FIDM introduces fashion certificate course with WWD and Yellowbrick

The fashion certificate course is an initiative by online education provider Yellowbrick, which has teamed up with California fashion school Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) and B2B fashion news platform Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). The goal is to help young designers expand their creative knowledge, FIDM said in a press release.

The programme, entitled ‘Designing the Collection’, aims to teach participants practical experience for working in the fashion industry by educating them about modern tools and methods of fashion design.

Industry professionals from WWD and faculty and designers from FIDM will guide learners through the process of designing a complete fashion collection, which includes basic fashion design skills such as sketching, mood boarding, journaling, writing a collection statement, the presentation of final pieces, etcetera.

With Designing the Collection, FIDM, WWD and Yellowbrick hope to encourage adult learners and motivated young fashion students to expand their knowledge and practical experience through five, fully online course modules: ‘Make it Personal,’ ‘Show, Don’t Tell,’ ‘Fashion Sketching 101,’ ‘Muse and Market,’ and ‘Your Final Designs’.

The young designers are given guidance in building their portfolio and will finalise three to five fashion designs for their own collections.

In order to receive a (non-credit) certificate of completion from FIDM for the course, participants must present a pitch deck that showcases their work.

“The pandemic pushed us to lean fully into online learning through the spring and summer quarters of 2020. Encouraged by those results, we began to ask: ‘What else can we create that will expand our educational reach online?’ It was then that we started talking to Yellowbrick,” Barbara Bundy, vice president of education at FIDM explained in a release.

“Designing the Collection was created to give designers a pathway to follow and enable them to think beyond standalone pieces. We couldn’t ask for stronger partners than FIDM and Yellowbrick,” Amanda Smith, president of Fairchild Media, the owner of WWD, said.