Studies in Fashion and Design, Cognate - COLA, UNH

The Studies in Fashion and Design cognate offers students a foundation for developing the basic skills to enter the field of fashion design. It introduces the art behind the creation of apparel and the basics of marketing strategy connected to fashion design. Students will be educated to develop their own creative process and design method while learning the basic knowledge of marketing and personal business. The cognate prepares students with a means to combine their artistic vision with practical application and helps them become designers who have the skills to support their own artistries.

Students complete coursework selected from three groups:

1. Design Creation: Helps students to adapt their artistic skills to support conceptual ideas. It gives students abilities in creating, analyzing, constructing and presenting works for costume creation. It aims to guide students in developing their own working process with a critical approach to problem solving. Students will be able to use terminology to communicate ideas in the fashion design industry.
2. Design Skills: Gives students the options to understand and apply a skill class of their choice to help them articulate their design ideas visually and digitally. It aims to offer students options to create visual merchandising for their design works through rendering hand skills, graphic design software, or photography.
3. Marketing: Helps students to understand and incorporate business aspects into their creative works. It aims to prepare students to promote and sustain their creative works independently as a personal business or within retail organizations.

Student must complete three courses (12 credits), one course in each group listed below.