Welcome to Fashion School
These past three days I have been living my dream of going to fashion school. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced and I couldn’t be more excited. I am excited to go to class everyday and learn more about the fashion around me and what influences me to continue in the industry that I love so much.
The program that I am enrolled in is complied of “freshers” who were accepted into the buying program. There are about 50 students and they all applied to be in this part of the fashion school and are being set up to become the next buyers for european markets. Each of them is very different in style, but all have a passion for fashion and it is exciting to finally be around people who appreciate the same things as myself.
The classes are set up very differently than they are in the US. They only meet once a week but for three hours. The first hour is lecture and the next two is a seminar where the class is split and it is more in depth, hands-on learning with a different tutor (teacher/professor) where you work with the other students and present your ideas and better understand the previous lecture if there was confusion.
Monday is Fashion Marketing. This class is very interesting and is a lot like a normal marketing class with the same terms but it only focused on the fashion market. I met an adorable girl from Germany, Isabelle. She is at a Uni in the Netherlands and is also on her study abroad in London. She speaks German, Dutch, and English and has an incredible accent. Jennifer is another girl I met who is from South Spain. She is going to the Uni full time and is studying to be a designer or merchandiser, I can’t remember. She speaks Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. That is the one thing that amazes me about all of these Europeans, they speak so many languages fluently!! It’s fabulous, but I feel like an idiot being able to speak only French and Italian (barely). I could probably get through a city in a day but it would not be pretty. Sorry Kyle, I won’t be a ton of help when we go to Paris.
Tuesday is Role of Design in the Fashion Industry. This class is all second year students. Oh, they do their system very differently than we do as well. They only study at a Uni for three years. So when I told everyone I was a third year they wondered why I was in a freshers class. The words freshman, sophomore, junior, senior mean nothing to them here. Anyway, this class is smaller and we talked about haute couture for three hours. I about lost it. It is definitely my favorite class. We work with fabrics and have a final project where we choose a store, find a garment we love, and write a report on the process that went into making the piece. I think I am going to do something Ralph Lauren because I have everything at my disposal!
Tuesday is also Personal and Professional Development. This is the class we are required to take if we are in an internship. The class is actually at the Marylebone campus which is in London right off the Baker Street tube station. We have to take the tube dow there, but it’s nice to get off the Harrow campus and into London. Unfortunately, this class is sooo boring. I am not the type of person to fall asleep in class but I was very close yesterday. For the hour of lecture, our tutor told us how to “actively listen” in probably 30 different ways and then took even more time telling us how to be reflective writers. Regardless I will try to get something out of the class. It just gives me more of a reason to blog about RL, so I can’t really complain. My tutor for the seminar is from the Ukraine and has a very thick accent. She is nice and kind of funny and told us for about 30 minutes why she has an Indian name but is from the Ukraine but tells everyone she is from Serbia and everyone gets confused when they meet her because she is white and has blonde hair and blue eyes. She’ll will hopefully keep us entertained, although she wants to teach us psychology which confused me a bit as to why but I am just going to go with it.
Wednesday is Buying and Merchandising in the Fashion Industry. I am excited about this class as well. My tutor has been a buyer for the last 20 years (I don’t remember for whom) and she is just adorable. The lecture is nice, because she interacts with us a lot and really tires to get everyone involved. At one point she put up a set of slides with looks from the new S/S 2012 collections and we had to yell out the designer and the trend. It was fun but I felt kind of like an idiot. I guess I don’t know as much as I should. There was one guy in the back who knew every designer shown, I was very impressed… And no he wasn’t gay. After our 30 minute “tea break” (we get them in every class, I love it) we went to our seminar. Here, as international students, we were put into groups of 6-7 students and we are working together now as a buying team. It was cool to meet these students but I am not sure yet how they feel about having an American in their group. They were nice but hesitant at first when I met them and didn’t really understand why I was allowed to take their classes and other upper level courses without having been selected as one of the few in the program. Oh well. We have an assignment due next week where as a team we have to go to this specific part of London, I believe it’s called Westfield, and we have to go to Topshop and River Island and compare the two. We are going to focus on Topshop and go through and do a comp shop as they call it. We will be evaluating the store and how it is put together and if it is working for their consumers or not. Then we are going to come back and present it to the class. It should be interesting, especially because just finding a time for all of us to go was a difficult part. Again, they didn’t understand why I had class on Tuesday and they didn’t.
Tomorrow I start my internship at Ralph Lauren. I am nervous but more than anything excited! I feel so blessed and lucky to have this opportunity and I just hope and pray that I am able to exceed their expectations. Now I just need to figure out what to wear!! Ahh, of course that’s my biggest problem ha. I promise to come home and tell you all about the first day as soon as I can!!
Miss you all and hope you’re doing well. We are having an Indian Summer right now so the weather is fabulous. Everyone is warning me though that next week it will be cold and windy. Bring on the oversized sweaters!
Cheers! :)
