April 24, 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, Broach, who’s an educator on fashion’s creative front line, has her say.
“It is probably the only fashion MA in the world where the students study metaphysics to understand world-building, as it is the cultural producers – such as designers, writers and artists – who create the ‘song’ a society sings” – Zowie Broach
Zowie Broach, head of programme for MA fashion, Royal College of Art, London
Before she joined the RCA in 2015, Zowie Broach co-founded the influential avant-garde design studio and brand Boudicca with Brian Kirkby in 1997. A deep thinker, her research has ranged from the integration of AI with design to exploring the opportunities and dangers of digital identities in the metaverse.
What is the aim of your course?
At the RCA, there is an importance of being visionary, where thinking about change happens at the deepest level. We ask each of them to show us their connection and realities about the global network of the real, their human network of thought and the relation to digital networks. It is probably the only fashion MA in the world where the students study metaphysics to understand world-building, as it is the cultural producers – such as designers, writers, artists – who create the ‘song’ a society sings. And if you can’t dance to that song then you don’t hear the music.
How many students on average are in a cohort?
It might change in size from 100 to 50. A collective needs each other; they need to feel the edges to remain connected but have space to think quietly, individually.
What are the qualities/skills you look for in your students?
Alchemical, transformative, intuitive, brave and curious.
While on the course, do your students develop an aesthetic, style or way of designing or thinking?
The mercurial mind of a fashion designer is unique. They can offer a catalytic practice that has transferable imaginative intelligence. All we ask is that they disturb those classical rhythms and rhymes, spit bars that make, revolt, sense and continue to change our world in their own language.
What are the key challenges facing creative education?
Fashion is a world that’s often misunderstood, pushed to the bottom philosophically, raised to the top when creating economy and pulled apart – rightly so – when the economies yield destruction, extraction and lack of inclusion. At this point in this century, we are all accustomed to a constant state of change whether geopolitical, societal or technological. So new ways of remaining grounded are required whether as self or education, business, governance or leadership… if we are to use our privilege purposefully.
How do you equip your students for the rapidly changing world we live in today in terms of economic, climate and political uncertainty?
I try to create an environment where they feel safe to break the rules and establish wonder. Enhance and practice skills with obsession and passion and consider negotiation, with love and grace, as possibly the most important skill for their immediate futures.
What are your hopes for your students?
That through the humility of excellence they rise to their dreams, remain confident in themselves and know that whatever they do, wherever they land, they will create change; that they are part of a resonance that came from being together with the guidance of the programme’s team and the wider culture of the RCA. [I hope they] hold within the multi-hyphenate spirit of Theaster Gates, the calm inner force of Angela Davis, the chameleonic call of David Bowie, the visionary inclusion of [software programmer] Audrey Tang and the communal love of Willy Chavarria, as a few that continue to hold us up, teach us all and create the best soil we can all grow from.
Photography by Elliot Morgan and production by Sonya Mazuryk. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here.
