Fashion

In the MA Fashion programme you will have the opportunity to choose one of three platforms: BIO, DIGITAL 360 or SYSTEMS. These are designed to give students an opportunity to work with tutors and peers to explore themes that responds to their emerging practice and develop new spaces, materials, identities and business models. There are points of intersection where students can engage with peers across platforms. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the School of Design’s interdisciplinary Grand Challenge, which enables all students to work collaboratively to develop projects that anticipate and respond to key societal concerns.

There will be several opportunities to collaborate with others, but at a minimum, your programme will include 239 contact hours and 1561 independent study hours. Contact hours can consist of lectures, seminars, tutorials, critical forums and workshops, among other types of teaching delivery.

Teaching types included on your programme can consist of briefings, projects, tutorials, seminars, lectures, critical forums, technical inductions, technical workshops, offsite visits and blended learning.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

Change Agents: Talk Debate (15 units) is a series of provocations asking you to debate your values and critical thinking about Fashion.

There will be a series of lectures covering gender, culture, race, digital values, design justice, and questioning our relationships to nature, time, space, data, our planet, and ourselves. It will open up further to neuroscience, material hierarchies, and philosophy. 

In parallel to the lectures, there will be a series of seminars based on the talks, where you will be invited to discuss deeper what insights you may have gained, what text you might choose to read and connect with, that will assist establishing your initial questions and research about your MA.

New Perspectives (30 credits) sets out distinct yet interrelated ways you might engage with a developing and changing fashion industry, and will support you in investigating experimental approaches to your practice.  This is a unit to provoke and challenge existing norms about the Fashion industry.

Our future embodied experiences across geographical and temporal scales can be studied in a way that connects both the emotional and the practical elements of Fashion, to bridging between our individual identities and our planet.

The unit looks to reform the dominant fashion paradigm, focused on making clothes (line-up to collection to fashion show) to one that is responsive to environmental concerns, social responsibility, geopolitical and economic challenges. We are now at a critical crossroads.

Term 2

In term 2 all School of Design students will participate in the Grand Challenge (15 credits), School-wide unit. This unit aims to connect and challenge all students in the School by introducing a ‘wicked’ design problem that requires a cross-disciplinary approach to problem-solving involving an external international scientific or industry partner (or both). This unit and lecture series has successfully connected and disrupted disciplines, people, philosophies and approaches to design thinking whilst providing our student body with unique networking opportunities. 

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA (30 credits). This unit aims to support you in meeting the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams on a series of themed projects informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action and help demonstrate the contribution the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Advanced Practise (15 credits) gives space to articulate further your unique perspective, system and aesthetic for Fashion, that may have emerged during your first term and the units completed so far. It will be a time to identify spaces in the landscape that require new responses and consider how Fashion might change behaviours.

This might include non-hierarchical thinking, trans and post-humans, all gender identities, inclusivity with an intersectional breadth, the debate about the position of non-human agency, and taking an open view to economics that includes all and offers alternatives.

Term 3

The Independent Research Project (60 credits) allows you to take responsibility for your practice by developing your own brief. Through the programme, you will have been encouraged to experiment with a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary ideas and practices. Through focused self-study the IRP enables you to apply that learning to a unique project and body of work. While your studies should inform this it should not be seen as fully conclusive; it is an emerging work that is now apparent and unambiguously your own voice as a designer. 

You will be mentored throughout the IRP to help you develop your voice and project. There will also be opportunities to make connections with peers throughout the IRP. A ‘Final Engagement’ will ask professional experts to critique your choices through a series of talks, following a public exhibition.

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.