Central Saint Martins (CSM) welcomes students from all over the world to programmes in the arts, design, fashion, media, communication and performance.
Creative practice combines the ability to imagine new futures with the means to deliver them. What we do is always connected to others. Our community goes beyond building, beyond disciplines and beyond borders. From local neighbours to global partners, Central Saint Martins collaborates with others to build knowledge and transform objects, systems and lives for the better. We understand that good things happen when people work together.
At Central Saint Martins, we believe that art, design and performance can generate real, productive change.
You will enrol on 3 mandatory units, 3 core units and then may select elective units. You must take a minimum of 12 credits and a maximum of 16 credits.
Credit value: 2 credits
Tutor contact: 20 hours
Self-directed study: 20 hours
Lead Tutor: Samantha Kemmy
The aim of Understanding Contemporary Cultures (UCC) is to introduce you to key concepts, debates and ideas present in contemporary culture today. We will do this together through in-class discussion, group activities and independent research. All of these activities will support your learning and prepare you to work independently on your assignments.
During this unit you will research key concepts, debates and terminology related to cultural and social theory, focused around three key critical themes:
You will be introduced you to a range of knowledges, perspectives and ideas surrounding:
As a group, we will approach these themes in an active and participatory way that will involve undertaking independent preparation each week and engaging with in class group activities. You are encouraged to maintain a questioning mindset and engage with each other and your tutor during each session.
By engaging with scholarly perspectives from critical and social theory you will be supported to think through fashion in a critical and evidenced way. This unit will help you to make critical connections in your own professional practice and experience of the fashion industry. Most importantly, you will develop key analytical and research skills that will support you to critically engage with the fashion and creative industries.
Lead Tutor: Michael Czerwinski
The aim of London Cultural Studies (LCS) is to orientate yourself, and explore aspects of London’s diverse culture, and creative landscape. As one of three mandatory units, you will meet and engage with all students across the UAL Study Abroad programme from CSM, LCC and LCF to build networks, and creative communities.
With LCS you will take creative risks, start conversations with people to find out about their lives, form new opinions, and energise your research methods with these newfound skills acting as city explorers and investigators.
We encourage you to explore all London has to offer from inspirational, historical, knowledgeable, and ‘alternative’ perspectives. You will learn about subcultures, genres, trends, as well as safely navigating yourself within a cultural capital city.
Lectures and conversations with your tutor and classmates will discuss the idiosyncratic behaviours, cultural attitudes and curious customs that make a city unique. As well as London, you’ll learn and draw wider inspiration from the sense of ‘Britishness’, always encouraged to think, listen, and speak critically.
Most LCS classes are predominantly field trips. You will do several visits, guided walks, and tours, going behind-the-scenes of unfamiliar spaces and areas to gain personal and fresh insight of this historically complex, challenging, creative city.
You will develop a personal body of research and experiences, which you will take forward as a memento of your time in London, to embed new ideas, values, and disruptive actions into your own creative practice, and beyond.
Lead Tutor: Laura Lightbody
The aim of Creative Histories (CH) will focus on how you can make a change for social purpose*, by examining creative outputs and practice from historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives. As one of three mandatory units, you will meet and engage with all students across the UAL Study Abroad programme from CSM, LCC and LCF to build networks, and creative communities.
In this project you will orientate yourselves in small teams, to collaborate and develop your proposition and presentation skills. In pairs you will pitch a speculative exhibition proposal delivered as a Pecha Kucha visual presentation.
By being an active researcher, acknowledging what has come before you, you will explore and examine a wide cross section of relevant and / or unexpected areas of interest. This will eventually act as the foundation of this unit, to make positive and impactful social change.
You will participate in a series of online lectures as well as guided visits, exhibitions in museums and art galleries around London, cultural centres and dynamic geographic landmarks each week. You will note take, annotate, and sketch in a research journal to document ideas and contextualise what creativity and culture means to you. This sketchbook will also connect to your London Cultural Studies research. Being critical is key.
Knowledge of the past allows for a considered understanding of why things are the way they are today, which in turn informs an intuition with which to predict future trends, cultural awareness and zeitgeist.
*Read more here about how UAL defines social purpose within creative practice.
Credit value: 3 credits
Tutor contact: 30 hours
Self-directed study: 30 hours
Lead Tutor: Joshua Beaty
Based in The Atelier at Central Saint Martins Archway campus, your Advanced Fashion Design unit offers an immersive and energetic programme of study for those with the drive and ambition to create, and curate original and effective ideas. As emerging designers, you will be introduced to the radical and experimental approaches of research methods, design development, production techniques and realisation for fashion design concepts. You will be concerned with traditional and contemporary studio-based observation, intelligent and practical investigation, forward thinking solutions to design challenges and sustainable and inclusive practice the course consolidates the colleges uniquely “art school” approach to the development of design for the body.Your programme will ask you to consider expressions of dress that lie outside strict fashion zones, in order to create personal narratives from direct responses to image, photograph, heritage, objects and obsessions to inspire silhouette volume, proportion and material.Your Advanced Fashion Design course will be delivered as a series of dynamic taught workshops and tutorial sessions, students will expand on existing skills, develop intuitive decision making, heighten self-expression and self-confidence, and break pre-conceived creative habits to create bold proposals for the dressed figure.You will collaborate with tutors and peers to curate and produce a showcase in your final week of the programme. The showcase may take the form of either lo-fi catwalk, performative installation or pop-up flash exhibition (format and roles tbc).You will gain a similar pace and experience to those studying on the undergraduate fashion programme at CSM, and work alongside peers, designers and artisans to start building your international fashion network.
*will be based at the CSM Archway Atelier space
Joshua Beaty is an artist, designer and educator living and working in London. He graduated from the BA and MA Fashion Programmes at Central Saint Martins as a recipient of the Samsung Award, the Sarabande Foundation Scholarship and the Louise Wilson Fund Award. He has worked with Julie Verhoeven, Charles Jeffrey, Fantastic Toiles, Phoebe English, Dover Street Market, Love Magazine, Joyce Hong Kong, David Lynch’s Silencio, La Musee des Beaux-Arts d’Orleans, amongst others. As an artist, he has exhibited internationally. From 2019-2021 he was artist-in-residence at Sarabande; the Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation. Joshua joined the BA Fashion academic team in 2019 and teaches across all design pathways.
“Fashion as being and not having”.
The objective of Advanced Fashion On/Off the Body is to connect you to contemporary debates and societal issues through the development of studio-based practice. Crossing the thresholds of design and communication, you will be required to consider fashion as both provocation, and product.
You will employ an expansive range of skills including photography, drawing, styling, make-up, challenging beauty industry ideals, debate, world building, storyboarding and image making to describe your own personal fashion universe. You will be urged to take creative risks, be illogical, disrupt your own creative preconceptions and boundaries, rearticulate traditional technical techniques to reimagine new traditions.
The course structure will link you to new ways of contextualising ideas for fashion with a focus on world building; community engagement; social justice; sustainable practice; political statement; and historical and contemporary analysis of fashion and the dressed body. This unit aims to turn fashion inside out, opening the door to misbehaviour and therefore corruption of current systems of production.
This unit will provide a bridge between design and communication of the dressed figure and your physical body of work should evidence your thoughts, ideas and / or arguments on fashion as an expression of politics, environmental impact, gender or non-gender, personal beliefs and ideologies, culture, and, how that resonates on a national and international scale.
Credit value: 1 credit
Tutor contact: 10 hours
Self-directed study: 10 hours
Lead Tutor: Melanie Ashley
This core Visual Identity and Communication unit provides a productive, expansive and contemplative environment of study with a focus on the communication, curation and presentation of ideas for the dressed body, and concepts around fashion worldbuilding.
Meanwhile maintaining a rigorous appreciation to traditionally desirable formats such as paper, print and digital folios, this dynamic unit will require you to investigate more explorative methods of communication that might include, but will not be limited to, photography, moving image, performance, dance, theatre, set design, storyboarding, magazine layouts, and zine culture, catwalk choreography, styling, casting, personal hobbies, sports and more.
Through visits, demonstrations and seminar discussion with tutor and peers, you will learn about creative roles and processes, and how creative teams come together to unify one vision and outcome. You will contribute to live debate through written response and reflection
This unit requires you to communicate your intentions, contextualise ambitious ideas, modulate the overall experience for audience engagement, and promote your personal design aesthetics, values and the vision of your fashion universe.
Melanie Ashley is a tutor in Fashion Communication. She directs communications, press and events at Central Saint Martins, including producing both MA and BA Fashion Shows, overseeing the most exciting fashion talents that emerge in London. Fashion in London is her specialist subject having worked across PR, fashion events, styling and digital innovation in London for 10 years for clients including British Vogue, Dover Street Market, Love Magazine and designers Richard Malone, Matty Bovan and Fredrik Tjærandsen.
After graduating from CSM in BA Fashion Communication she worked with famed fashion PR Mandi Lennard, then alongside Camilla Lowther at pioneering photography agency CLM and has continued to focus on emerging talent in London throughout this time.
Alongside her teaching and work at CSM she continues to be part of music artist M.I.A's creative team, traveling internationally which continuously informs her world view and perspective on fashion reinforcing an important sentiment - Fashion doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Credit value: 2 credit
Lead Tutor: Lucrezia Alessandroni and Jon Flint (Tutor)
The textile industry is one of the most resource-intensive and polluting industries in the world, significantly impacting the planet through high energy consumption, chemical usage, and waste production. In the face of the climate emergency, innovative explorations at the intersection of design and biology create sustainable alternatives that reduce environmental impact and promote ecological balance. At Central Saint Martins, we invite you to explore these critical issues and expand your behaviours, knowledge, and skills.
Fashion Biomaterials focuses on the assignment "Growing Couture: London's Biotextile Journey", where you'll explore the potential of living materials and local resources in creating sustainable fashion. You will gain hands-on experience in growing, crafting, dyeing and prototyping with biomaterials, as well as experimenting and documenting these processes. You will deepen your understanding of how sustainable practices are reshaping the fashion industry, engaging in critical discussions and exploring new ways of thinking. Guided by expert tutors and guest lecturers, you will participate in group activities and tutorials designed to develop your creative ideas.
By the end of the course, you will produce your own comprehensive "A to Z Biomaterials Guide," which will serve as a curated library of your cultivated samples and detailed process documentation of your experiments. You will also prepare a presentation highlighting your journey and findings, as well as how you could integrate your discoveries in your future practice as creative designers. You can use a format that best represents your work, such as a digital presentation, video documentation, or another creative medium that will help you shape your own fashion biomaterials manifesto.
Jon C Flint is a designer prototyper and educator. Jon’s research interests lie in dissecting the complexity of technological products or services and distilling them into simple and unique physical forms. What Jon designs is grounded in the domestic space, often the first port of call where new technologies impact our lives. His work manifests as connected appliances, digital mirrors, salesman suitcases, workshops and even rooms from the future.
From 2015 to 2018, Jon worked as a designer at the acclaimed design and experiential futures practice Superflux. Over the years, he exhibited work at the Tate Exchange, Victoria and Albert Museum and Asia Culture Center and led talks and workshops in Montréal, Canada, to Shanghai, China.
Jon continues to work on projects as part of the practise-based studio VJF and the Cached Collective. Jon was one of the 10x10 emerging designers selected by the British Council's Design Connections programme for 2019. In 2020-2024 he was part of the design associate/expert network at the Design Council.
Lucrezia Alessandroni is a biodesigner with a background in product design and visual communication, interested in combining design principles and scientific approaches. Her passion for wearables and open-source technologies drove her to explore new material with a focus on the sustainable angle, interested in the interconnections among living organisms and ecosystems.
Lucrezia’s current research focuses on female healthcare and living objects as a tool to develop new symbiotic relationships with micro and macro environments whilst exploring both emerging and traditional fabrication techniques and challenging the stigma around female bodies.
Lead Tutor: Mizuki Tochigi
This 2-credit elective unit will allow you to explore the potential of communicating through Jewellery alongside your studies in Advanced Fashion Design.
Jewellery communicates on many levels and signifies different meanings in different contexts. From the Crown Jewels to a safety pin and a suffragette broach to a diamond engagement ring, the values and messages are as important to counterculture as they are to the establishment. You will use this as a starting point to research, design and create jewellery that communicates a point of view.
During this unit you will be researching the power of jewellery, learning how to originate and develop ideas in a jewellery context / learning how to create a final design / learning and practicing making skills to create a wearable necklace or neckpiece and create a presentation of your project.
The theme and nature of your work in this fashion Jewellery elective unit will be able to stand alone as a project but also be informed by your other studies within your CSM Semester studies.
You will be introduced to the unit by a seminar and discussion about Jewellery and by visiting a range of museums and archives in London for research and idea development starting points.
You will be developing your theme and ideas independently and discussing and presenting them in group tutorials.
You will be exploring nonprecious sustainable materials to use to create your pieces. You will start the 3D element with a material exploration session to learn and practice some technical skills. You will then select and source materials relevant to your ideas and use these materials to create your final pieces in workshop sessions.
There will be photo session to create a record and contextualise your project and a final presentation event.
Mizuki Tochigi is a London based contemporary jewellery artist who graduated Central Saint Martins. She believes that sustainable thinking can be a positive, creative force and uses this mindset to drive her designs. The challenge of projects that emphasise responsible practice encourages her to creatively use waste or environmentally friendly materials. Mizuki aims to challenge the perception of everyday materials, adding value to them by using her jewellery skills to reassess our relationship with waste. She believes in making a direct change to our actions for sustainability through her jewellery. Alongside her practice Mizuki also works as Jewellery Technician at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins.
Email us
studyabroadoffice@arts.ac.uk
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@ualstudyabroad
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