Why fashion's biggest retailers want a seat in the classroom

Have you ever thought about heading back to school? Well, retailers certainly have, as fashion schools become their newest innovation labs. For fashion retailers looking for their next employee—or their next big idea—the classroom is becoming the place to look.

Major fashion schools are deepening their relationships with brands and retailers, moving beyond internships, guest lectures, and campus recruiting and into semester-long projects, mentorship programs, and collaborations built around actual business challenges.

At Parsons School of Design, recent industry partners have included Saks Fifth Avenue, Levi’s, Zara, Hugo Boss, Kering, Coach, Under Armour, and Theory, according to the school. In fact, Parsons now explicitly offers companies the opportunity to pursue “innovation-focused” collaborations intended to help them with business challenges, according to the school’s website. For Ben Barry, dean of Parsons School of Fashion, it’s all about helping ensure fashion education doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

“Partnerships with brands are so important for fashion and design schools like Parsons because it allows us to ensure that our curriculum, what we’re teaching our students, moves beyond the theoretical to be truly grounded in the complexities, the contradictions, the realities of industry,” Barry told Retail Brew.

He added that while recruiting is still a major incentive, retailers also benefit from access to classrooms that function as what he called “creative innovation hubs,” where students can experiment without many of the rules actual teams inside established companies have to deal with.

Last year, Parsons fashion management graduate students worked with Tory Burch to select a product and design a pop-up retail experience around its launch, taking into account everything from marketing and consumer culture to fashion’s role as entertainment. In another course, Parsons fashion design students worked with Macy’s and disabled collaborators to design clothing for people with disabilities.

Per Barry, brands no longer want to just send down execs for talks but actually help create the brief, meet students throughout the semester, provide feedback on work in progress, and return for final presentations. He said such projects can eventually result in “paid internships, to jobs, to scholarships, to awards for our students.”

FIT to be tied: At Fashion Institute of Technology, similar changes are afoot. Jason Schupbach, president of FIT, told Retail Brew in an email that brands and retailers are shifting from one-off sponsorships toward more formal strategic relationships with schools.

One example is Gap Inc.’s Doris Fisher Creators Program. Launching this fall, the program will give 30 FIT students access to Gap leaders and creatives through a mentorship program that includes fashion design, graphic design, and fabric styling.

FIT also has a years-long partnership with Macy’s through which Fashion Design BFA students compete to create collections the retailer ultimately produces and sells under its private brands. Earlier this year, for instance, FIT graduate Khoboso Nale’s knitwear capsule launched at Macy’s Herald Square under the retailer’s Bar III brand, after she worked with company executives and visited retail and manufacturing facilities during the development process.

Barry said companies increasingly value adaptability, collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and a willingness to work with evolving technologies instead of just prepping students for a narrowly defined role.

“We’re thinking they’re being prepared for jobs that we don’t know what they are yet, but they will exist when they graduate, and they’ll continue to change,” he said.

In fact, when a company wants to pursue an idea developed during a Parsons course, Barry said students retain ownership of their intellectual property and can then work directly with the brand to develop it.

And as AI and other technologies reshape both fashion and higher education, Barry expects the line between education and industry R&D to further blur.

“We don’t have the same constraints that one might have in industry,” he said. “And so that really allows this freedom of thinking, these new ideas to be played with, to fail, to try again, to iterate.”