Fashion Design

This is a Connected Degree
Portsmouth is the only University in the UK with the flexibility to choose when to do an optional paid placement or self-employed year. Either take a placement in your third year, or finish your studies first and complete a placement in your fourth year. You can decide if and when to take a placement after you've started your course.

Overview
Bring your creative and original ideas to life on our multi-award-winning Fashion Design degree course.

You'll develop your innovation, self-awareness, and critical thinking via our teaching approach – which integrates sustainable and ethical design principles, focuses on your unique strengths, and shapes you into a confident and cultured professional. You'll also develop communication, leadership, and collaboration skills through exchange and enterprise projects, and you’ll build a deep knowledge of traditional and digital making skills using industry-level facilities.

Using innovative research methods, you’ll be able to deliver authentic, imaginative work that pushes the boundaries of what fashion and textile design means now and in the future.

Course highlights

• Master traditional and innovative fashion design methods, including pattern-cutting, fashion illustration, silkscreen print, embroidery, and constructed textiles and biomaterials

• Explore sustainable design methods to help you change the fashion industry for the future

• Gain valuable industry experience and entrepreneurship skills by taking an optional placement, either with a company or as self-employed

• Enhance your collaboration and team-working skills by working with other students on other courses in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries

• Get insight into the fashion industry by attending guest lectures by visiting international professionals—previous visitors include Mohsin Sajid, Niccolo Casas and Shingo Sato

• Showcase your skills by exhibiting your work at the University’s annual graduate show

Careers and opportunities
Our collaborative and project-orientated course will give you the skills to become highly employable.

Graduate areas

Our graduates have worked across design, marketing, communications and commerce in areas such as:

• fashion, textile or accessories design

• trend prediction

• buying

• visual merchandising

• teaching or lecturing

• journalism or writing

Graduate destinations

Our graduates have worked with some of the biggest names in fashion and major retailers, including:

• Ralph Lauren

• Hugo Boss

• Matthew Williamson

• River Island

• Fat Face

• Marks and Spencer

After you leave the University, you can get help, advice and support for up to 5 years from our Careers and Employability service as you advance in your career.

Graduate startups

Previous students on this course have also set up their own fashion and textile labels. For example:

• Sunny Williams set up his label, House of Sunny, in 2011 and has developed minimal, androgynous aesthetic womenswear, which sells internationally and is stocked by ASOS

• Nikki Strange created her own-name line for Marks and Spencer in 2015 and also works as a freelance textile designer and visiting lecturer.

The University of Portsmouth is passionate about creating career-focused modules that do more than support your studies, they empower your academic journey and prepare you for what comes next.

We design modules that have:

• Clear themes and skills development as you progress through each year
• Assessments that feel meaningful, often based on real-world tasks rather than isolated exams
• Career-enhancing opportunities such as placements, live projects, enterprise and volunteering

For a full list of the modules you will study on this course, please visit https://www.port.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/ba-hons-fashion-design#modules