Abstract:

This paper, part of a broader research about fashion design in higher education contexts, is based on the results of a previous analysis of six higher education fashion design courses within EHEA , which aimed to understand if and how Semiotics was presented in the programs, either as an approach or as a content. The results demonstrated that Semiotics presence varied in accordance with the national guidelines and fashion programs perspectives, although it is expected that fashion designers build creative and sociocultural competences, as well as technical, production and managerial ones. As it was acknowledged in the previous study, Semiotics is indispensable in providing a deeper and critical thinking in the selection, filtering, analysis and synthesis of the amount of information originated from diverse social and cultural codes. This paper moves forward and considers that a semiotic approach is utmost necessary when considering a global, connected and unstable sociocultural context, in which the fashion designer must act as a decoder, understanding the roles signs play in the creation and diffusion, as well as the reinterpretation of fashion.
Balancing aesthetic and practical functions, fashion designers need to develop an interpretive sense, important to comprehend and transpose social codes into innovative design solutions that can create meaning for a borderless market. The meaning-making process of fashion design is an interpretational one, is a process of ‘making sense’ of the ‘globally scattered’ social and cultural codes, the fashion brand structures and values and the target audience desires, translating them into relevant fashion proposals. Therefore, and considering fashion design as sector associated with both originality and the logic of mass production and consumption, this paper strongly considers that the study of fashion design education in online settings, should also consider the approximation with Semiotics, since fashion designers are increasingly required to work, to understand, to decodify the needs and expectations of a global consumer, and a complex, hyper connected, multicultural and ever changing global market.
This paper presents the results of a study about the Semiotics presence in fashion design higher education programs delivered online. After an extensive research, nine higher education programs, related to fashion, were initially identified. From these and based on a set of criteria adopted in a previous study, two were selected for further analysis. The two programs offered by Italian Higher Education Institutions (HEI) not only reinforced the results previously obtained in other Italian HEI with offers on-site but demonstrated that the approximation between fashion design online education and Semiotics is a valid approach to fashion design as a global ‘decodification’ process. With the results, this paper intends not only to contribute to a deep-thinking knowledge in fashion design studies, but also and foremost seeks to collaborate with the methods, perspectives and pathways of fashion design education, in online contexts, assuring its coherence with fashion practice and its global reach.

Keywords:

Semiotics, fashion design education, online learning.