Ok so I’m so happy I can finally spill the beans of the new course I am starting this week. Teen Vogueand Parsons School of Design have joined together to create a 10 week online fashion course titled: ‘Certificate in Fashion Industry Essentials’, and I will be taking part in the first ever cohort of this course.
Anyone who knows me knows how much I’ve loved fashion all my life. It’s always been a part of everything I’ve done, and I think after spending the last year in New York and seeing the opportunities there are out there I’m definitely in a place where I want to take it more seriously. If you have something you know you love why shouldn’t you be learning about it, working for it, playing with it?
Fashion has always been a passion of mine and has always been something I always wanted to study- but there wasn’t a huge variety of courses to choose from when I was finishing school, so I chose to do Communications Studies in Dublin City University – which I loved every second of. It was very broad and had lots of creative modules, meaning you could take from the course whatever you wanted and whatever you decided put into it. In college I was always very active with my colleges fashion society ‘DCU Style Society’ and in my final year I was the co-editor of my college’s fashion magazine ‘The Look‘.
I was so happy to hear of this new course that Teen Vogue and Parsons are launching, I feel very lucky that I have the opportunity to study it after finishing college. The flexibility of an online course is great for me as I’m working full time and trying to keep up with my blog, it means I can delve into the course work at my own pace.
The course content looks so amazing, informative and useful for moving forward with. It really is everything you’d need to start a great career in fashion:
Course 1: Unlocking your Visual Style
Course 2: Thinking like a Designer
Course 3: Understanding Fashion Production
Course 4: Working in Fashion Media
Course 5: Developing Fashion Marketing & PR Skills
Course 6: Fashion Essentials Final Project
The course itself will have interactive elements, with videos from Parsons School of Design staff and supplementary reading material from Teen Vogue. Each course is then reinforced with assignments based on the topics. The lessons learnt will be easily applied to real life with the advice received from Teen Vogue experts and other fashion industry leaders such as Rebecca Minkoff, International Fashion Designer; Amy Astley, Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue; and Francesca Sammaritano, Parsons Faculty and former Fashion Designer for Calvin Klein.
Rings are Carat & Bronzallure from Matthew Stephens, Limerick
In total, the online course is equivalent to a full semester course with 42+ hours of online instruction and 70+ on-demand video lessons taught by more than twenty instructors and a combination of skills and career-focused assignments. At the end you will have a professional fashion portfolio that has been reviewed and evaluated and is ready to be taken to an interview. Upon completion, you receive a certificate from both Teen Vogue and Parsons School of Design – a great thing to add to any CV/ Resumé.
I will be doing blog posts every two weeks as I go through each section of the course – I’ll fill you all in with the details of the coursework, the subject topics, the teachers and anything else I find useful along the way. Be sure to follow @teenvogue on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat for updates about the course, as well as myself on Instagram & Twitter (louisecooney_) and Snapchat (lou1409).
To learn more and/or sign up for the course, click here.
Photos by Edelle Kenny (Insta: @edellecarmelkenny)