MANIFESTO: IDC FASHION

IDC Fashion is a concentration in Parsons’ Integrated Design Curriculum that utilizes a holistic approach to educating students within the context of garments, identity, media and fashion. IDC is more of an underlying philosophy than a program. We ground ourselves in the understanding that a heightened consciousness towards what we wear, what we create and what we consume will make us wear more ambitiously, consume more conscientiously and create more ecstatically. IDC is constantly evolving and refining itself, perpetually challenging students to explore and understand their place in the world—and as a result, expand their own potential and break habitual patterns.

The IDC Fashion track offers a series of core classes and electives that provide a context in which knowledge is built up with a sense of purpose. The IDC Fashion core classes engender in its students the ability to engage with their electives in various disciplines in an integrated and productive way. This allows for more meaningful exploration and more useful genuine learning.

“The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.”

IDC fashion students make clothes, publications, images, drawings, videos, whatever fits their sensibility—constantly and continuously. We create, we share, we perform, but most importantly we have fun. Our mode of learning is experiential. At IDC we imagine new modes of production and exchange, realize them, and enact them in creative ways.

“Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail.
There is only make.”

The traditional fashion design training marks arbitrary points, independent of beauty and inspiration, that designate a work as ‘finished.’ We at IDC view no such points. Works are only revised, reworked, added to, edited and expanded—never finished. We place human existence at the center of our curriculum: understanding what it means to be human, and knowing that what you do carries wide reverberations, is as important a skill as draping. What we wish to do is add a touch more humanity to every part of the process of creation, production and consumption. The result is that the entire process is demystified, which creates pieces, events and interactions that have an expansive energy to them.

“Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.”

We want to pull as much as we can out of as many places we can. It is about sharing and creating in abundance, with love and confidence. By constantly and curiously exploring our relationship to what we make, where we are and whom we interact with, we are opening up the entire process of creation and exchange. Once there is space to grow, there is no limit to what we create and share.

“Consider everything an experiment.”

When you seek to get the most out of your connections and bring a heightened consciousness to them, anything and everything can be considered an experiment—anything and everything is an opportunity to learn. As a result, IDC’s Fashion track is flexible and self-directed. It leaves room for the x quantities—all the variables and unknowns in life. An IDC student has the resiliency to take whatever life deals them because they expect the unexpected. They can integrate themselves, and their skills, into any environment—no matter how unlikely or challenging.

Quotes taken from Sister Corita's Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

IDC Colloquium: Fashion Media

The course will offer a combination of seminar and studio. In class students will explore the language and history of magazines, fashion and art publications in particular, photography, media, communication, marketing and branding. The class will provide context and offer talks, guest lectures and small hands-on projects in which students explore the issues that come up in class through making. The class is interactive and will cater to the needs and desires of the students who participate. The aim of this class is for students to understand the economic, cultural and social implications of their own work and of professional fashion media practice, and develop radically innovative strategies that will impact and change the current landscape of fashion and media.

IDC Networks: The Gift

This course is the spring core class for junior students who develop their work within IDC’s Fashion Area of Study. In this studio, students are challenged to create their own methods of working and interacting with the world. They will formulate a dream scenario for what they want to achieve by the end of the semester and beyond. They will be challenged to be resourceful and innovative in realizing that goal, joining with those classmates, colleagues, organizations, businesses and initiatives that will make their dream real and apparent.

Students are expected to understand their own potential and where they need to extend themselves with qualities other people and organizations have to offer. The focus of this class will be on extending oneself and creating models of exchange outside of the monetary system. Students are challenged to engage in barter economies and trade skills that they have with skills they need. They will start to understand the value of the skills, services and products they have to offer and understand and receive what others have to offer in return.
The students will determine the content and the dynamics of class time, inviting people to class, initiating activities, and more that will help support the development of their processes and projects.

IDC Interfaces: Love

This course is the core class for junior students who develop their work within IDC’s Fashion Area of Study. In IDC Interfaces: Fashion Core 3,
students continue to explore their personal interests and qualities they would like to develop in relation to clothes, fashion, identity, media, performance, and more. Building a more focused and informed perspective from their experiences in previous cores and area of study electives, they will ask their teacher to elaborate on specific aspects of their work that need more in depth support and development. Fashion Core 3 is self-directed and self-motivated. This core class is offered in several sections: in the first week of the semester students will interview the teachers and choose the instructor they feel will best support their personal growth.

IDC Systems: Being Singular Plural

This course is the core class for sophomore students who develop their work within IDC’s Fashion Area of Study. Students continue their studies of body, garments and identity developed in (Un)Fashion, and will transform the ideas, propositions and designs that were conceived during the first semester into wearable clothing, accessories, magazines and services that will be sold or exchanged during an event/sales presentation outside school at the end of the semester. We will explore and rethink existing modes of exchange using a practical, hands-on approach. We will develop alternative strategies that will question current values, the role of ‘consumer’ and the notion of ‘product’ in clothing design, business management and communication. Each student will work from their own field of interest in teams of 4 or 5 to develop one or more sales events. Each team is encouraged to invite lecturers, propose site visits, and more that will support the progress of their projects.

Students from other Areas of Study in IDC, Design & Management and Communication Design that want to be involved and test their knowledge in hands-on projects are strongly encouraged to register for this class.

IDC Ecologies: (un)Fashion

Embedded in an understanding of culture, history and place, students in IDC Ecologies: (Un)Fashion will design with the body and their own identity as their principal site of exploration. Questioning their assumptions of fashion, students will expand their definitions of dress, garment, accessory, costume, photograph and publication through critical exercises and projects for the body. The exercises and projects will include experimentation and exploration with construction, materials, forms, color, and issues of representation; and will be developed through a process of research and making.