Master of Arts in Fashion Styling, Creative Direction and Digital Content Istituto Marangoni, UK

The Fashion Styling, Creative Direction and Digital Content programme is a postgraduate level course designed to equip students with a holistic set of skills in styling, still image, and film, as well as printed and digital media. The course supports participants in becoming visual image experts, with a focus on the importance of the fashion image and digital media in creating a compelling story and atmosphere for fashion brands. The course is aimed at students from a styling, fashion, design, or business background, but is also open to applicants from other relevant disciplines who are interested in developing their personal visual language and creative skills.

Contemporary fashion stylists and creative directors understand the importance of the fashion image and digital media to create a compelling story and atmosphere, together with the growing connections between still and moving image to express fashion and luxury. This fifteen-month postgraduate level Fashion Styling, Creative Direction and Digital Content programme supports participants in becoming visual image experts with holistic skills set in styling, image, and film, as well as printed and digital media. Students will develop these skills while working on innovative, forward-looking projects for fashion brands for both physical and digital realms. Through in-depth creative, cultural, and contextual research, idea generation and technical experimentation, with recognition of contemporary professional standards and future imperatives, this programme looks at how to reflect the soul, identity, and values of a fashion brand while students explore and refine their own unique aesthetic personality as a creative director of the fashion image.

Students will learn about the rapidly evolving landscape of fashion styling and creative direction and the exciting ways that the fashion image, film, and digital media can enhance storytelling and communication strategies to develop dynamic content for the fashion industry of the future. Focusing on the visual language of communication, participants approach the many different aspects of fashion styling, learning how to persuade, inspire and create an emotional response.

Key themes of the course:

• Fashion styling, visual communication, and creative techniques
• Creative research, traditional and new media, critical perspectives
• Media and image values, semiotics
• Storytelling techniques, photography and moving image
• Visual culture, personal creative identity.

Through a series of multidisciplinary units, students will acquire the technical skills and theoretical knowledge needed to create editorial fashion shoots and commercial creative projects from initial concept, through final delivery – including analysis of current and future trends and the historical and contemporary context of fashion. During the course participants will also apply technical and cultural notions to in-studio projects, learning how to develop and plan in detail every area of the technical and creative process, from lighting to composition, to produce the theme of creative proposal developed to answer brand image or assigned client brief.

The units and tasks within this programme will require a high degree of critical thinking, analytical and strategic mindsets, initiative, and creativity, leading to professionalism and independent working approaches essential to any creative profile suitable for the contemporary market of fashion and design.

This programme will offer students the ability to develop a personal creative identity and reflect on their own skills and approaches to storytelling and communication, through industry briefs and projects designed to experiment with creative techniques and mindsets. Alongside technical and aesthetic aspects of photography and film, that incorporate lighting, composition, editing and special characteristics of films and paper, the course looks at digital strategy and networking, bringing observation and communication abilities together with artistic and creative expression.