About the programme

The programme is structured around three, interconnected semesters that together support individually tailored sustainability strategies for each student, finalised in the graduation project at the fourth semester. 

All modules ask students to deliver tangible design proposals that embrace techniques and approaches relevant to fashion, clothing and textile sustainability.

The four semesters consist of the following elements:

First semester: New Landscapes

Building on creative practices this semester evolves around the issues of longevity, localism and materials as central learning objectives. The students are introduced to multiple aspects of fashion sustainability work and its cultural, social, economic and environmental implications. 

In a ‘landscape’ of fashion that is rapidly changing, students are asked to develop their own design manifestos that will guide them through their new narratives and design approaches for fashion, clothing, and textiles design. 
The first four weeks of the semester is dedicated to shared reading workshops where students begin to explore new landscapes for change, together with introductory practice-based workshop modules that anchor abstract ideas through hands-on material experimentation. 
After this, the semester project involves a wardrobe study of a fellow student that goes on to inform their design process and subsequent final delivery. 

Second semester: Diversity

This semester the students work with diversity to open up the understanding of cultural heritage, as well as discovering values, norms, and stylistic preferences of targeted customers or audiences. We explore how the creative process can be harnessed to promote true value through shared experiences, community and artisanal values.

The first eight weeks are dedicated to a collaborative project with an external partner. The students are asked to find inspiration in a museum object and explore how to respectfully integrate cultural heritage in their own work. The semester theory studies support practical development by engaging issues of decolonialization, universal design and different perspectives on historical and future fashion narratives and cultures. From this, each student creates high quality work that is subsequently exhibited with the external partner during the Fall semester.

In the semester project, students work with user-led design processes and user understanding. The goal is for each student to learn how to nurture an audience and customer well-suited to their artistic vision and to understand how fashion, clothing and textile design interact with wider notions of user experience, needs and aspirations.

Third semester: Change

This semester focuses on the way fashion, clothing and textile designers can better understand their own roles in collaboration with stakeholders such as subject specialists, communities, businesses and more.

Building further on the 1st and 2nd semester projects, students learn how to employ systems thinking and strategic collaborative design processes to strengthen their own roles as change makers in broader contexts. At the same time, they develop skills that enable them to grow new markets, value propositions, and opportunity spaces for their further professional careers. As such, the focus is on collaborative work with individual external partners that the students identify and with which they test their skills. 

This semester also begins to ask the students to look ahead and contemplate who they are as designers and professionals within a complex and challenging industry. 

The third semester also marks the completion of the student’s written thesis. 

Fourth semester: Graduation work

In the graduation project students must demonstrate how they individually engage with the various perspectives and elements of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd semester.

Alongside preparing graduation work, students work with visualisation and storytelling techniques such as portfolio development, fashion film, sustainability communication and receive social media training. Graduate work is showcased at the Royal Danish Academy’s graduation exhibition, and at a catwalk show during Copenhagen Fashion Week. Industry preparation and professionalisation occur in parallel to creative development and grow the students’ skills in achieving funding, organising large scale exhibitions, understanding fashion recruitment and entrepreneurship in relation to the graduates’ further professional careers.

Project delivery formats are open but must include artistic design proposals of material character at a high artistic and technical level.
 

The programme is taught in English.