Abstract:

Today, the fashion industry is a highly complex pluralistic and heterogeneous sector, in which physical and immaterial products, cultural capital and human resources are integrated. In the current context, in order to meet contemporary challenges and generate innovation, the forms of cross-fertilisation are becoming ever more daring, the number of the sectors involved is growing and require increasingly specialised skills. Fashion’s boundaries, which are open to the boldest forms of research and experimentation, are the result of the interplay and mutual integration of highly diversified and specialised fields. As Fashion involves diverse, heterogeneous disciplines, it makes it extremely difficult for a single student or professional to be able to hold all the specific knowledge needed in each sector. Therefore, collaborative work in this context is fundamental: interdisciplinary experience are needed to enrich all team members by creating an exchange of knowledge, facilitates learning and management of different topics that require different specializations.

The aim of the paper is to investigate innovative methodologies for the development of soft skills in fashion design higher education.

First of all, the paper focuses on the importance of soft skills in fashion design education, reporting data from ongoing research developed within the framework of “FTAlliance. Weaving Universities and Companies to Co-create Fashion-Tech Future Talents”, a three-year (2020-2022) Knowledge Alliance Project co-founded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (GA 612662-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPKA2-KA). Companies are looking for graduate students with highly developed soft skills. Next to discipline skills, it is ever more important that students have the ability to work in a team, know how to listen, understand and interact with people of different backgrounds. Interdisciplinary courses and teamwork experiences are essential both in the academic training as well as in the workplace environment to train transversal skills and generate innovation.

Then, the paper describes and analyses the outcomes of a case study, a virtual didactic experience taking place during COVID19 pandemic, aimed at developing the soft skills of fashion students within the third year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Fashion Design at Politecnico di Milano. The five-day workshop was conducted in digital distance learning mode, alternating moments of frontal lectures, interventions by professionals from heterogeneous fields, and practical group exercises with the aim to transfer to students knowledge about how to work in team in an effective manner, to manage stress and to know how to present themselves in the best possible way.

The paper concludes with insights and suggestions on how digital educational experiences can stimulate the development of soft skills in the fashion design field.

Keywords:

Soft skills, Fashion design education, COVID19 pandemic, digital educational experience