Drs. José Teunissen

Fashion education on a artschool is finding the right balance between developing design skills, craftmanship, thinking in concepts and preparing students on a practice and a creative business. Nowadays it has become clear that fashion is more than a clothing industry: fashion functions as a strong cultural phenomenon, as thé communication element in our culture that prescribes and provide us with personality and identity. Besides it is one of the biggest and vital creative industries.

Therefore ArtEZ has installed a professor Fashion Theory (José Teunissen) and a professor Art, Culture and Economics to stimulate strongly research on fashion as a cultural phenomenon and as creative business. Students simply need to understand more of theoretical context of their future workfield. Besides it is important to learn them more about the practice and the business itself during the education. The department Fashion and Product design has developed several interesting practice-based workshops and assignments to stimulate this. In the third year of the BA students product and fashion design, for example, have to develop as a team a professional fashion collection: Collectie Arnhem. In a half year they have to go on the whole process from sketching, designing, marketing, buying fabric, selling till organising a fashion show. The Fashion master students work on other projects with the ArtEZ store Coming Soon, the Monsteratelier and Modebiennale Arnhem. This lectures focuses on all these projects. There will be explained how education, theory and practice are related within the philosophy of ArtEZ.