©Vogue / Niall Mcinerney Graduation fashion shows, regardless of the school or country, seem to be a stage where purely devoted to artistry, setting aside commercial and practical considerations. While students' work may be esoteric to the general public, these shows are significant as they represent attempts to establish a continuity with the avant-garde lineage of high fashion, focusing on philosophical inquiry into fashion and experimentation with garment forms. The trajectory of contemporary fashion education began to take shape in the mid-20th century when fine art schools established fashion departments1. Coinciding with the industrial changes in fashion, when designers were being redefined from traditional craftsmen to "artists" or “auteurs”, this educational shift helped repositioning fashion from the realm of craft and technique to that of fine art. ©Karel Fonteyne As graduates of these schools began to make their mark in the industry, such as the Antwerp Six2 in London from the 1980s and British designers taking positions at Parisian couture houses in the 1990s3, these institutions naturally gained international recognition. These fashion schools, which remain the epicentres of fashion education today, have established their identity as institutions that nurture independent designers. They define fashion design as designers’ practice of reflecting socio-cultural changes and conveying their philosophy and narratives through the collection. Their unique educational model, which views fashion design as an artistic practice that goes beyond producing goods to capture the zeitgeist and create cultural discourse, has proven successful through graduates who, like the above examples, have become world-renowned. Over time, their approach has been institutionally reinforced through industry partnerships - including internships and scholarships with global luxury companies - as well as participation in fashion weeks and high-profile graduation fashion shows. This is where the distinctive subjectivities of the ‘star’ or auteur designers are shaped through the range of pedagogies in place. These colleges seem to be almost unassailable in their role as agents of distribution for the various fashion labour markets.4 UAL Sign Install. Installation by Merson Group. Photography by Ana Blumenkron. However, the late 20th century, which marked a “big bang” for the fashion industry, coincided with the spread of neoliberalism and the penetration of market logic into higher education. British fashion institutions similarly underwent a structural reorganisation towards an “entrepreneurial model”. Under the banner of enhancing education efficiency and market competitiveness, systematic changes were implemented: integration into universities5, increasing tuition fees, destabilisation of faculty employment, and the quantification and grading of art education. These neoliberal changes still operate as a form of institutional discipline in the educational system today. For example, the biased curriculum design that over-emphasises “creative expression”, the hierarchical competition among art schools, as well as the assessment systems that attempt to grade students' creativity - all these elements condition students from the start to accept a winner-take-all mentality that is dominated by a select few elites in the industry, namely the “creative directors” or their equivalents. ©London College of Fashion / Ana Blumenkron Such a system of assessing creativity continues to be implemented in various ways as of 2025. At Central Saint Martins, only a select few students are permitted to participate in high-profile fashion shows, while others must present their graduation work in relatively marginalised exhibition formats. At London College of Fashion, a spatial hierarchy privileges visual and expressive fashion design, with fashion design programmes occupying the most visible spaces while others, such as marketing and fashion theory, are pushed to basement or peripheral locations. This hierarchy is ultimately completed through the practice of successful designers returning as faculty members at fashion schools. While this circular structure ostensibly promotes the value of transferring professional experience, it can result in limiting diverse creative possibilities by normalising specific career paths and aesthetics as universal models. Many respondents discussed a downside to this emphasis on expressive creativity, suggesting weaknesses in commercial, managerial and technical training (...) Lack of competence in these skills could be a barrier to developing a career, and an issue in developing relationships with retailing and manufacturing companies.6 ©TikTok The core of this structure lies in how fashion education’s emphasis on artistic experimentation and critical thinking is, in reality, subordinated to commercial objectives of market competitiveness and brand value creation, just as in the industry itself. Under the fashion school pedagogy, students (either voluntarily or subconsciously) internalise certain definitions and standards of creativity, consequently self-censoring their work to fit the market demands. The framework of creativity established by education does not stop there; it also shapes students’ futures. Students willingly accept the precariousness of the neoliberal labour market by pursuing their own brands with the aim of acquiring symbolic capital instead of economic stability. In this way, fashion education institutions function as creativity factories for the entire industry, which further reinforces the elitism of the fashion industry wrapped in the guise of auteurism. While the creativity of each student may be experimental and original, the novelty itself is treated as a commodity that can be quickly consumed and replaced like fleeting trends that rise and fall rapidly. ©Fédérationde la Haute Coutureet de la Mode Of course, just as a fashion week debut is no longer the only path for emerging brands to pursue, creators and designers have always sought alternative routes, bypassing or questioning established structures and narratives. But so far, these movements have led to new forms of commodification and market absorption. Consider how Vivienne Westwood, who left after just one semester, is now celebrated as a ‘proud alumna’ of the University of Westminster; how social media, which appearing to dismantle the authority of traditional media, ended up becoming a tool for the perpetual reproduction of their prestige; and how avant-garde designers, who once freely experimented and failed, have been absorbed as a new drivers of the fashion industry’s economic growth. While fashion schools have undoubtedly been incubators of creativity that have produced many stars and continuously motivated students, they have also clearly engineered the absorption of students’ creative work into the market in the wake of these “geniuses”. Students must now question whether the institution's portfolio has appropriated their creativity and whether they have obeyed the institutional call to “Be Creative”, much as their education has become merely another line on their CV. 1 Establishment of the Fashion Department at the Royal College of Art in London in 1948, and the Fashion Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 1963. 2 (Black and white) From left in the photo: Marina Yee, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Dirk Van Saene.3 John Galliano's Dior and Alexander McQueen's Givenchy in 1996, and Stella McCartney's Chloé in 1997.4 McRobbie, A., Strutt, D. and Bandinelli, C. (2022) Fashion as Creative Economy: Micro-Enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan. Kindle Edition.5 In 1986, six independent art education institutions in London, including LCF and CSM, merged into the London Institute, which was granted university status in 2003 and became the current University of the Arts London (UAL).6 Casadei, P. and Gilbert, D. (2022) ‘Material and symbolic production of fashion in a global creative city. Industry’s perception of the 21st century London’, Creative Industries Journal, pp. 1–22. Available at here7 Harrow College of Art at the time BY MUYO PARKAPRIL 1, 2025 >READ THE KOREAN VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE> READ OTHER ARTICLES