BA (Hons)Fashion Design

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 Silhouette

In this module, you'll investigate how the silhouette - the outline or contour of a garment - communicates concept and identity in fashion. You'll focus on shape, volume, proportion and line, exploring how manipulating these elements transforms perception of the body and communicates a message about the wearer.

Fashion Fundamentals

This module introduces you to the creative sequential process involved in the primary stages of fashion design. You will learn how to develop and creatively communicate an individual concept informed by creative research using a variety of sources, and how to respond to this research with initial design ideas. You'll also learn core pattern cutting and garment production methods.

Concept to Consumer

This module requires you to design an on-trend range and make a garment for a specific fashion brand, market level, and customer, developing your knowledge of industry practice. The module also importantly enables you to develop your fashion design, print design, pattern-cutting and garment making skills, as well as furthering essential digital skills, using industry-specific software.

Fashion Fabrication

This module focuses on the world of fabrics and the design of surface textiles, including more eco-conscious options. As well as learning about fabrics, you'll learn and explore digital print design, screen printing, fabric manipulation and laser cutting techniques to produce a wide range of surface textile samples in response to a concept or theme.

Core modules

Future Focus

This shared, interdisciplinary module provides a 'launchpad' for students across our fashion courses, to collaborate on a live brief - mirroring the professional creative team environment. This client-focused module will give you the confidence to get out into industry and give you the ability to apply the skills gained during your first year of studies.

Semiotics of Style

In this module, you will deconstruct and reinvent 'classic' garments, challenging the symbols, assumptions, and cultural codes that they traditionally communicate. Through a combination of design experimentation and semiotic research, you'll explore how clothing functions as a system of signs and how those signs can be subverted, furthering your creative design ability in the process.

Form and Functionality

In this module you will step into the role of a fashion designer working for an established brand that specialises in functional clothing. You'll be required to design a range of garments that merge functionality and aesthetics, as well as be in-line with forecast trends. Designs must be commercially viable and forward-thinking to appeal to a customer. To further your pattern-cutting and sewing skills, you'll make final products in real fabrics.

Capsule Collection

This module will develop your individual design identity, deepen your understanding of the creative design process, and further your technical skills through the development of a cohesive, high-end ready-to-wear collection. You'll develop a concept based on a selected or invented ‘muse’ and will use this to inform the concept and creative design of a capsule collection that includes sustainable fabrication.

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.

Core modules

Portfolio and Professional Presence

In this module you'll create a hardcopy portfolio with tactile elements to take to graduate events and job interviews, as well as build a complimentary online/digital presence. Portfolio work will tell the story of your final collection, as well as include a follow-on collection and a design competition entry.

ReFashion the Future

In this module you'll investigate and evaluate eco-conscious design methods within the industry, and use either one or a combination of methods to design a range of clothing and produce a prototype of a garment that reflects innovation, responsibility and aesthetic appeal.

Final Collection Research and Development

In preparation for the Final Collection: Production module, you'll focus on developing an individual and visually exciting concept and use this to inspire a range of creative design ideas that are thoroughly explored, analysed and developed through to the initial prototype stage. This process enables you to further advance your skills in and knowledge of the creative design process, alongside key technical and digital skills, realising your unique design identity in the process.

Final Collection: Production

In this module you'll push your creative design ability and technical skills to new levels - to problem solve and think innovatively, resulting in a fashion collection that communicates a strong personal design identity and a range of professional skills and knowledge. This module is informed directly by the Final Collection: Research and Development module and you can create either a 3D or 2D fashion collection.