Reshaping Fashion Education for the 21st Century World

Universities are among the oldest and most enduring institutions in the Western history. They belong to the vision of opening knowledge to a community—universitas in the Latin term—through open lessons and lectures in churches and cloisters during the early Eleventh Century. In fact, they were originally medieval institutions, but were re-imagined during the Enlightenment to serve the industrial era to come. While the industrial revolution has passed and our current world is dramatically different from that time, what we know today is that higher education is still informed by that concept. Therefore, attempts to transform its model to better answer our present scientific, cultural, and societal challenges are increasingly growing, and signs of change are already in place. Within this perspective, design education has been at the very center of this transformation, where design thinking skills have been identified as one of the key attributes of millennial leaders. In spite of this, by purpose or by lack of interest, fashion has always been a peripheral subject within design scientific debate, also fashion design education itself has been a small self-referential niche of the whole system. This isolation is possibly coming to an end, given the acknowledged impact of fashion on global economies and society, and the need for it to engage, as for all other sectors, in supporting a consistent transition of our world towards more sustainable paradigms. Starting from this assumption and looking at the evolution of fashion and at the opportunities and threats it is facing, the chapter draw some guidelines to shape fashion design education for the 21st Century.