Fashion school: Q&A with Elle Education

Elle Education is an international institute that focuses on the lifestyle industries, in particular fashion and interior design. FashionUnited spoke to the tutor and coordinator of the visual merchandising and fashion stylist diploma course and the image consultant and personal shopper short course Isabel Yuste Tosina and international communications specialist Grushenka Monsalve about the institute’s future plans, courses and its community.

How would you describe Elle Education’s student community?

Elle Education is available worldwide, and in two languages (Spanish and English) so our student community is highly diverse. We have students from around 35 nationalities and from different ages and professional backgrounds, all with the common goal of following their passion and specialising, or starting their career, in the lifestyle industries of fashion and design. Another way to describe our student community is hard-working and determined since a large majority of our students take advantage of the flexibility of our programmes and complete them whilst working or completing other education programmes.

What do we need to know about Elle Education?

Elle Education was created with the main purpose of helping individuals to not give up their dreams and follow their passion in their professional paths. This dream started 13 years ago in Spain, expanded to Mexico, and finally internationally with the Executive Education Program made in partnership with MIT Sloan Executive Education: Innovation Leadership for Fashion and Luxury Brands. Elle Education is a project by Mindway and Elle International. Since its start, Elle Education has helped more than 20,000 students to reach their professional goals, and we continue to expand our offer to continue with our mission.

What kind of courses does Elle Education offer? What is the focus area?

We recently launched our master programmes, accredited by the Complutense University of Madrid, which start in October and have a duration of one year. They cover the topics of fashion marketing, interior design, and management of lifestyle businesses. This last one has two modality options: 100 percent online, like the rest of our programmes, or hybrid, where students attend some on-site classes.

Next, we have our diploma courses which are six months long and are also accredited by the Complutense University of Madrid. The courses include marketing and communications for fashion and luxury brands, interior design, and visual merchandising and fashion styling. The next intake will take place in October.

Then we have our short courses, with the largest range of topics and courses, these last two months, are certified by Elle and Mindway Liberal Studies, and offer very specialised information for a specific sector including image consultant and personal shopper, how to create a brand, introduction to business management, influencer marketing, product design, event production, and fashion and lifestyle branding. The enrollment period for the next edition opens today, 15 April.

Finally our educational offer ends with our open programmes which are by far are most flexible and specialised, they include the psychology of consumer behaviour by style psychology founder, Kate Nightingale; disruption in fashion- 3D collection: design, develop and present, by Mountain Collective CEO, Mourad Bahrouch; and how to make a mood board by Beauty Papers editor, John William.

How would you describe the visual merchandising and fashion stylist course?

This diploma course is a perfect mix of two professions, we provide an added value to the styling courses that are already on the market, which are usually focused only on the fashion styling profession or combined with image consulting or coolhunting. We wanted students to learn two fascinating professions within the fashion world where there are real job opportunities.

The visual merchandiser is responsible for the image of a store, the stylist’s responsibility is the image of a particular brand or person, having deep knowledge in both professions helps students to be a better professional in the other, nowadays it is imperative to master both disciplines to perform positions in e-commerce or be responsible for the entire image of a fashion retail company.

What are the plans for this year? Any new things coming up?

This year we want to continue inspiring as many individuals as we can, we already started what we called Elle Education Live last year which offers free masterclasses on our website, but we wanted to do something bigger and with more impact, and so, we launched the Sustainability Seminar with support from the United Nations Office for Partnerships, which will take place from April to June, 100 percent online and free upon registration on our website.

We are extremely excited about this initiative as different speakers will cover topics such as the impact of innovation on sustainability, sustainable business models, the impact of technology, and how we can move towards sustainability in the lifestyle industries.

We believe that the first step to changing the world is always education, and we are honoured to be contributing to this global initiative and to provide individuals with the frameworks to be the change the world desperately needs right now.

Do you have any tips for future students who want to study at Elle Education?

Our main tip for future students is to believe in themselves and follow their passions. This will be the driving force of their ambition in their professional path. We are here to help them take their first steps towards their ideal professional future and give them the tools to succeed.

Photo credit: Elle Education