BA (Hons)Fashion and Beauty Media

Core modules

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis introduces students to creative exploration through hands-on, practice-led workshops and foundational research skills. As your first university experience, this module builds confidence, community, and creative identity while allowing broad experimentation. You'll develop practical abilities, understand research-informed practice, and produce a portfolio demonstrating progression across diverse creative disciplines.

Utopia and Dystopia

In this module you'll be introduced to the creative challenges of communicating ideas within contemporary art and design through a themed, practice-led project where you'll develop concepts through hands-on research, experimentation and visual exploration, mirroring real-world creative processes. By engaging with techniques such as mark-making, surface design, mood-boarding and contextual investigation, you'll build the foundational skills and confidence needed for specialist study.

Creative Industries Launchpad

In this module, you'll collaborate with students on other creative foundation years. You'll begin to explore the professional world of creative practice via an introduction to the soft and hard skills that cut across the creative industries, by investigating future pathways and opportunities, and by kickstarting a personal narrative about your own role in the creative industries sector.

Creative Showcase

As the final module on the foundation programme, this module showcases the diversity of creative skills represented across the creative foundation courses and gathers these skills together in the end-of-year showcase. You will use your specific skillset to contribute to this overall project - cross-disciplinary collaboration is encouraged. The showcase is your opportunity to share your project with key partners and celebrate your contributions with their fellow creative foundation students.

Core modules

The Visual Storyteller

This module enables you to master the foundational, visual, and editorial workflows required for producing engaging fashion and beauty media editorials. You'll develop core photography and design skills and integrate short-form feature journalism to collaboratively create and contribute to a live edition of Carbon magazine working to weekly deadlines.

Creating the Concept

In this module you'll master the conceptualisation and execution of professional fashion and beauty editorials by integrating trend awareness with narrative strategy. You'll learn to evaluate and strategically align the relationship between text and image, adopt defined production roles, and produce a high-quality portfolio of work for a given target audience and publication, demonstrating professional readiness through a live production assessment.

From Concept to Consumer

This module introduces students to the core principles of marketing, public relations (PR), and social media strategy within the fashion and beauty sectors. You will examine the strategic role of marketing and critically evaluate how brands communicate, position themselves, and employ integrated tactics to engage and influence target audiences.

The Content Consultancy

In this module, you'll develop your ability to function as a media or marketing consultant by applying journalistic and or content creation principles to real-world commercial and community challenges. You'll evaluate a local client’s business or organisational need and existing media performance, using this analysis to design and propose an innovative, platform-native content strategy.

Core modules

The Copy Clinic

This intensive, practice-led module is designed to elevate your copywriting across all forms of professional, strategic and promotional communication. Moving beyond the foundation of editorial writing, you'll focus on the principles of persuasion, linguistic consistency, and measurable impact across all media forms, from concise advertising copywriting and social media micro-copy to extensive marketing and brand copy tasting features.

Serial Storytelling

This module brings storytelling together with audience and platform understanding to enable you to build your discipline-specific knowledge and practice by devising your own original audio or audio-visual series for a specific platform of your choosing.

Masterful Marketing

Delve into in the rapidly evolving world of fashion and beauty marketing to address real-world challenges such as digital disruption, shifting consumer behaviours, and the rise of immersive brand experiences. You'll develop advanced creative, analytical, and strategic thinking skills to produce and pitch a professional campaign prototype at the end of the module.

Optional modules

Please note: Not all optional modules are guaranteed to run each year.

Creating a Product Range

This immersive, practice-led module challenges you to create a product range to a live brief from a partner company. You will develop a complete buying and merchandising plan for a new capsule collection, including market and trend analysis, range planning, and sourcing strategy, providing tangible evidence of their professional competencies.

Social Currency

This module examines the essential role of digital communities and data-informed strategy in contemporary media, communications, and content creation. Groups will take ownership of the social media channels for the course's brand, Carbon, developing targeted, evidence-based campaigns and marketing plans, using real-world data to track, iterate, and refine their approach.

Core modules

Future Forecasting

This is a speculative, innovation-driven module that challenges you to reimagine the Carbon brand for a future consumer landscape. You'll use advanced future forecasting skills to deeply research evolving market needs, consumer pain points, and emerging technologies to create a concept mock-up that showcases these skills.

Thinking Like a Creative

In this module you'll critically evaluate your personal strengths and professional capabilities through direct industry exposure (placements) and real-time research, leading to a deeper understanding of specific career requirements. You'll use structured reflection in action to identify skill gaps and opportunities and create a personal development plan (PDP) and portfolio in progress that charts your transition to employment.

The Professional Lens

This module will enable you to synthesise future trend knowledge with critical market evaluation to identify opportunities for innovation or entrepreneurship within a given sector. The module emphasises critical thinking, innovation, professional practice, and the ability to communicate ideas effectively across media formats.

Optional modules

Please note: Not all optional modules are guaranteed to run each year.

The Media Event

The module enables you to master the strategic and collaborative process of event management by designing and executing an engaging live (IRL) event. You'll learn to critically reflect on the four stages of event planning and the complexity of event roles, providing an in-depth analysis of the future viability of IRL events in their professional sector.

Global Fashion Markets

In this module you'll critically evaluate complex international business scenarios, integrate insights from previous learning, and apply strategic reasoning to develop evidence-based recommendations that demonstrate mastery of theory and practice within a global context. Through case studies, critical evaluation of real world scenarios, business models, and applied strategic models, you'll be equipped to design strategic recommendations that protect and advance a fashion organisation in a dynamic global market.

The Professional Launchpad

This practice-led module is the culminating experience to prepare you for transition into the creative industries. By bridging academic learning with industry realities, you'll create a specialised, industry-ready portfolio of work that showcases advanced technical execution, ethical responsibility, and a critical understanding of future employment or business launch potential.

Virtual Fashion

Through practical, project-based learning, you will develop skills in digital garment creation, virtual prototyping and 3D visual communication. Alongside technical development, you explore emerging technologies to understand how digital tools support sustainability, efficiency, and innovation across fashion and marketing.