Paris Fashion Institute returns with tailored Design Studio courses

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jul 25, 2018

The Paris Fashion Institute returns this fall, with revamped Design Studio courses, tailored to students’ specific needs. Widely regarded as one of Europe’s best bespoke fashion courses, the Paris Fashion Institute, or PFI, has a proven track record of preparing ambitious young talent for a career in fashion.
 

The intensive four-week courses are held in English and have featured lectures from such fashion luminaries as Karl Lagerfeld, Hubert de Givenchy, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Stella McCartney, Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe and Diane Pernet.

Along with field trips to Paris couture ateliers; ready-to-wear runway shows and major fashion exhibitions, taking in the vast range of assets in Paris, the world’s unquestioned fashion capital.

“Design Studio is a key class. The approach, the phases and the timing are exactly the same as the actual fashion industry. The class teacher acts as a creative director proposing the theme for the collection, the season, the structure and the customer profile. The students, evaluating tendencies and trends, work all together as a team analyzing the actual fashion brands and market, then creating the collection: silhouette, color-palette, fabrics and fabrications. The final mix is an collective collection where the students are designers, illustrators, pattern makers, colorists, product managers and market strategists. This ready-to-wear and accessories collection will be presented on paper at the end of the four weeks of seminars. It’s a precious visual C.V. that the students will use when looking for a job in the industry,” explained PFI’s founder and director Joan P. White, noting that the book means colleges and universities can give the students credits for the PFI course.
 
Founded in 1976, PFI is located in Cité Université, with classrooms and dormitories inside the leafy campus in the 14th arrondissement. A truly international setting, with students of over 130 countries, Cité Université boasts buildings designed by master architects such as Le Corbusier and Willem Marinus Dudok.

Students now come from all six continents; with diverse backgrounds from graduates to individuals with several years of experience in merchandising and marketing.  A hyper-busy course, and a distinctive method of gaining a truly 360-view of fashion, with a total of 174 hours of classes, including Creative Workshops, Marketing/​Merchan­dising, Lectures, Art History, Survival French, Fashion Illustration, and a Design & Product Cycle.
 
PFI alumni have gone on to achieve high ranking places in such notable fashion institutions as Vogue and W magazines; Barneys; Bloomingdales; Harvey Nichols and Hermès.
 
The next course begins on September 1.