Parsons History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Parsons focuses on creating engaged citizens and outstanding artists, designers, scholars and business leaders through a design-based professional and liberal education. Its students, the filing says, learn to rise to the challenges of living, working and creative decision making in a world where human experience is increasingly designed, and the school embraces curricular innovation, pioneering uses of technology, collaborative methods and global perspectives on the future of design. That mission statement is worth reading as a claim about scope: Parsons files itself not as a fashion school with other departments attached, but as a design school whose founding idea was that the designed world - the rooms people live in, the garments they wear, the advertising they read - is a single subject worthy of serious teaching.

The Name, Seventh Avenue and a Social Turn

In 1939, nine years after Frank Alvah Parsons' death, the school officially adopted his name. By locating visual beauty in the ordinary things of middle-class American life, the filing credits Parsons himself with virtually inventing the modern concept of design in America: the faculty cared about the spaces people lived in, the garments they wore, the advertising they read, the furniture and tableware they used, and the principles they taught had the effect of democratizing taste and making it available to America on a broad scale. As the modern curriculum developed, many successful designers remained closely tied to the school, and by the mid-1960s Parsons had become, in the phrase this profile preserves, the training ground for Seventh Avenue - New York's garment industry educating its own next generation inside one school.

The social and political upheaval of the late 1960s then challenged several departments, especially Interior Design. Where the curriculum had emphasized middle- and upper-class homes, the program redirected students to more urban and socially conscious projects such as prisons, hospitals and housing for the underprivileged, and the graduating class of 1965 mounted A Place to Live, an exhibition that analyzed substandard urban housing and proposed alternatives. Today, the filing says, every Parsons department shares a commitment to design as both a social responsibility and an intellectual practice. In 1970 the school became a division of the New School for Social Research, now The New School, and the campus moved from Sutton Place to Greenwich Village in 1972, a merger that brought new funding and energy from a fully accredited university.

A Global School Taught by Working Designers

Internationalism has always been an essential ingredient of Parsons' success, the profile insists, and dates it precisely: in 1920 Parsons was the first art and design school in America to found a campus abroad. Parsons also has four affiliate schools in France, South Korea, the Dominican Republic and Japan, which operate independently but embrace Parsons' philosophy and teaching methodology, alongside exchange programs with other art and design schools. At filing, 30 percent of Parsons' students were international, a figure quoted here with its era attached, as a testament to its global reputation for design education excellence. A researcher should keep that percentage in its period rather than quoting it as a current enrollment statistic.

The faculty model is the last distinctive fact in the filing. Since the school's earliest years, the overwhelming majority of its teachers have been professional designers who teach part-time, giving students the advantage of being taught by New York's successful working artists and designers, and its strong ties to industry bring guest lectures and critics into classrooms - historical descriptions name visiting critics including Richard Meier, Donna Karan, Mayer Rus, Arthur Corwin and Paula Scher. In recent years at filing the school had strongly promoted technological skills, from computer graphics and computer-assisted design to interactive multimedia and digital imaging. This page's kept links carry Apparel Search's own education routes onward: fashion schools, fashion schools by location, and the New York fashion schools directory.

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