About Istituto Marangoni

Working on a limited time frame, this intensive fashion course provides the key technical and theoretical concepts related to fashion design and the fashion industry, looking at womenswear, menswear and accessories design, as well as an introduction to the study of materials and fabrics, and research applied to the individual design process. From freehand drawing techniques and the basics of clothing manufacture, participants quickly progress onto more technical aspects of fashion design such as fabric analysis, garment structure, and an introduction to manufacturing and production.

• Fashion designer
• Textile designer
• Fashion illustrator
• Fashion colourist
• Pattern maker
• Fashion consultant

Short courses cover a variety of subjects, levels and duration to suit all preferences, and are also the perfect ‘taster’ or introduction to fashion programmes, useful when considering more intensive study, or for future career path development.

This short course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of fashion design, how to formulate ideas and translate them into a visual representation. Participants will be introduced to key notions in the fashion design process, to basic drawing and illustration techniques, and the study of trends. The course also explores the role of the fashion designer with participants working on creative research for an individual design collection via a vocational learning approach.

Week 1: The start of the course introduces fashion drawing and design techniques followed by an analysis of the founding principles of developing a fashion collection including: silhouette, colour charts, fabrics and accessories, right through to the design and creation of outfits. Participants are then introduced to the silhouette, colour palettes, the appropriate use of fabrics, and the principle financial considerations of designing for fashion.

Week 2: Starting from creative research to foster personal inspiration, participants are guided to develop basic silhouettes and coordinate outfits with fabric and colour selection. The focus on trend research looks into its origins together with market relevance, and a brief analysis on how trends influence a contemporary collection.

Week 3: Based on inspiration linked to a selected theme, participants put together a basic fashion design collection supported by appropriate technical information, including colour charts, inspirational materials or mood board. Participants put into practice the acquired knowledge from the previous weeks and prepare a presentation of their work as a basic collection portfolio, to receive a final holistic critique.

This dynamic intensive course trains participants on essential technical and theoretical aspects related to the development of creative content for fashion (photography, video, styling and art direction). For those with limited time available, this course focuses on visual communication investigating the many different aspects of fashion styling, using images and multimedia contents to persuade, inspire, and create an emotional response.

The work of a fashion stylist must be both strategic and creative: attentive to the historical context and culture of fashion, to current trends and developments in the industry, and yet still remaining consistent with a client’s brief or brand identity.

Possible career paths:

• Fashion Stylist
• Digital Content Manager
• Art Director
• Fashion Photographer
• Social Media Director

Short courses cover a variety of subjects, levels and duration to suit all preferences, and are also the perfect ‘taster’ or introduction to design programmes, useful when considering more intensive study, or for future career path development.

This short course will guide participants through the latest fashionable trends in contemporary interior design. It encompasses the definition of a style through an interior design scenario, helping participants to improve their aesthetic sense and skills in décor. This course will challenge participants’ ability to interpret the world of interiors and home collection, their use of complementary styles, colours and lighting effects via a vocational approach to learning.

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Interpret an inspirational theme for a design project;
• Develop basic interior design skills;
• Define materials, colours, lighting for an interior project considering new trends;
• Translate concept into the interior space.

Short courses cover a variety of subjects, levels and duration to suit all preferences, and are also the perfect ‘taster’ or introduction to fashion programmes, useful when considering more intensive study, or for future career path development.

Course Themes

Week 1:

Participants investigate the complex and fruitful relationship between art and fashion through a fascinating journey over the centuries, from the Renaissance up to the present day and with a view to the advent of metaverse and NFT collectibles, aimed at captivating examples of collaboration -through exhibitions, installations, the use of perfomative arts and events- between designers and artists and fueling their inspiration. They will be encouraged to demolish disciplinary boundaries and industry conventions.

Week 2:

Participants keep on investigating the creative processes that characterize each of the two systems, passing through the development and production of a project sitting on the fence between fashion and art, being it a collection, an NFT or a perfomative fashion show. The week will conclude with an illustrated presentation of a creative project proposal, supported by a concept, research materials, development including for example illustration, colour charts, photos or mock ups. 

This full-time course is a strategic and market-oriented blend of the main perspectives in fashion business; covering strategy, budgeting, finance, product development, fashion marketing, communication, branding, buying, retail operations management and global distribution channels. 

Fashion is an industry in constant evolution, therefore both time-tested and contemporary marketing strategies are analysed in order to achieve business goals. Participants learn brand marketing and development strategies, and implement specific cost control systems. By studying cultural, sociological and historical dynamics in fashion, they understand the influence of trends in different countries and realities and their impact on sales performance. 

Fashion business professionals drive the tactical and entrepreneurial spirit of a fashion company; they will as well work on production, communication, marketing and retail and must possess a thorough knowledge of the fashion panorama. They are able to identify with great precision which tools they need to successfully position a brand, a collection or even a single product in the fashion and luxury markets. They are experts in the business of fashion. The course looks at current issues in the industry including sustainability and new media digital marketing (virtual platforms, e-commerce, social media) working to define a commercial proposal that meets the demands of the fashion industry of today. Key focus is also given to competitor evaluation and analysis techniques. Through the principles of economics and finance, participants are able to measure profitability and ensure compliance with budgets and strategies, and implement specific cost control systems. 

Taking a fashion collection or luxury product through to wholesale and retail distribution channels needs a mix of both concrete business acumen and creative communication skills in order to successfully complete the process; determining target audience, price brackets, and planning promotion and distribution channels. Participants learn real-world skills working in collaboration with international companies on industry projects and case studies, as well as via guest lectures and talks from visiting professionals and experts in the sector. The overall aim of the programme is to form future business professionals capable of creating a valid business plan, or commercial proposal, either for a start-up, new business ventures, or for existing brand development.

Short courses cover a variety of subjects, levels and duration to suit all preferences, and are also the perfect ‘taster’ or introduction to fashion programmes, useful when considering more intensive study, or for future career path development.

Due to globalisation, fashion brands and fashion products aim to meet the desires and requests of consumers on a worldwide scale. Meanwhile, local and subcultural trends are constantly emerging, creating a knock-on effect to change what is ‘fashionable’, or directly influencing sales of the most ‘desirable’ fashion products.

This short course in trend forecasting looks at the interaction of shifts in fashion, consumer lifestyle and culture, and some of the key methods used to perceive upcoming trends, and predict what consumers are willing to buy several seasons ahead of time.

Participants are shown forecasting skills, and discover how to contextualise and interpret information to construct the basis of a trend preview: an assembling of work and research, that goes beyond simple ‘fashion intuition’.

Target: this course is aimed at professionals who want to deepen their knowledge of digital marketing and communication, e-commerce platforms and new technologies to support the management of fashion and luxury brands. The course is suitable for those who want to develop a digital-based business by adopting innovative strategies that combine creative thinking and brand management. Fashion e-Commerce & Digital Marketing: become a fashion expert and develop innovative strategies for a successful e-business.

In this course, participants will learn how to analyse an e-commerce platform by recognizing the different product and service strategies. You will learn how to develop digital content to engage the online consumer through visual storytelling. By deepening digital marketing, the course will also focus on the study of the advanced tools needed to analyse the target and personalize the online offer.

The goal of this course is to be able to manage a successful e-commerce for fashion and luxury brands and create an engaging customer journey for the contemporary consumer. The course is completed with the study of technological and innovative tools to support the creation of communication strategies, with the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, try-on technology, and new digital media.

Career Opportunitites:

Participants will be trained on the strategies and tools to enhance the digital communication of a brand or e-commerce platform, through innovative tools and content strategies. They will be able to collect and analyze data to recognize new market and target opportunities to develop a successful e-business.

Learning focus:

• Digital content creation
• Design Thinking
• E-business Management
• Innovation and New Media: VR, AR, and new digital tools
• Data Analytics

Target: fashion industry professionals, and more. This course is developed to deepen the characteristics of the product, the materials and the quality control. You will learn how to analyse a fashion collection, to recognize the style and identity of the brand, to select and manage the different product categories. The aim of the course is to train a fashion buyer and merchandiser expert in the fashion sector, capable of coordinating a showroom, managing an order and maintaining contact between the company and the reference stores.

Career opportunities:

Through this course participants will be able to deepen the technical skills on the product analysis to anticipate fashion and market trends; they will be prepared on how to operate in competitive fields such as the fashion and luxury retail sector - by adopting knowledge on the latest technologies to be used within the store and through e-commerce platforms.  Attendants will develop a greater creativity for the display layout of the products, the preparation of the window displays for physical and digital stores. This course is designed for professionals who want to increase their skills and update themselves on retail, merchandising and visual display trends.

Learning focus:

• Fashion Retail
  
• Product and Collection Analysis
• Trend Forecasting
• Visual Merchandising and Visual Display
• E-commerce Strategies and Technolgies

Target: fashion industry professionals and more. Fashion enthusiasts who want to get involved and learn to recognize their skills and resources to develop their own business. Fashion Entrepreneurship: get ready to turn your dream into a business, analyzing market opportunities, the perfect target and developing innovative strategies for your success in the fashion world. 

In this course, participants will learn to analyze the innovative and successful business models of the fashion and luxury industry, market trends and opportunities, and risk management.  The goal is to develop a business plan with marketing and communication strategies to launch or enhance your brand, enter a new market or attract a specific target. Thanks to the practice of leadership, emotional intelligence and public speaking, they will be able to promote your brand, look for potential investors or create synergies, collaborations or brand extensions. The course is completed by the study of new technologies and digital tools to support the management and planning of brand development strategies. 

Career opportunities:

Throughout the programme, participants will be able to deepen their knowledge on the fashion system, analyzing market opportunities and strategies to develop an innovative business, to enter a new market, expand the target, or simply refresh your business with a rebranding or a brand extension. This course will allow as well to improve leadership, team and brand management, public speaking, and communication skills. In addition, specific attention will be given on winning business models and the technological tools that fashion and luxury brands are developing, to evaluate new opportunities.

Learning focus:

• Luxury business models
• Leadership skills
• Fashion brand management
• Ethics and sustainability
• Digital technologies

These undergraduate programmes are designed for participants looking to enter the fashion world, and provide a complete education allowing participants to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to pursue a career in the chosen field.

The Fashion Styling & Creative Direction programme aims to form skilled stylists with the ability to create new narratives covering both creative and operational strategies in the fashion and luxury business. They will understand how to use media to create followers and highlight brand identity, as well as the relationship between creative and organisational areas of a brand or company brief.

Participants will also learn how to communicate fashion trends and products using paper or digital publications; by understanding the role and responsibilities of the professional stylist participants learn how to pull together, organize and lead a team of experts to ensure that the direction of what is published in fashion magazines, appears online, or on the catwalk, communicates the right messages, at the right time, and to the right target audience.

From a solid base in styling, this course moves onto exploring multiple areas of the fashion industry where management of the creative process is core practice.

Participants are encouraged to develop their own ideas and experiment in producing a different variety of visual outcomes, such as fashion editorials, fashion films, brand image and restyling proposals, interactive and print advertising campaigns, and social media visual contents.

The course covers key skills in fashion copywriting, PR and media planning, fashion production management, business planning, time management, and advertising deadlines and budgets. Cultural studies in the history of art, design, dress and fashion culture provide the necessary skills to make a critical assessment. The analysis of style brings shape, reality and energy into the visual space - the material ‘reality’ of image making.

Participants will also be trained on how to create an immediately identifiable and recognizable style in order to produce and develop live photo shoots, managing the team involved in the process of photography, image editing, set construction, still life and moving image, lighting, direction, and choices in make-up, hair and accessories; they are encouraged to decode stereotypes and to think about image positioning from a different perspective in order to discover their own unique personal style.

Short courses cover a variety of subjects, levels and duration to suit all preferences, and are also the perfect ‘taster’ or introduction to fashion programmes, useful when considering more intensive study, or for future career path development.

This dynamic short course focuses on the analysis of image and the development of style. From the definition of fashion moods to the importance of accessories, participants will evaluate aspects related to traits of the body and learn how to enhance and complement physical characteristics. They will work on the development of an individual style through the construction of a ‘total look’ and capture it for a photo shoot via a vocational learning approach.

Week 1 Style overview: participants study and explore key periods in history that represent past, present styles, future fashion trends and the elements that characterize and influence them. In order to fully understand the role of the stylist, participants will be guided in sourcing and collating information from research tools such as books and fashion magazines and through specific virtual domains relevant to fashion and luxury, as well as conducting iconographic research.

Week 2 Personal identity: participants evaluate the different types of human faces and bodies and are introduced to the skills and techniques used to enhance particular physical features such as hairstyling and make-up. They will gain an understanding of the fundamental elements used to dictate a style (i.e. the importance of colour, silhouette, accessories and their combination) and key notions in photo shoot planning and narrative.

Week 3 Style definition: participants will bring together their experience and work undertaken during the previous weeks to define, develop and present a particular style ready for a photo shoot, collating and editing their work for presentation and review in an individual stylist portfolio or style book.

Interpret space and enhance the way we live today using colour, layout, acoustics, lighting, furniture and fabrics. Interior designers plan responding to the ‘identity’ of the given space, as well as taking on-board demands of physical wellbeing, and performance needs of the space in question.

This three-year course covers a complex mix of technical design skills (CAD), combined with a contemporary approach, learning how to create a story evoking both style and mood in the main areas of contemporary lifestyle interiors: residential, commercial, retail, public spaces, and exhibition design. 

Learning focus:

• Spatial design
• Designing public spaces
• Residential design
• Brand identity into interior design
• Professional portfolio
• Materials and surfaces
• Illustration and colour technique
• CAD
• History of art and design
• Research approaches

Career opportunities:

• Interior designer
• Interiors for editorial/publishing
• Showroom management
• Consultant for exhibitions/installations
• Set designer

Become fully qualified in the latest fashion and accessories design techniques and expand your career options. Covering clothing and accessories design, these three-year full-time courses encourage individual style and creativity, while also offering the chance to become multi-skilled fashion designers. Participants begin by studying the language of ready to wear, progressing through all stages of the design process including hand sketching, fashion illustration and digital design, as well as pattern making, pattern cutting and construction, right through to the finished garment or product – through a deep study of all the steps in collection development. 

Learning Focus:

• Fashion drawing & illustration (2D, 3D)
• Prototyping (lab & workshop) pattern cutting, maquette
• Visual communication & professional presentation skills
• Digital design & 3d printing
• The study of fabrics and materials
• Professional design portfolio & collection
• Marketing & fashion business
• Analysis and strategies of contemporary fashion
• History of luxury & brand heritage

Career opportunities:

• Fashion designer
• Accessories designer
• Fashion illustrator
• Product manager
• Trend forecaster/Trend Analysis expert

The Portfolio Design short course, featuring an exclusive collaboration with world-renowned talent scout Sara Sozzani Maino (Scouting and Educational Initiatives Advisor Vogue Italia & International Brand Ambassador Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana) is designed to equip students with the visual skills they need to communicate their design ideas. They are introduced to some of the most important notions of sketching and drawing, as well as digital design skills for visual communication and representation. At the end of this course, students will have designed and output a complete identity and style research and portfolio.

In the first week students explore the visual world and the latest aesthetic trends, to understand which contents they want to communicate. Through drawings, text, colours, images research, they will be able to identify the area in which they want to focus and develop their portfolio in the following weeks.   

In the second week students gain the tools to create their own portfolio, by assembling the references and the inspirations they found through the research, evolving and deepening them by using drawing techniques and other digital graphic tools, consistently with their desired outcome. 

Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate a competence in the use of information technologies necessary for the presentation of a portfolio;
• Show an ability to develop themed concepts and design ideas;
• Generate a body of art work that evidences personality;
• Apply aesthetic judgement and editing in the development of a portfolio of visual work.

These undergraduate programmes are designed for participants looking to enter the design world, and provide a complete education allowing participants to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to pursue a career in the chosen field. Both furniture and industrial product design overlap with many creative fields including crafts, fashion, art, and interior design. Product designers understand where these areas meet, making use of contemporary influences and appropriate methods in their own creative process, designing luxury furniture, bespoke one-off items, or products for industrial design and commercialisation. 

Learning Focus:

• Technical drawing & rendering (CAD)
• The product design process
• Product analysis
• Product branding
• Industry project work in collaboration with companies
• The history and culture of product design
• Design methodology & development
• Industrialisation of the creative process
• Final project and portfolio creation
• Creative research practice and theory

Career opportunities:

• Product designer
• Product development manager
• Design director
• System designer
• Concept designer

These undergraduate programmes are designed for participants looking to enter the design world, and provide a complete education allowing participants to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to pursue a career in the chosen field. Todays graphic designers not only work with technical images, they consider the look and feel of the design, they understand the message they need to communicate and their audience; visual designers take on a 360° view of the creative design process. This three year course investigates visual design communication by working on innovative ideas in graphic design and new media for all fields of the creative industries.

Learning Focus:

• Manage publishing & editorial projects
• Exhibit design (stage, retail, corporate interior, art event)
• Visual identity & branding (logo, corporate design, signage)
• Interface design for E-shop, online platforms, and social media
• Photography & art direction
• Communication publishing & techniques for brands
• Graphic layout & art direction for website & digital application
• Creation and Image development, research and editing
• Infographics
• Professional design portfolio & presentation skills

Career Opportunities:

• Graphic designer for publishing (editorial)
• Graphic designer for packaging and branding
• Art director for advertising agencies
• Visual designer for exhibits and corporate design
• Visual designer for digital/interactive tools
• Web communication

This foundation course develops critical independent thinking and practical ability for undergraduate level study. Upon successful completion participants reach the necessary level to be able to apply for one of the BA (Hons) Degree programmes or for a Three Year Course. Istituto Marangoni one-year foundation courses prepare participants for entry into any of the three-year undergraduate degree programmes, or three year courses, in the fashion or design fields. Over the course of the year participants are offered exciting new challenges that will improve their creative thinking, develop their broader fashion, design & art skills, and help them to identify where their true passion lies. 

Learning Focus:

• Communicating fashion concepts
• Representation of fashion design & business ideas
• Trend & style creative research
• Style development
• Production scenarios in fashion business
• Techniques and fashion product cycle
• Fashion trends and styles
• The Fashion system
• Fashion portfolio building
• Presentation & visual communication
• Visual culture

This foundation course develops critical independent thinking and practical ability for undergraduate level study. Upon successful completion participants reach the necessary level to be able to apply for one of the BA (Hons) Degree programmes or for a Three Year Course.

Learning Focus:

• Communicating design concepts
• Representation of design ideas
• Product creative research
• Concept formulation and development
• Production & environment scenarios
• Techniques and product logic
• Interior design context & defining mood
• Representation of product design
• Design portfolio building
• Presentation & visual communication
• Visual culture