Fashion and Textiles

The MDes in Fashion and Textiles at Glasgow School of Art focuses on practice and research-based learning. The programme develops independently-minded designers who challenge and interrogate the field of fashion and textiles in new and innovative ways. The programme frames studio learning as a stimulating space that fosters critical reflection and experimentation within a vibrant community of professionals. The programme encourages students to take risks, reflect on their creative process, engage in peer learning, and utilise GSA's various technical, library, and archive resources.

The programme encourages students to consider the human form as a limitless opportunity for creative expression and to develop an individual visual language accordingly. The programme employs a range of pedagogical approaches, enabling students to acquire key skill sets and attributes, enhance design thinking, develop innovative strategies, and reflect on their professional practice, through a learning journey that embraces acclimatisation and immersion, origination and experimentation, and progression and resolution. Throughout, students take significant responsibility for managing their learning, and the programme emphasises self-reliance and personal academic development. The programme emphasises formal and informal crossdisciplinary discourses within the Stage 1 core course on design research methods and Stage 2 PGT elective courses and reflects a sharing and collaborative ethos.

The programme fosters independence, creativity, experimentation, and critical thinking, enabling students to address the evolving needs of society with empathy, social awareness, conceptual mindsets, and diverse forms of expression. The programme encourages students to be resourceful and to take inventive and rule-breaking approaches to surface and silhouette. Students take playful and unrestrained dressing-up-box approaches to fashion and textiles, subverting and disrupting craft and clothing conventions. The programme supports students to move effortlessly and expertly between 2D and 3D, to make spontaneous and reasoned responses, to consider outermost and innermost details, and to design responsibly for optimum social, environmental, and cultural impact.