How Fashion Schools Court Industry Talent

Fashion students today want a relationship with their professors that goes far beyond a one-sided lecture in the classroom.

They look to their professors as “mentors and connectors,” who can help them land an internship or guide them through the industry’s ups and downs, said Michelle Francine Ngonmo, founder of Italy-based nonprofit the Afro Fashion Association and visiting professor at multiple fashion schools including Milano Fashion Institute. At the same time, students expect their instructors to be “current with the industry trends,” and understand the realities of navigating a post-college landscape, Ngonmo added.

Also on that list: diversity in race, gender, and experience, as well as a knowledge of how fashion intersects with sports, music, entertainment, politics, and social issues, Ngonmo said. More than their predecessors, today’s fashion educators must be able to guide and inspire students toward developing their own insights, rather than simply passing down traditional industry rules or sharing personal experiences, experts say.

Industry professionals can make some of the best candidates for teaching roles because of their real-world experience and deep understanding of the industry. But these high expectations have made it increasingly challenging for fashion schools to recruit and retain professors, who also have to be willing to trade-off prestigious industry titles, brand cachet and sometimes even a higher salary to do the job. Plus, transitioning to academia is often a lengthy process.

“I just wanted to [teach]. It was like a dream,” said Naama Doktofsky, a former adjunct professor at Moore College of Art & Design and The Fashion Institute of Technology who paused her academic career last December to join women’s contemporary fashion brand Cartolina as design director. “But I needed more stability and it didn’t make sense with the time commitment. It was not sustainable.”

Fashion schools looking to attract accomplished designers, journalists, and business leaders as professors need to play the long game in courting them, experts say. For full-time professors, schools like FIT, which is a union campus, offer competitive salaries and benefits, but they’ve also upped their emphasis in areas like diversity and sustainability and increased their investments in faculty research and technological innovation to make joining their roster a more appealing premise for industry professionals.

“I’m quite proud of the people we have brought on in the last few years,” said Joyce Brown, the longtime president of FIT. “We get incredible résumés for people doing interesting, innovative, breakthrough kinds-of-things and want to be here.”

Courting a Professor

Rather than forcing a fit, fashion schools should start by recognising that the best educators already come equipped with “the gift” of teaching and “an enthusiasm for reaching and guiding young people and transforming their lives,” Brown said.

If the passion is there, the next step is to identify who is ready to take on the challenge of shaping a new generation of students influenced by digital innovation and global crises such as the pandemic and geopolitical unrest.

“The world has changed, and we’re not in full recovery mode anywhere,’” Brown said. “It’s been a very big adjustment and developmentally difficult for young people, and faculty are the front line with that in the classroom.”

Offering adjunct and part-time positions and guest lecturer opportunities are ways schools entice “intellectually curious” industry tastemakers to take that first step into exploring academia – and simultaneously expose students to current industry insights, said Ramona Dunlap, a veteran fashion marketer whose career included roles at Calvin Klein and Donna Karan before signing on to become a full-time professor at FIT in 2022.

“I have industry connections who are happy to serve as guest speakers, and they’re like, ‘yep, that’s as far as I want to go,’” Dunlap said. “Then I have some guest speakers who come into the class and they’re like, ‘Wow, I really enjoyed that, how could I be an adjunct?’”

Prominent fashion schools like FIT — alma mater to designers like Michael Kors, Norma Kamali, and Calvin Klein — and Central Saint Martins in London, which counts Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Phoebe Philo, and Stella McCartney among its alumni, can leverage their own brand cachet, which can rival that of major fashion labels.

“I never knew until I had this job, how much people revere and regard professors,” Dunlap said. “When I say I’m a professor at FIT, that’s actually more credible than some of the brands I worked for.”

FIT’s launch of the D-Tech Lab in 2017, an on-campus hub where students and faculty collaborate to solve real-world challenges for fashion brands, along with the 2021 opening of its Social Justice Centre, which focuses on increasing representation of Black and Indigenous people in creative industries, has also lured talent from both other schools and the industry. These initiatives, Brown said, signal the school’s commitment to faculty research, technological innovation, and diversity, key factors that appeal to prospective educators.

At Central Saint Martins, Hywel Davies, dean of the M School (or fashion, textiles, jewellery and materials), said the school has also leveraged its well-connected staff and their camaraderie and even its historic campus as part of its appeal.

“We’ve got some people that have taught here for nearly 50 years,” he said. “So there’s a real family kind of community of people supporting each other.”

Salaries are another element that can be challenging for industry professionals who want to dip a toe in academia. Ngonmo, who has preferred to remain a visiting or adjunct professor throughout her academic career, values the autonomy she gains by staying off the full-time faculty roster but has had to renegotiate her salary twice over the past six years, she said.

“The salary absolutely could be better,” she said. “I think the profession of a teacher is sometimes overlooked … for what they are actually doing in the fashion industry.”

Meeting the Needs of Today’s Students

Fashion students seem to gain the most from professors with a common set of attributes: diverse, well-networked, tech savvy, socially-conscious and inspiring, experts say.

Today’s students can be more impatient when it comes to acquiring knowledge — a shift “exacerbated by the immediacy of information and technology and [tools like] ChatGPT,” Brown said. It means the best professors will need to find ways to “develop the curiosity in students … so that they can solve [things] for themselves,” she said.

It’s an area where industry professionals can struggle in their transition to academia, Davies said, if they come in with the assumption that they’re there to “tell our students how things work, or how it should be.”

“We’ve got to remember our job is to inspire these students to go into the industry and change it,” he said. “We’re not here [just] to transmit knowledge.”

In other words, students don’t want professors who lecture “at them,” Dunlap said, but who ask the right questions, share ideas and engage in two-way dialogue.

Ngonmo said her itch to get into the classroom was partly fuelled by her upbringing — her parents were both teachers — and also by her experience as a journalism student, where she saw a lack of “teachers who looked like me,” she said.

“The first time I entered the room as a professor, three of my students came to me and … said, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe that this year we’re going to have you as a professor,’” she said. “We feel like we can be more connected.”

While fashion students are often eager to hear from industry professionals about the fast-paced changes in the field — something schools can facilitate by bringing guest speakers — they equally value professors who support them throughout their entire school journey and beyond, Davies said. Doktofsky, for example, has hired a former student as a full-time assistant designer for Cartolina, as well as brought on another as a design intern for the brand.

“[Teaching] has definitely felt secure and fulfilling for me,” Dunlap said. “And I can say, in this job, I never had the Monday blues.”