Fashion Design at Parsons: Creating the Pathways of the Future
Students at Parsons School of Design’s School of Fashion aren’t just making clothes—they’re reimagining the systems of our world.
Parsons School of Design’s undergraduate Fashion Design program curriculum creates an expansive educational terrain that empowers students to generate and explore entirely new territories that challenge our understanding of what fashion is and reimagines its impact on society. Students have the opportunity to explore diverse approaches to fashion design in four pathways: Collection, Materiality, Fashion Product and Systems & Society. These pathways are designed to enable students to develop a specialized, differentiated approach to fashion design that resonates with their personal interests and values. While all of the pathways share many fundamental practices of garment and collection development, research, material inquiry and systems thinking, each one offers students the unique ability to focus on a specific areas of fashion design and develop differentiated bodies of work.
Collection
Challenges students to consider approaches to body, gender, age, and size, amongst others, in order to develop new narratives, definitions and terminologies within a clearly defined visual aesthetic beyond traditional contexts.
Materiality
Enables students to focus on the application of material and textile innovation to fashion design in relation to the body and beyond. Courses aim to help students generate new possibilities for fashion through the integration of new technologies and sustainable approaches with foundational methods of dying, knit, print, surface treatments, embroidery, and weave while challenging students to explore new fabrication techniques. Deep hands-on research exploration towards applied materiality outcomes including both garments/wearables and non-garment/non-wearable outcomes are encouraged.
Systems & Society
Challenges students to critically engage how fashion relates to contemporary issues facing society. In this pathway, students explore a diverse range of systems design and critical thinking approaches in order to develop and actually construct new types of fashion systems and models that can make a positive impact on our world. In the Systems Pathway emphasis is placed on designing with a deep consideration for human beings in all aspects of the fashion system. Systems & Society opens up new opportunities for students to engage as fashion designers across the entire value chain with an emphasis on circularity. Students explore interdisciplinary methods to address specific design challenges they identify in society and are encouraged to develop deep, empirical research methodologies in order to generate diverse types of outcomes and communicate innovative, speculative proposals for what new types of fashion systems could be.
“Our development of the revolutionary Systems and Society and Materiality Pathways, respectively, in the BFA Fashion Design Program at Parsons is demonstrating how we can truly reimagine new possibilities and models for how fashion design and education innovation can so powerfully affect lasting, systemic, and positive change in our society, particularly in the most most marginalized communities. I am so proud to work with such a dedicated student body and faculty in the School of Fashion and at the New School whose love and commitment to fashion, diversity, inclusion, sustainability and human-centered systems design has empowered us to generate these new pathways in our fashion design curriculum.”
— Brendan C. McCarthy | Program Director, BFA Fashion Design: Systems & Materiality
“What I find incredibly liberating is that we continue to instill the importance of thinking and making (the underlying tools for a fashion design program) — but then challenge our students to fully explore where their passions and interests lay. The pathways allow a deeper connection in subject approach whilst broadening the opportunity for personal expression. It is now impossible to pin down exactly who is a Parsons Fashion BFA graduate — any preconceptions of a mold are broken, with each student setting their own particular tone and vibration.”
— Neil M. Gilks | Program Director, BFA Fashion Design: Collection & Product | Associate Professor of Fashion
Below, meet five 2019 BFA Fashion Design graduates whose works represent the pathways of study and the future of the fashion industry as a mechanism for systemic, global change.
Natalia Riedel, BFA Fashion Design ’19 (Systems & Society Thesis Pathway)
Winner of the 2019 Social Innovation Award | Founder of These Days
Natalia is a Brooklyn based designer who makes size inclusive intimate apparel, blends illustration with fashion, and drinks her coffee black.
She believes that vulnerability is a strength and that social equity is a vital part of sustainable fashion design. Her own eating disorder recovery has led her to focus on using design as a tool for making mental health care more accessible and building community. She supports body diversity, deconstructs diet-culture, and normalizes the experience of coping with mental illness through user-centric design.
“The bras and underwear are constructed with non-linear closures because recovery isn’t linear. Adjustable waistbands, straps and overlapping panels allow the wearer to adjust the garment to their body instead of manipulating their body to fit a garment. Our bodies are constantly changing. We get bloated, some of us bleed, and our garments should be able to shift with our bodies.”
Natalia on her thesis collection, These Days, for i-D’s “8 Emerging Designers to Watch”
Jose Luis Cabrera, BFA Fashion Design ’19 (Materiality Thesis Pathway)
Winner of the 2019 Social Innovation Award | Creative Director, Roa New York
Jose Luis Cabrera is a Fashion Designer born in Santo Domingo, Dominican
Republic. Motivated to find better educational opportunities to improve his life and family, he moved to New York at 11 years old. New York City’s cultural diversity exposed the young designer to various populations of people from native New Yorkers to immigrants from around the world. As a result of observing an array of cultural garb and design, his interest for clothing and style grew enormously. In a class at Parsons School of Design, he created a
sustainable system for Hugo Boss in order to innovate their production of suits
worldwide, making Boss the first brand in the world to create a single fiber suit. Cabrera also believes in fashion sustainability and “fashion with a purpose.” His work reflects this as it attacks both waste and social issues in the Dominican Republic and other Latin American countries. As a creative individual in the fashion industry Cabrera wants to contribute to the betterment of the lives of children in Dominican Republic and Latin America. His main goal in fashion is to give underdeveloped communities a voice.
Veronica Lee, BFA Fashion Design ’19 (Collection Womenswear Thesis Pathway)
Winner of the 2019 Creative Systems Award | Founder of voni studio.
Veronica H. Lee (voni studio) is a fashion designer and visual artist currently living and working in New York City, and a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design’s Fashion Design BFA. She had her first solo-exhibition at Sister Gallery in Adelaide, Australia which included drawings, paintings, sculptures, film, performance and garments. She works across all forms of media — though fashion design is her primary practices. Her first collection premiered on the New York runway in 2017 sponsored by Designow. Her work also has been included in group exhibitions at various New York City galleries including LIC Arts Open Gallery and the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Her work has been featured in publications such as DROME Magazine and Deux Hommes. Her garments have been featured in various editorials for digital publications including i-D, LOVE, and FGUK. Lee is the recipient of the 2019 Hugo Boss Scholarship prize for excellence in Parsons’ Collection Pathway.
Lee’s work draws from the human condition. Her interest lies in expressing the intangible psychological, and spiritual aspects of the human experience through tactile forms. She utilizes the format of a collection as a time-based canvas and takes into careful consideration, the implications of “dressing” and “fashion”, envisioning dramatic looks which impress allegorical narratives.
Andrew Davis, BFA Fashion Design ’19 (Materiality/All-Gender Thesis Pathway)
Winner of the 2019 Future Textiles Award
New York-based designer Andrew Davis creates work that blends traditional menswear with innovative materiality techniques with a thoughtful design practice. His work is rooted in multidisciplinary research that includes personal narratives and artistic references that inspire him. A pillar of Andrew’s work is the push for thought-provoking materiality that creates new perceptions of what fashion can look and feel like. Andrew wants his work to communicate that designers and consumers should thoughtfully interact with the materials they use in order to sustain a balanced physical and emotional environment. Whether through methods of upcycling, extending garment life cycles, or contributing positively to local communities, Andrew’s design practice is always seeking to operate more harmoniously with the physical and social environment.
Andrew previously worked in Eileen Fisher’s renew design department, where he aided the team in creating new garments from previously-worn garments. while there, he had the opportunity to collaborate with Public School on a limited-edition upcycled capsule collection.
Yayi Chen, BFA Fashion Design ’19 (Collection/All-Gender Thesis Pathway)
Winner of 2019 Creative Systems Award
Yayi’s artistic inspirations stem from her unique trilingual and multicultural upbringing. She grew up in both Spain and China, and was fortunate to be immersed in the artistic atmosphere of both beautiful and distinct cultures, which heavily ignited her passion towards fine art and fashion design. For the past five years, her cultural experiences enriched further on through her study on fashion design in Parsons the New School for Design New York campus as well as exchanging to Central Saint Martins in London. She has worked for the renowned fashion houses including The Row and Thom Browne during her stay in New York.
The contrast between the representational aspects of traditional eastern philosophy and the conceptual identity within contemporary art has stimulated Yayi’s interest in challenging the traditional interpretation of fashion. Her research and creation often focuses on women’s identity in the society throughout history within multicultural backgrounds. In her recent collection In Tran · sient, she explored the invisible identity of Chinese immigrant women in Europe in terms of their overlooked and objectified labouring body. Through the collaborative process that Yayi has approached of combining fashion and performance art together with a community of artists from the same diasporic background, she aimed to used the collective voice to empower immigrant women by pondering their struggle through her poetic and feminine vision on contemporary fashion. The project earned Yayi several awards including: the 2019 Parsons Academic Awards of Creative Systmes, the 2019 Parsons X Solstiss Sponsorship Award, the Parsons X Neiman Marcus Hudson Yards Showcase, and CFDA 2019 Fashion Future Graduate Showcase, as well as finalist position for the Pasons X Luxarity Lane Crawford Partnership Award. Yayi was also the awardee of the 2o18 CFDA Scholarship Award and finalist position to the 2019 Liz Claiborne Scholarship Award.
For the future, Yayi wishes to expand the cross-disciplinary conversation of fashion in the contemporary art scene by diving into further research on the possibilities of fashion in collaboration with other fine art fields such as theater and music.
For more information about applying to The New School’s Parsons School of Design, visit newschool.edu.
