On Aug. 18 the Roski School of Art and Design announced a new, interdisciplinary minor in fashion available to undergraduate students beginning in Fall 2023. Although USC has offered various fashion classes for some time, this minor will be the first time that students can have a specific concentration in the field. 

Haven Lin-Kirk, Roski’s dean, said resounding student interest pushed the University to launch the minor.

“[Fashion is] the one thing that more students come and ask for from the art school than almost anything else,” Lin-Kirk said. “You would think it would be about digital technology, nope, for us it’s like, ‘Why can’t we have more fashion classes here?’” 

The new minor also serves as a stepping stone for students toward Roski’s forthcoming Master of Fine Arts in fashion or the Iovine and Young Academy’s forthcoming Master of Science in fashion innovation, both of which USC will soon launch.

While Roski houses the new fashion minor, students are required to take classes in IYA, the School of Dramatic Arts, the Kaufman School of Dance, the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. 

IYA Dean Thanassis Rikakis said the minor’s interdisciplinary nature was intended to reflect the complexities of today’s fashion industry. 

“You have enough fashion in the physical world, the digital world, part of it is marketing, [it’s] an area of socioeconomic activity [and] cultural activity. We’re reacting as a University to exactly that nature of the economy,” Rikakis said. “If you’re really going to allow study in an intersectional space of activity, that study … should be done across different areas of the school.”

The minor was designed to give students access to experts in various fields so they can enter the fashion industry with as diverse a set of tools as possible, Lin-Kirk said, which will give students an important advantage.

“Very few people that have this kind of impact in the fashion industry just come from a fashion program. There are fashion programs out there, but that’s not what USC wants to do,” Lin-Kirk said. “We’re a tier one research university, which means that we believe that what happens in the studio is part of the research that a creative practitioner is actually going to be investigating.”

Students will be able to investigate multiple fields, including dance, through the lens of fashion. Julia Ritter, Kaufman’s dean, said including the school’s classes in the fashion minor felt natural. 

Dance and fashion have a deep historical connection, Ritter said, because choreography is becoming more relevant in areas such as fashion runways, where designers must consider how models should move and pose to demonstrate the styles’ material and artistry.

“[There’s an] incredibly long history of choreographers and dance artists working with artists, whether they call them fashion designers or costume designers,” Ritter said. “Students who study dance courses through a lens of fashion, they’re going to be gaining fluency in what it means to be a body in conversation with material.”

The new minor also looks to take a very modern approach to fashion, Lin-Kirk said, with the intent of improving upon various flaws and shortcomings of the current industry.

“We’re not going to be in fast fashion, we’re not going to be contributing to all the waste that’s out there, we’re not going to be continuing to promote gender stereotypes,” Lin-Kirk said. “We’re going to be a really interesting program that is going to do something completely different than the types of fashion design programs that we’ve seen in the past.”

The minor’s goals go beyond teaching students the current trends in fashion, Rikakis said. If the course reaches its full potential, he said, students will investigate what fashion is and what it can be. 

“If we succeed, students will begin to realize, ‘Wow, what fashion is is not what the professor is teaching me, [but] the conversation that we’re all having to define what fashion is,’” he said. “That type of learning, where the student is part of the conversation of what fashion is and … getting the discussion to move across faculty and students? That’s the first step [to] success.”