Understanding Fashion: From Business to Culture (FutureLearn)

The course features exclusive input from fashion industry leaders, including designers such as Simon Porte Jacquemus, Christelle Kocher, Paul Smith, and CEOs at Chanel, YSL and Hermès.

You’ll deepen your understanding of the industry and take a dual approach to the study of fashion as you investigate it as both a cultural phenomenon and a creative industry.
What topics will you cover?

- Fashion and modernity: contemporary relevance, ‘Zeitgeist’, and the desirability of the new.

- Fashion and society: the concept of trends, social distinction and selection, culture and subcultures.

- Fashion as a language: decoding silhouettes, the genre of fashion literature and fashion press.

- Fashion and consumption: fashion and gender, the emergence of ‘lifestyle’, fetishism.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Develop transdisciplinary knowledge and expertise aimed at understanding the logics of the contemporary fashion field

- Identify the creative models of the different fashion houses and their conception of time

- Explore the trends diffusion models

- Interpret a fashion silhouette

- Explain the construction of consumer behaviour

Who is the course for?

Whether you’re a marketing student intrigued by consumer culture or you’re an experienced fashion professional looking to enhance your knowledge, this course is designed for anyone looking to deepen and specialise their knowledge of the fashion industry.

This course will also be relevant to fashion entrepreneurs who need a holistic view of the industry’s key success factors.

This course is supported by DEFI.