Today, all fashion schools are teaching fashion business and merchandising NOT fashion design. The truth is that many of these fashion institutions are actively misleading their students. Unfortunately, many people who apply to these design schools can’t seem to see through the lies and the deception behind these fashion institutions. If you do analyze these school fashion design programs carefully, you will see that many of their courses and programs focus heavily on fashion marketing and merchandising, rather than actual technical fashion design skills training.
At the end of the day, these design schools are teaching their students to become fashion merchandisers NOT real fashion designers. As a result, their fashion school graduates will have NO real fashion technical skills when they complete their design program. This is the root of the problem for many new fashion graduates coming out of these design schools. And of course, this leads to the main reason why many of their fashion design graduates are unemployed – because they are not able to sew or complete a full garment in three hours when they are being tested at a job interview. They can’t draft, sew, grade any patterns, or know how to French drape. The ironic twist in all of this is that many of these fashion graduates paid a lot of money to study fashion design in the first place but, in fact, they are really studying fashion marketing/business, and they are NOT marketable or employable when they graduate with a fashion design degree/diploma. In other words, they don’t even know that they are being scammed.
– Chris Falcon is a Canadian designer and fashion educator with over 35 years of experience in the garment design and manufacturing business.