School of Fashion

Take your first steps toward a career in the fashion industry by earning your degree at the School of Fashion. At Columbia, we’ll help you lay the groundwork to pursue your professional interests, whether it’s fashion design, merchandising, product development, or marketing. Here, you’ll learn the art and the business of fashion by participating in corporate competitions; working in studios for actual clients with real customer needs; joining fellow changemakers who celebrate body diversity and sustainability practices; and interning for companies such as Modern Luxury, Express, Wuensche USA, Boy Meets Girl, and Cotton Inc. Your creative career starts here.

Undergraduate Programs

Graduate Degrees

Minors

  • Fashion for Game Art
    The Schools of Fashion and Design have collaborated to create a hybrid course of study designed to expose students to the intersections of fashion and the video game industry.
  • Fashion Studies
    The Fashion Studies minor gives a broad overview of the industry, with courses in trendspotting, marketing fashion brands, apparel evaluation, fashion history from a global perspective, and approaches to fashion design. The minor is a great complement to degrees in fine art, design, or theatre design and technology.
  • Fashion Styling
    The minor in Fashion Styling will introduce students to the disciplines within this broader field. Students will learn about costuming for film, television, and theater, editorial styling, personal wardrobing, and styling for e-commerce. As part of collaborative teams, fashion students will work with students in adjacent disciplines such as photography, cinema, television, and theater to develop, analyze, and create still and motion imagery and scenes.
  • Sustainable Fashion
    The interdisciplinary Sustainable Fashion minor explores many facets of sustainability as it relates to the fashion industry including sustainable and zero waste design and merchandising; history and theory of environmentalism in fashion; textile science; labor issues; sourcing and supply chain; and the legal implications of sustainable and ethical fashion.
VIEW ALL MINORS
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Faculty

Faculty are industry professionals, artists and scholars who are active practitioners in their field and share their real-world experiences in the classroom.

student working at sewing machine
Facilities

Columbia College Chicago offers top-notch facilities designed to help fashion students explore their ideas, work on projects and collaborate with each other.

students celebrating at graduation
Alumni

Fashion alumni find success with hands-on experience that translates into work with major designers, retailers, boutiques, and galleries.

model wearing colorful layered dress walking down runway
Student Work

At Columbia, students in the School of Fashion collaborate with real companies to serve their clients’ needs as well as realize their designer dreams by creating their own collections.

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