Fashion Schools

A school is an institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. A fashion school teaches subjects relevant to clothing, footwear, textiles, fashion design and other fashion industry topics — and for students serious about working in the apparel industry, it is the standard first step.

Levels of Fashion Education

In North America the term school can refer to any educational institution at any level: preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, university and graduate school. Fashion is taught in some high schools, but students serious about the apparel industry typically attend fashion schools at the undergraduate or graduate level. Undergraduate education is the post-secondary education before postgraduate study, including all academic programs up to a bachelor's degree; students of higher degrees are graduates.

Fashion schools teach courses in fashion design, fashion merchandising, fashion business management, textile design, fashion marketing and more — the creative, technical and commercial crafts of the industry taught as connected disciplines rather than as a single design course.

Choosing Where to Study

Location shapes a fashion education because the industry is concentrated in particular cities. The fashion schools by location directory linked from this page organises the search geographically, and two city summaries go deeper: fashion schools in California, with its Los Angeles industry base, and fashion schools in New York City, home to the Fashion Institute of Technology — which also has its own summary linked here, alongside the fashion high schools summary for younger students.

Guides to the best and top fashion schools, the About Fashion Schools term page and the best fashion colleges guide, all linked from this page, help compare institutions. Fashion education has never been so fashionable — the remaining task is matching a school's strengths to the career a student actually wants.

Questions to Ask Any Fashion School

A prospective student can compare any two schools with the same short set of questions. What will I actually make, write or analyse in the first year — the answer reveals whether a program is studio-led, business-led or theory-led. Who teaches: working practitioners, full-time academics, or a mixture, and in what proportion? What happens between terms — internships arranged by the school, industry projects, or a summer left entirely to the student? And where do graduates work two years out, in which roles? Schools that answer those questions with named companies and real course lists are describing an education; schools that answer with atmosphere are describing a brochure. The location directories and best-school guides linked from this page supply the long lists; these questions shorten them. Fashion education is fashionable, as this page notes, precisely because the industry hires — and the schools worth attending are the ones that can show, concretely, the door from their classrooms into that industry.