Fashion Research at Design Schools

The report “Fashion Research at Design Schools” (2008), which was commissioned by Institute for Fashion and Textiles at Designskolen Kolding,  appoints the potentials and challenges in relation to the ongoing academization of design schools, with a specific focus on fashion research. The key research question is: “What kind of fashion design education is Designskolen Kolding aiming to offer in the future, what kind of skills will the students need in their future work place, the fashion industry, and can research work as a potential in this process?”

 

The study is based on qualitative, interactionistic interviews (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2005) with key persons from the respective research- and fashion departments from eight selected design schools in Holland, England and USA. The analysis of each case is inspired by Edgar E. Schein’s levels of culture (Schein 1994), that aims to pinpoint both formal and informal layers generating the identity of each institution.

 

Results and answers are analyzed in the way that publicly declaimed visions and strategies are commented and elaborated by interviews and questionnaires, to clarify what “basic assumptions” are present in terms of perceptions on fashion education and fashion research, that are “taken for granted” in the institutional culture of each case. Because of the diversity between the cases, a cultural-oriented comparison has been made, where every case is perceived as idiographically unique (Thyge Winther-Jensen 2004). Descriptions of each selected case are subjected to concluding summations throughout the case study, where the focus is on specific characteristics in each case, which are presented as the “core competences” of each institution. It is further pointed out how research strategies on fashion are constructed as a continuation of the way teaching in fashion design and research on fashion is perceived in the various cases. This of course implements the fact that there are very diverse perceptions on what fashion research is.  A main discussion therefore concerns current methodological diversities in fashion research, a field of research that is expanding rapidly these years. Through the preliminary study and the case study a mapping out of how fashion research is conducted at various institutions, respectively, forms the basis of an overall discussion that sets this development in context. It is concluded how the current “knowledge economy” (Florida 2002) creates hybrids between regimes of creativity (Kupferberg 2006), that is, diverse professions, in the Creative Industries in which the fashion system is operating. In terms of fashion and research on fashion, three regimes of creativity are in interplay, namely researchers, designers, and the fashion industry. In the conclusion a proposal is made on how Designskolen Kolding can balance between the three often opposing partners, and create a strategy on fashion research that is based on their own “core competences”, as defined above.