Parsons The New School for Design - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

Current programs, admissions and faculty information are on the Parsons website at The New School, linked above. There is no shop box on this page: Parsons is a school, not a retailer, and it sells no products through consumer marketplaces. The school today operates as Parsons School of Design - the longer 'Parsons The New School for Design' name carried in this page's web address was its branding from 2005 to 2015 - and it remains in Greenwich Village, where the campus moved in 1972, teaching across art and design disciplines to a student body drawn from around the world. Its founding claims, all set out in full on the history page, still define it: the first fashion design program, the first campus abroad by an American art and design school (Paris, 1921, in the school's own historical record), and a faculty model built on working designers teaching part-time.

The history begins in 1896, when Parsons was a forerunner founded as the Chase School, named after American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase, who led a small group of Progressives who seceded from the Art Students League of New York in search of freer, more dramatic and individual expression. In 1904, Frank Alvah Parsons joined Chase, and six years later he became the school's president. Anticipating a new wave of the Industrial Revolution, Parsons predicted that art and design would soon be inexorably linked to the engines of industry. His vision was borne out in a series of firsts for the school kept here: the first program in Fashion Design, the first program in Interior Design, and the first program in Advertising and Graphic Design, each of which has profoundly impacted American life.