If you want to work in fashion and are about to enter college, finding the right school for you can be a difficult task. We’d like to help. So we’ve painstakingly rounded up the 50 best fashion schools in the world. (Click here for the full list.)
These are not just design schools. We’ve included tons of colleges and universities that offer stellar fashion business, marketing, styling, textiles, and technology programs.
Methodology: To generate our list, we spoke to students, employees at the schools, companies who hire graduates, and industry professionals. We also considered tuition costs, demographics, famous alums, and variety in programming. It’s not scientific, but we tried to be as objective as possible. Keep this in mind if you don’t see your favorite school here or disagree with the ranking your alma mater received. The take-home message? These schools are all amazing, or they wouldn’t have made the list.
Tuition: Art and design schools are generally expensive. But you can see here that the prices range from almost $40,000 per year to free. (Yes, you read that correctly–thank you, Finland). Unless otherwise stated, the tuition you see is yearly for international students. It does not include room and board and incidentals. Also, tuition obviously changes yearly, so take it as an approximation.
How To Apply: Most of the schools have very similar application requirements, so we decided not to include them for each individual school. In general, you need a high school equivalency, letters of recommendation, essay, portfolio (for design students), interview. Some countries, for obvious reasons, have language requirements. We’ve noted where English is not the main language spoken.
Famous grads: Just because a school hasn’t produced a marquee name (yet) doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Every single one of these schools has placed students in major fashion houses, commercial labels, and other fashion businesses. Behind every Alber Elbaz (a Shenkar alum) are 50 Jane and John Does helping everything run smoothly. And getting paid damn good money to do it.
Other: If you see an asterisk (*) it denotes a CFDA-affiliated school.
Now dive in and learn something:
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