Fashion Styling and Creative Direction

With a passion for style, and a creative mind and full of visual ideas, participants learn how to recognise, reinvent and define image for a garment, a product or brand. With recognised top level instruction they are ready to begin their career as inspirational stylists, going on to use their talents in various areas of the fashion and creative industries including editorial features, advertising campaigns, brand image and restyling proposals, in social media and visual merchandising, as well as in music videos, TV and movies.

This three year full time Fashion Styling & Creative Direction course trains highly skilled stylists with the ability to create new narratives covering both creative and operational strategies in the fashion and luxury business. They understand how to use media to create followers and highlight brand identity, as well as the relationship between creative and organisational areas of the brand, or company brief. By understanding the role and responsibilities of the professional stylist participants learn how to pull together, organise and lead a team of experts to ensure the direction of what goes in the fashion magazines, appears online, or on the catwalk, communicates the right messages, at the right time, and to the right target audience. From a solid base in styling, this course moves onto explore multiple areas of the fashion industry where management of the creative process is core practice. Participants are encouraged to develop their own ideas and experiment in producing a different variety of visual outcomes, such as fashion editorials, viral videos, brand image and restyling proposals, interactive and print advertising campaigns, and social media visual contents.

The fashion course covers key skills in fashion copywriting, PR and media planning, fashion production management, business planning, time management, and advertising deadlines and budgets. Cultural studies in the history of art, design, dress and fashion culture provide the necessary skills to make a critical assessment of a brand or client’s lifestyle and legacy.

The analysis of style brings shape, reality and energy into the visual space – the material ‘reality’ of image making. Participants learn how to create an immediately identifiable and recognisable style in order to produce and develop live photo shoots, managing the team involved in the process of photography, image editing, set construction, still life and moving image, lighting, direction, and choices in make-up, hair and accessories. They are encouraged to decode stereotypes and to think about image positioning from a different perspective in order to discover their own unique personal style.

This course forms the base of all three year fashion styling pathways. With fashion styling as the core subject, participants select from different pathways to specialise in a chosen area of interest, responding to individual creative flair and passion.

This course is also available as a BA (Hons) four year course (including placement sandwich year)-*.