Course summary

This is a Connected Degree Portsmouth is the only University in the UK with the flexibility to choose when to do an optional paid placement or self-employed year. Either take a placement in your third year, or finish your studies first and complete a placement in your fourth year. You can decide if and when to take a placement after you've started your course. Overview Bring your creative and original ideas to life on our multi-award-winning Fashion Design degree course. You'll develop your innovation, self-awareness, and critical thinking via our teaching approach – which integrates sustainable and ethical design principles, focuses on your unique strengths, and shapes you into a confident and cultured professional. You'll also develop communication, leadership, and collaboration skills through exchange and enterprise projects, and you’ll build a deep knowledge of traditional and digital making skills using industry-level facilities. Using innovative research methods, you’ll be able to deliver authentic, imaginative work that pushes the boundaries of what fashion and textile design means now and in the future. Course highlights

• Master traditional and modern fashion design methods including drawing techniques, pattern-cutting, fashion illustration, silkscreen and digital printing, embroidery and constructed textiles

• Further your creativity, research, practice and environmental specialism by taking part in our sustainable fashion research project PO1

• Bolster your entrepreneurship by setting up your own label or fashion company as part of your studies

• Gain valuable industry experience by taking an optional placement – either with a company or as self-employed

• Enhance your collaboration and team-working skills by working with other students on other courses in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries

• Get insight into the fashion industry by attending guest lectures by visiting international professionals – previous visitors include Julian Roberts, Niccolo Casas and Shingo Sato

• Impress potential employers by exhibiting your work at the University’s annual graduate shows and Graduate Fashion Week showcases in London

• fashion, textile or accessories design

• trend prediction

• buying

• visual merchandising

• teaching or lecturing

• journalism or writing

• Ralph Lauren

• Hugo Boss

• Matthew Williamson

• River Island

• Fat Face

• Marks and Spencer

• Sunny Williams set up his label, House of Sunny, in 2011 and has developed minimal, androgynous aesthetic womenswear, which sells internationally and is stocked by ASOS

• Nikki Strange created her own-name line for Marks and Spencer in 2015 and also works as a freelance textile designer and visiting lecturer.