March 31, 2026 |
There’s no shortage of creative talent spilling out of fashion studios around the world. Most of it comes from a handful of fashion schools whose professors and practitioners are responsible for hand-picking and nurturing the graduates who will help to shape an industry equipped for an increasingly uncertain future. It’s challenging. The professors we talked to for this feature – from Antwerp to Johannesburg – share similar concerns, such as fashion degrees not being sufficiently funded or taken seriously, despite the industry’s importance both culturally and economically. They worry about students losing the ability to touch, in a literal sense, having information overload and not having spaces to express their creativity after they graduate. And there is also the issue of finance.
A master’s in London costs between £30-40,000 per year once you factor in the fees, living costs and materials. That’s why the Royal College of Art introduced a one-year master’s course in 2023. Some academic institutions in Europe are more accessible. The University of Vienna, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, aka HTW (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft), are all free or you’ll pay minimal fees to attend, with extraordinary educators and practitioners at the helm. Imagine! At HTW, you could be taught by Professor Hussein Chalayan. At the University of Vienna, Prof Craig Green will be guiding you through your fashion design tutorials.
“My area of specialty is innovation, sustainability and cultural identity,” says Chalayan, who has been at HTW Berlin since 2019 teaching across its BA and MA courses. “Right now, there are great state universities in Europe,” he says. “Lots of students who don’t have money deserve a place but can’t afford to study. The best art, music and fashion never came from money.” In London, the course leader for MA Fashion at Central Saint Martins, Fabio Piras, says: “The struggle is part of artistic practice.” But he questions why the industry isn’t more supportive of the education of the talent it ultimately benefits from. CSM’s MA course currently has just five scholarships, down from 12 pre-Covid.
As an academic myself, responsible for the BA Fashion Communication Journalism pathway at Central Saint Martins, I can vouch for the fact that working in creative education is an education in itself. Despite the 16 years that Liliana Sanguino, of the Parsons School of Design, has spent at the forefront of fashion education, she is still learning. As a Colombian who has built a career in London and now New York, and who collaborates with Indigenous trans communities in Colombia, she says she needs “a definition of fashion that is wide enough to hold all these worlds. I encourage students to do the same: to question, to expand and to define fashion through their own perspective, culture and lived experience. Without that, creative education risks producing designers who can replicate existing systems but not imagine new ones.” Here, Brandon Wen, who’s an educator on fashion’s creative front line, has his say.
“It’s about what is it that you’re doing or saying that isn’t already being said; your vision needs to be not only very strong, but also very personal” – Brandon Wen
Brandon Wen, creative director, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Los Angeles-born Brandon Wen is a fashion designer and performance artist who trained at Cornell University before arriving at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. He succeeded Walter Van Beirendonck as creative director of the fashion department in 2022.
How many students on average are in a cohort?
In the master’s, it’s 17.
What are the qualities/skills you look for in your students?
Generally, we don’t accept a lot of people who haven’t done the bachelor’s [degree] here, because the master’s is only one year. It ends up being a consulting sort of year. For the people we take, it’s personality and character, like if you look at a portfolio and there’s a clear point of view.
While on the course, do your students develop an aesthetic, style or way of designing or thinking?
It’s about what you’re doing or saying that isn’t already being said; your vision needs to be not only strong, but also personal. We’re over the top. So sometimes it’s hard for more minimalist profiles. But it’s not because we’re anti-minimalism. We expect a certain level of intensity and richness in the design. There need to be details that are well thought out. But it’s about having a strong personal identity and making what isn’t already made.
What are the key challenges facing creative education?
As politics gets more conservative, everything gets tighter, less flexible… sometimes modern thinking can hurt a certain freedom that is creativity. And by that, I mean the vagueness of not defining everything as it is. It’s not a ‘crack the whip’ education anymore. You demand and expect a lot, but you’re also guiding them. It’s important that while you are adapting to sensitivities, you also understand there needs to be a challenge, because if there’s no challenge, they don’t grow. In the first year, I have a strict rule about drawing, it must be in a book or on paper. They can try things out digitally if they want. But what I’m looking at in class, it has to be done by hand. If the student is presenting with an iPad, for example, they can show different options. They can undo if they’ve forgotten something, they can Google, search it and pull it in; so many things happen that aren’t decisions, just options. When you draw it in your book and you paint it red, you’ve chosen that red, and you have to live with that choice. It demands more from you when it has to be physically there and your choice, your decision-making skills, actually grow, because then you say, “Okay, shit, I drew this horrible red. I know next time I have to do it differently.”
What are your hopes for your students as they graduate?
I would love to see space created for them. Because you have a lot of students who are talented and artistic and sensitive, and if they were to just go for a brand and make technical drawings, it would be such a depressing end for them. Is there a space where they could work or what brands can they work for? Should we have better relationships with them? Are there incubators we need to know about? I want them to be able to find the space to be the creatives that they are here.
Photography by Lalo + Eva and production by Sonya Mazuryk. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here.
