May 19, 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, Fabio Piras, who’s an educator on fashion’s creative front line, has his say.
“The style is, what is it you’re into? And let’s discuss it, and let’s question that style. How believable is what you actually present? How false is it?” – Fabio Piras
Fabio Piras, course director for MA Fashion at Central Saint Martins, London
Fabio Piras did his BA and MA at CSM before launching his own label, which was BFC’s NewGen recipient from 1995 to 1997. He has also consulted extensively in the industry, including for Tod’s, and was the creative director at Brioni. He took over the leadership of the MA in 2014 following the death of Louise Wilson.
How many students on average are in a cohort?
This year it’s an enormous cohort, with 56 graduating and 46 in the first year.
What are the qualities/skills you look for in your students?
There are several things we can’t teach like motivation, vision, the desire to be part of something and the interest in the subject. Yes, it’s problematic, but you need to love it in order to critique it, or to dismiss it. You need to love it in order to do something about it.
While on the course, do your students develop an aesthetic, style or way of designing or thinking?
I’ve been completely inconsistent in terms of style or aesthetic. The style is, what is it you’re into? And let’s discuss it, and let’s question that style. How believable is what you actually present? How false is it? It’s a composition, a style, it’s the way you put things together.
From your perspective, what are the key challenges facing creative education?
We are still treated as a bundle of extravagant people who do stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. Well, it’s an industry that can bring quite a lot of income. I’m not against the industry but I would like one that understands education better.
How do you equip your students for the rapidly changing world we live in today in terms of economic, climate and political uncertainty?
I don’t want to bring into a project brief a level of assessment that is about addressing carbon footprint as it becomes really suffocating. This doesn’t mean it is not discussed. What makes your design greater is how you think. If you don’t think about the climate horror that we live in every day, about the fact that the planet will become so warm that who cares about winter somewhere? It’s putting it into a level of practice that is important. You’re not a designer if you don’t find solutions.
What are your hopes for your students as they graduate?
It’s making students understand and appreciate the cultural side of what they do, the kind of knowledge they can bring to society through what they do and to respect that it’s not about necessarily following the trail of ‘I’m a designer’. We should be starting to promote the idea of how would you start your own little atelier, your workshop. It’s the same for a filmmaker, a playwright, a novelist. [You need to] understand who your audience is and be part of that, serve a crowd that can start from your friends at college all the way to then becoming some mega name.
Photography by Elliott Morgan and production by Sonya Mazuryk. aken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here.
