within contemporary fashion.
The course welcomes applicants with interests across diverse aspects of contemporary fashion design, including approaches to integrating circular economy, collaboration and craft practice, novel approaches to sustainable fashion, concepts of cultural hybridity in fashion, as well as experimentation in the field of digital fashion.
UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES AT THE CSVPA GRADUATE SCHOOL
This programme offers outstanding specialist tuition combined with extensive academic contact and studio access. As a Master’s student you benefit from:
- Expert tuition from industry-active professional designers, artists, visual communicators and researchers, with unrivalled understanding of contemporary art and design practices, the importance of visual intelligence and experimental approaches to learning, and a passion for sharing their knowledge and skills.
- Imaginative and contemporary project briefs, which prioritise experimental practical approaches, and which are underpinned by research-led conceptual understanding.
- Unique opportunities to engage in creative collaborations with Academic Faculty, Departments, Colleges, Doctoral Researchers and Undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge.
- Exclusive access to contemporary creative industry expertise, by means of workshops, talks and projects, as well as the opportunity to participate in a competitive internship scheme in partnership with Hearst Magazines UK, publisher of titles including Digital Spy, ELLE, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle Decoration.
- Intensive learning experiences tailored to your needs and ambitions, with high levels of personalised support and extensive 1:1 tutorial time.
- A postgraduate qualification that will help you to gain distinctiveness and further your creative and professional ambitions.
- Collaborating with a creative, interdisciplinary and global postgraduate community, developing individual skills in a sharing and collective context.
- Studio workspace, accessible every day of the week.
- Access to specialist art and design resources.
- A small, supportive and specialist creative arts college in a beautiful, historic and cultural city—a creative hotspot and home to one of the UK’s most dynamic and international student communities.
RESOURCES & FACILITIES
All students on our MA programmes have access to a wide range of resources to support their studies and the hybrid nature of contemporary practice across art and design including:
- Industrial sewing machines and technical support from garment technicians and specialist pattern cutters.
- Digital Media hardware and technical support, including A3 scanner.
- Photography studios and access to analogue darkroom facilities.
- Wood, metal, and ceramics 3D workshops and technical support.
- Unlimited access to professional TaskAlpha A3 photocopier/printer
- Prototype Lab (including 3D printer and laser-cutter).
- Industrial sewing machines and technical support from garment technicians.
- Additional Learning Support
THE AWARD
“The Hearst work placement helped broaden my skills and showed me what career opportunities I could pursue after I graduate”
Cristina – MA Fashion
VIDEO
HIGHLIGHTS
OVERVIEW
Course Location
Cambridge
Course Length
1 year (3 semesters)
Course Start
September
Tutor Support
Specialist tutor support available 5 days a week.
Studio Access
Students have access to our studios 7 days a week, from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, Monday to Friday, and 9:00 am to 5:00 pm at weekends.
Awarding Body
Falmouth University
How your Work is Assessed
Visual, material and written assignments and projects.
Guest Lecturers
Visiting Lecturers, drawn from a variety of relevant industry and academic contexts, deliver a series of presentations that help you to situate your own hopes and ambitions for the future.
How we Teach
Throughout this course, students will be taught through specialist workshops, guest lecturers, project briefings, regular 1:1 and group tutorials.
English Language
Up to 5 hours per week if required
Progression
Fashion Designer, Fashion Curator, Creative Pattern Cutter, Fashion Design Lecturer, Fashion Technician, PhD
Careers
Previous students have gone on to work at Goblin Animation, Esquire Magazine, Vivienne Westwood, Fashion Crossover, Wyre, Gorilla TV, and many other companies within the creative industries
ENTRY
Age
20 years +
Educational Level
Successful completion of an Undergraduate Degree in an art & design, or related subject, and/or professional relevant experience. Students who do not meet these entry requirements will still be considered on their own individual potential to succeed, as well as any evidence of prior experiential learning.
English Level for International Students
IELTS 6.5+ (no element under 5.5)
Portfolio & Personal Statement
See below for more details.
STRUCTURE
STUDY BLOCK 1 / AUTUMN TERM
Study Block 1 helps you build your knowledge of the essential skills in your chosen area of art or design, establishing the confidence to try out new ways of thinking through new ways of making.
In your first term, you will be assigned a series of imaginative briefs designed to stimulate your creativity and help you develop the ingenuity and resilience that professional art and design practices require. You will deepen your understanding of research methods for creative inquiry, and examine the values that motivate you, as well as participate in a series of technical and conceptual Labs, designed to help drive your creativity. There will be additional opportunities to exhibit your work, engage cross-course collaborations and external live briefs. An understanding of the concept of Artistic Transfer will assist you in engaging in creative collaborations with researchers at the University of Cambridge. You will also begin to outline a self-directed project proposal, which will ultimately develop into your Independent Major Project.
This module promotes experimental approaches to design practice. We will begin by working together during a diagnostic phase to assess your skills, experience and ambitions, and create a personalised approach to your learning. You will build your knowledge of essential skills and core knowledges relevant to fashion design practice.
You will reflect on and implement concept generation, where ideas come from, and how our physical engagement with materials and methods informs both our knowledge and the direction of the creative process.
You will undertake a series of individual and collaborative projects that help you strengthen your understanding, develop your own creative and visual language, and explore new methods and materials, both traditional and contemporary. Group and individual project briefs will provide the supportive structure for practical activities that interrogate the ideas and influences at play in creative problem-solving.
In this module you will learn alongside artists, designers and visual communicators from across our MA programmes. You will develop advanced research skills and methods, understand the importance of primary and secondary research, analysis of objects, images and texts, develop your critical thinking, and build confidence with academic study skills and conventions needed for successful study at postgraduate level.
You will go on to apply these skills to research projects that explore the theoretical landscape of contemporary creative practice, underpinning your work with an understanding of the values that motivate your work. You will examine case studies from a variety of different disciplines that make use of current critical methodologies, which may include archives and collections, design activism, institutional critique, collaboration, participation and co-design, material and object studies, culture jamming, hacking and disruptive design, and identity, ethnography and auto-ethnography, as the dynamic research tools through which concepts are created, analysed and critiqued.
STUDY BLOCK 2 / SPRING TERM
Study Block 2 looks to the future, and helps you develop a focus for your practice.
As you continue to develop your own creative practice, exhibiting your work in a work-in-progress showcase, you will also begin to address how artists and designers need to be engaged in forging the future of their respective fields, as well as integrating enterprise as part of your practice. You will explore your own ideas through interactions with students on other MA courses and receive support in developing and writing a professional context report, tailored to helping you to further your professional ambitions. A partnership with Hearst UK affords unique insights into working in the creative industries, as well as the chance to compete for further work-based opportunities in the organisation, by means of developing a response to a creative brief assigned by a department at Hearst. Visiting practitioners bring their own expertise and unique perspectives into the Graduate School. You are encouraged to develop the ability to communicate your creative intentions and critical understanding by a variety of contemporary methods and approaches, as you move towards the final stages of the course.
This module gives you the opportunity to put into practice what you learned last term, focusing your ideas and ambitions and pursue an individual direction.
Interdisciplinary dialogues set up in Semester 1 are continued through regular crits and project reviews with tutors and peers, engaging all students in critical discussion and sharing of fashion design and related knowledge.
To build your portfolio, you have the opportunity to take part in live and industry projects, and you are encouraged to build a public profile for your practice or brand. These briefs will help you build an autonomous approach to independent enquiry-based projects that form the heart of the module. Through self-initiated projects you will develop your independent thinking, problem-solving and problem-setting skills, enabling you to show real engagement with current issues and critical or theoretical contexts that shape your design practice. You will apply your subject knowledge, research skills and critical enquiry to propose an original inquiry-led project that responds to, or challenges, contemporary issues, situations and questions encountered on the course, engaging appropriate critical methodologies to identify a contemporary question or issue, in-so-doing focusing on a defined area of fashion design practice as a ‘testing ground’ for your Independent Major Project next term.
Your position as an emerging designer will be strengthened through Creative Futures, in which you will work with other MA students to explore art and design in a social context, exploring the critical, technological, environmental, geo-political and ethical issues that impact on contemporary creative practice—and the ways in which artists and designers today are responding to the challenges we face today, while speculating about what tomorrow may bring.
As part of this module, you will have the opportunity apply for a period of work experience (including a competitive opportunity offered by our partner Hearst Magazines UK). Alternatively, you will identify a professional context relevant to your ambitions, designing a professional or industry-facing project around your own emerging creative practice. By building on your engagement with the contemporary professional practice of your discipline and the exploratory projects you have completed, you will have the confidence to finalise the development of a proposal for your final Master’s project, to be realised in Study Block 3.
STUDY BLOCK 3 / SUMMER TERM
During this semester, all your attentions turn to the research, development, and production of your Independent Major Project. A student-led symposium helps you to underpin your creative activity with conceptual understanding, resulting in the writing of a critical rationale, which reflects upon the implications, consequences and impacts of your project. The year ends with an exhibition showcase of your projects and the co-creation of an exhibition catalogue, both of which celebrate the end of an intensive period of creative, conceptual, critical, and professional development.
In the final stage of the programme, over the summer term, you will focus on your final Master’s project that gives you the freedom to take your design practice in your own individual direction. This is the culmination of the course, and the opportunity for you to develop and exhibit an inquiry-based independent project, evidencing all of the practical, conceptual and professional learning throughout the year.
You will lead the project, but you will be supported and facilitated throughout the journey, with regular group seminars, 1:1 tutorials and technical support, to help you realise your final outcomes that evidence the depth of your research and your professional skills and expertise.
We encourage you to think about the dissemination of your work, building relationships with your audience and/or future customers and developing your online presence or personal brand. You will also be supported in perfecting a professional portfolio that serves your design ambitions for the future.
The MA culminates in a group showcase and catalogue, in which you will consider the professional and public presentation of your final projects, working together to design and promote a public event and publication that celebrate the end of your postgraduate studies, and which mark your next step towards your creative future.
Past Independent Major Projects have included: fashion collections, publications; digital campaigns; performances and experimental workshops; fashion magazine concepts; fashion and accessory designs; participatory installations; social campaigns; interactive designs; charity campaigning; projects developed for digital fashion and augmented and virtual reality technologies; experimental fashion practice; fashion branding projects.
The course provides you with a dedicated context to develop a bespoke strategy for your professional development, including applying for opportunities such as work experience, finding mentorships, residencies, or internships, helping you to develop industry contacts, build your CV, develop your creative portfolio, and to prepare you for work in a variety of roles in the cultural and creative industries, as well as establishing an independent art or design practice.
Our collaboration with industry partner, Hearst UK, is a distinctive feature of the second term of the course. Through an initial series of industry-related talks, curated by Hearst, and open to all students, Hearst employees provide invaluable perspectives on employment in the post-pandemic creative industries. Then, each year sees a different department at Hearst setting a competitive creative brief, resulting in an invitation to our MA students to pitch their creative responses to the brief in one of the boardrooms at House of Hearst, in Central London. A panel of Hearst creatives selects their favourite responses, and the shortlisted students then progress to a second stage of scheme, during which they spend some time at Hearst. The final stage is the opportunity to apply for a paid internship at Hearst. Whilst the scheme is not a guarantee of further engagement with Hearst, previous students have gone on to further work experiences with Hearst across departments at Esquire, ELLE, Red, and ELLE Ukraine, Digital Spy, the Hearst Accreditation teams, as well as other departments. These experiences, and the perspectives arising from them, have helped previous students develop lasting professional contacts.
Students may additionally identify their own limited period of work experience whilst on the course, during Study Block 2, which then forms the basis for the writing of a professional context report. This is also a means of developing working relationships with potential industry partners. Previous students have arranged periods of work experience with fashion design studios or developed other strategies for entering the industry.
In addition, you will gain insight into industry through competitions, external projects and opportunity to engage in live briefs. Our art & design collaborations with the University of Cambridge provide unique opportunities for our students to engage with a range of opportunities to add this prestigious educational context to their CVs. Successful application to the Cambridge Creative Encounters scheme sees MA students receiving funding for developing art and design collaborations with University of Cambridge researchers. Our programme of talks by visiting practitioners and theorists has included Yvonne Nitmoah, Bel Jacobs, Vicky Keeble; Bethany Williams; Jane Bennetts; Holly McQuillan, and Orsola de Castro of Fashion Revolution,
MA Fashion: Design students also benefit from attending other talks, from interdisciplinary artists and theorists. Recent examples: Professor Timotheus Vermeulen; Futurologist Anne-Lise Kjaer; Inter-disciplinary fine artist, Alison Gibb; Elana Jeeaoo, Senior Visual Designer at Zoe; Daniel Lismore; Antonio Arocho, 3D Digital Designer; and Rifke Sadleir and Dan Baragwanath, digital designers at DXR Zone.
The course provides students with the experience and expertise to pursue career possibilities in the expanding creative industries and cultural sector in the UK and worldwide.
Career advice is embedded throughout the programme. Teaching is provided by a team of experienced and industry-active staff and supported by Visiting Lecturers in practice and/or industry, working in the fields of fashion design practice and education, fashion design, graphic design, digital media and communications, photography, illustration, fine art, curating and criticism, craft and product design and design research.
PORTFOLIO & PERSONAL STATEMENT
Portfolio
A portfolio of work showing personal work, schoolwork, finished and prepared is required for this course. Your portfolio is the chance to show us your skills and your passion. Download our guide to see what we look for in a portfolio.
Personal Statement
Please submit a short statement (300-400 words), telling us about yourself, your previous experience and your approach to creative practice. Please include:
- Reasons for applying to our MA course.
- Experience and skills. What were you doing before? What are you doing now?
- Your approach to art/design practice. What inspires, informs, and influences what you do—and why? What values underpin your creative desires?
- What you hope to get out of the experience of studying for a Master’s.
- Your long-term ambitions. How do you think the postgraduate study will help you develop a career in the creative industries?
PORTFOLIO GUIDE
What We Look for in an Portfolio guide, to prepare fully for your audition at CSVPA.
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Currently pulls postgraduate family, to test filtering of this module.
TALK TO US
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