About Us
In the College of Fashion & Textiles, we improve lives by fashioning the future. As a collaborative and creative academic community, we prepare students to shape a sustainable, diverse, and inclusive future in fashion, textiles, and merchandising.
Our programs center empathetic and ethical practices that integrate design, technology, and innovation to prepare graduates for dynamic careers in the global industry. Through immersive experiences that connect artisanal processes with future-facing technologies, aligned with professional practice and industry partnerships, students gain the expertise, adaptability, and leadership capacity required to advance the evolving fashion and textiles industries.
Create the future, find your joy, change the world!
We are pushing the envelope.
The College of Fashion and Textile's collaborative community gives students the ability to shape a sustainable world through creative problem-solving and driving innovation by constantly pushing the envelope of what is possible.
Academic Programs
Undergraduate Programs
- Fashion Design (BS)
- Fashion Merchandising & Management (BS)
- Textile Design (BS)
- Textile Technology (BS)
Graduate Programs
- Fashion Design Tecnology (MS)
- Fashion Merchandising & Management (MS)
- Textile Design (MS)
- Textile Technology (MS)
Doctoral Program
DEC Curriculum
The Design, Engineering, and Commerce (DEC) Core Curriculum focuses on building the durable skills necessary for today's professional world with the opportunity to practice and apply those skills in the context of students’ own discipline. It includes three core courses: Finding and Shaping Opportunity, Systems Thinking and Sustainability, and Research Methods, that culminate with the fourth requirement, the Capstone Experience, which integrates the skills of the core courses into students’ senior capstone projects within their majors. Each course fosters collaboration among designers, engineers, and business majors giving students a breadth of expertise that goes beyond the boundaries of a traditional degree. This approach aggressively addresses changes in the 21st-century work world, where a sophisticated interdisciplinary understanding makes young professionals more effective in their own field of expertise, and enhances their ability to lead and succeed.
Finding and Shaping Opportunity
- This course introduces principles of design thinking as a key element of innovation. Students will learn how parts of traditional design process can be used to reveal opportunity, and how to shape that opportunity by critically and creatively evaluating its components as part of a larger system. As a culminating assignment, students will work collaboratively with peers from other disciplines to create real-world value in an economic, social, and environmental context by innovating a new model for business that is both desirable and viable. This course is designated as creativity intensive.
Systems Thinking and Sustainability
- The field of sustainability will be surveyed using the lens of Systems Thinking. Students will be introduced to the rate and scale of environmental impacts resulting from climate change, our industrial food system, and waste accumulation in linear models of production, with case studies considered from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Students will develop systems models to identify key feedbacks and interactions among factors. A final team-based inquiry-driven project will involve analysis of a focal area of choice, to characterize sustainability challenges and opportunities for focused interventions, with consideration of social equity dimensions and model limitations.
Research Methods
- This writing intensive course explores a range of research tools to analyze human belief, behavior, and cultural practices, and the systems which they drive and are affected by to inform planning and critical inquiry. Students will learn to formulate appropriate research strategies and questions for conducting quantitative and qualitative research to explore a variety of approaches that address contemporary issues around all aspects of sustainability (economic, social, environmental, technical. Students will consider ethical, empathetic, and contextual sensitivities at all stages of the research process, from planning through to analysis and interpretation. They will convey their findings through multi-modal means of communication as appropriate to the content and purpose of their research.