MA Design (Fashion)

MA Design (Fashion) at Arts University Plymouth is an opportunity to reimagine the status quo of fashion and to use a research-led, practical exploration of materials, processes and technologies to propose new strategies for the industry.

This course will give you the opportunity to dive deep into current practices and theories in Fashion Design that are transforming the nature of this rapidly changing sector through a direct, critical interrogation of its standards and hands-on research. Designed to foster both design entrepreneurs and creative practitioners, our MA Design (Fashion) encourages you to build upon your existing knowledge or fashion experience to develop a fashion project realised through new material applications, circular production protocols and systems thinking in a research-based, studio centred enquiry.

Your fashion research and creative development will happen together, where your existing practice or industry experience will act as the foundation for guided experiments to deconstruct and reimagine the assumptions embedded within both design education and fashion cultures.You will benefit from embarking on this study journey within a truly interdisciplinary academic context, enriched by ongoing input from industry specialists and institutional partners who will help ground your experiments with real world challenges and opportunities. Through external briefs, your ideas and proposals will take on professional dimensions and provide you with a period of focused making through a full iterative evolution, from concept to prototype to product or service, providing you with both the creative agency and industry networks required to succeed in the field.

Your MA study of fashion design will benefit from the opportunity to participate in the university’s Making Futures Research Group, which examines how traditional cultures of making might exist in future contexts through the use of emerging practices, materials and technologies. The MFRG is a coalition of students and academic staff linked to Making Futures®, our international research platform which seeks to situate material cultures and material knowledge at the centre of the many critical issues facing global consumer society, including how we might move beyond mass consumption towards an inclusive, regenerative economy capable of supporting social well-being and enabling more resilient communities.

Through the course you will have access to wide range a state-of-the-art facilities and resources to develop your work, including our Materials Lab, Biomaterials Lab, Sew Lab, CAD Lab, and Fab Lab Plymouth, which was the first of its kind in the UK and part of a network of over 2700 Fab Labs around the world.

We are committed to developing ethical, sustainable design practices as outlined in our Strategic Vision and this ethos is embedded in all MA courses.