Elinor Renfrew, Fashion Ba - Hons - Course director

I’m Elinor Renfrew, the course director at Kingston University for Fashion BA. It’s a world-renowned course and it’s world renowned because of its destinations and the students that we have here go into industry and are some of the best designers in the world. The course is three years and it is fashion design and we’re one of the few courses in the UK that only offer fashion design and our students go on to work as designers but it may be that they go on to be stylists, they may go on to be illustrators, they may go on to be in PR but predominantly they’re design students and I’m here sitting in the third year studio and you can see behind me the students working on their collections. The course is very much about portfolio; it’s well known for that and Kingston wins awards for portfolio and for illustration. Every year in any national competition the students at Kingston are up there with the winners. We’re a sponsored course at Kingston, which makes us quite unique. We are sponsored by large American companies – Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers – and in the UK we have companies such as John Smedley Knitwear, French Connection and we also have Topman and a trend forecasting company called Studio M and they work with us, with the students, to sponsor projects with competitions exclusively for Kingston. The students from these competitions win some amazing places and they go on paid internships to New York and they go to Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic over the summer and every year we send about five students out there and we now have a new sponsor, Old Navy which is San Francisco and these are exclusively to Kingston. In addition we do enter other competitions through the British Pastoral Council and every year students from Kingston win awards and win positions, internships, placements at the companies. We are studio based here and all the students work very much together, they support each other, although they all work in their own areas, they all know each other, we’re one campus, we’re one site and there’s a real community and I think that’s one of the things that we pride ourselves is the fact the students are proud to be here, the staff enjoy working with the students, we all work very much as a community here. When they leave, the students then come back and want to work with our fashion students from Kingston so they will go on and work in the industry alongside graduates from here. If you look at the companies all over the world, most of the design companies in the world will have Kingston students as their design directors within the design team. In the UK we have companies like All Saints, Religion, Paul Smith, there are quite a few companies that are actually mostly our Kingston graduates in the design team and also abroad – H&M, Zara, Abercrombie and Fitch in America, and Zara in Spain. When we are looking for students to come here, we’re looking for students who can innovate, that are creative, hard working. It’s a tough course, it’s very tough here but they have a lot of staff contact time, high expectations and working within peer groups that have high standards. So we’re looking for creativity, but we’re also looking for students that are completely dedicated and really want to get a career in fashion and want to be successful. They are competitive as well as being supportive because they realise the industry is getting smaller and there are more students leaving. If you come to Kingston, I think it will probably be one of the best experiences you will get because we are part of a design school and we work closely within the design School – 3D design and 2D design – so students get the opportunity to work with communication design students, they get to see students from product design, architecture, fine art, they are all in the same building. We do collaborative projects within the studio with just fashion where students will work on a group project on a trend for a company in London and from that they will get a paid internship for the best ones from the group. They will work on styling, they will work on all sorts of things to do with trend forecasting which is quite different from design. That’s the only group project we do. When it comes to third year, they focus very much on their collections and portfolio and throughout the three years it’s portfolio, 2D design and 3D design and the the understanding of taking 2D design into 3D design. It’s all about working on the body, understanding the the body from drawing the body, fashion illustration, toiling, cutting for different silhouettes and really trying to be quite extreme in what they want to do but also never forgetting that it needs to end up in a store and somebody needs to buy it. We encourage as much creativity across three levels but professionalism is the one thing that our students are known for. We also run a professional practice module and that one is – we work again closely with industry and we bring in designers who will have their own practice including Sophie Hulme who is a graduate of Kingston, very successful graduate from 2007, who will come in and brief the students. They will do a project and then from that project they will then produce work in order to gain a place, with their CV, with their cover letter. So it’s a very professional package and this helps them when they come to third year and they find their own company to work with. This year we’ve had some very successful outcomes for that project where third years have secured projects with Lanvin, Miu Miu, Armani, so it’s global and that really sets them up for when they leave. So the whole time at Kingston is about linking with industry without losing creativity because that’s what they are looking for. They come to Kingston for creativity before anything else but also I’m told time and time again that our students are very employable, they take it seriously and they are a huge asset in the workplace as interns but also when they graduate. We also do trips – next week we’ve got first years going out to New York and they will visit the sponsors. So go to the studios and see the kind of companies that they will be working for on projects in second year. So everything is integrated. The staff I have here are very dedicated and they are are very varied. They all have their own businesses, I’m the only full time member of staff, but I do that because I want to bring in people who are already out in the industry to bring in designers running their own labels to bring in that expertise into the department, whether it’s knitwear, whether it’s accessories, whether it’s menswear, that expertise comes back into the department and the staff are very very generous with their time with the students and with their sources and resources. It’s a complete package here but it’s a partnership and it’s only going to work if you are dedicated and you want to be here and we have a very high retention, we have very few students leaving Kingston. They want to be here, they want to be part of the whole experience and I think of all the colleges and courses that I know, I think we offer a very diverse, creative and altogether professional package to any student who would like to apply to Kingston.