MA Fashion
London, United Kingdom
DURATION
1 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Request application deadline *
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
Request tuition fees
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* as the RCA received a high number of applications we encourage you to apply as early as possible to secure your place on your programme
* visit the RCA website to find out about fees for this programme as well as scholarship and funding opportunities
Key Summary
Online and on-campus events for future students
Join our events online, in the UK and around the World.
Introduction
Fashion is designed, created, articulated, manipulated, and simulated in both physical and digital spaces. It aims for a state change, where you are open to new and emerging thinking and unlearn. It is also at its best when guided by diversity, inclusivity, and cultural awareness. We must perceive systems and structures, and express our fashion identities with an awareness of how our values are embedded in our outputs. This program creates an environment where you can engage with these processes. This will include an exploration of themes such as gender, culture, race, justice, nature, time, space, data, science, materials, and magic. Throughout you will have the opportunity to reflect on, discuss, and strengthen your own authentic identity, and help others to do the same.
In the MA Fashion program, you will have the opportunity to choose one of three platforms: BIO, DIGITAL 360, or SYSTEMS. These are designed to allow students to work with tutors and peers to explore themes that respond to their emerging practice and develop new spaces, materials, identities, and business models. There are points of intersection where students can engage with peers across platforms. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the School of Design’s interdisciplinary Grand Challenge, which enables all students to work collaboratively to develop projects that anticipate and respond to key societal concerns.
Units
- Change Agents
- New Perspectives
- Grand Challenge
- AcrossRCA (College-wide unit)
- Advanced Practise
- Independent Research Project
Meet the RCA
We host a range of online and on-campus open days as well as recruitment events in cities around the world. These events can include 1-to-1 meetings and portfolio advice, informal chats, presentations, and sessions with staff, students, and alumni. Check the RCA event webpage for details of upcoming events.
Next on-campus open day: Saturday 27 January, 2024.
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| Lecture in the dark | Graduate Fashion Exhibition 2023 | Fashion Studio |
Program Outcome
What will I learn?
In the MA Fashion programme, you will have the opportunity to choose one of three platforms: BIO, DIGITAL 360 or SYSTEMS. These are designed to give students an opportunity to work with tutors and peers to explore themes that responds to their emerging practice and develop new spaces, materials, identities and business models. There are points of intersection where students can engage with peers across platforms. There will also be an opportunity to participate in the School of Design’s interdisciplinary Grand Challenge, which enables all students to work collaboratively to develop projects that anticipate and respond to key societal concerns.
Admissions
Curriculum
Programme structure
The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.
Term 1
New Perspectives: Talk Debate Draw, is an intense series of shared perspectives, that aims to strengthen (and yet ask you to debate), your own values and critical thinking about Fashion as identity. There will be a series of lectures that may cover, Gender, Culture, Race, Digital Values, Design Justice, and that question our relationships to Nature, Time, Space, Data, our Planet, and Ourselves. It will then open us up further to Neuroscience, Material Hierarchies, and Philosophy. Parallel to the lectures, there will be a series of workshops run by the Fashion technical team, working only with material from within the RCA studio and a series of intuitive workshops.
Platforms set out distinct yet interrelated ways in which you might engage with a developing and changing fashion industry and will support you in investigating experimental approaches to your practice. This is a unit to provoke and challenge existing norms about the Fashion industry and give ideas about Identity through BIO, DIGITAL 360, and SYSTEMS.
BIO, DIGITAL 360, and SYSTEMS look to unite values, sustainability, planet-centred thinking, cultural identities and connected patterns and networks, as embodied experiences across potentially different geographical and temporal scales.
Term 2
In term 2 all School of Design students will participate in the Grand Challenge, a School-wide unit. The aim of this unit is to connect and challenge all students in the School through the introduction of a ‘wicked’ design problem that requires a cross-disciplinary approach to problem-solving involving an external international scientific or industry partner (or both). This unit and lecture series have been hugely successful in connecting and disrupting disciplines, people, philosophies and approaches to design thinking whilst providing our student body with very unique networking opportunities.
Advanced Practise gives space to further articulate your unique perspective, system and aesthetic for Fashion, that may have emerged during your first term and the units completed so far. It will be a time to identify spaces in the landscape that require new responses, and consider how Fashion might change behaviours. This might include non-hierarchical thinking, trans & post-humans, all gender identities, inclusivity with an intersectional breadth, the debate about the position of non-human agency, and taking an open view to economics that includes all and offers alternatives.
Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA, the College-wide unit.
Term 3
Independent Research Project (IRP) - The Independent Research Project (IRP) is an opportunity for each student to take responsibility for their practice by developing their own brief. Through the programme, you will have been encouraged to experiment with a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary ideas and practices. Through focused self-study, the IRP enables you to apply that learning to a unique project and body of work. While this should be informed by your studies it should not be seen as fully conclusive; it is an emerging work that is now apparent and unambiguously your own voice as a designer.
You will be mentored throughout the IRP to help you develop your voice and your project. There will also be opportunities to make connections with peers throughout the IRP. This includes a burst mode week called ‘Mirror Mirror’ where students can present work in progress and give and receive peer feedback. A ‘Final Engagement’, will ask professional experts to critique your choices through a series of talks, post a public-facing event.
Program Tuition Fee
Rankings
The Royal College of Art has been ranked the number 1 university for art & design internationally for the 9th consecutive year, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023 – the largest world-wide survey of academic and industry opinion.
Scholarships and Funding
Burberry Design Scholarship
Scholarships are targeted to students enrolling on a number of RCA MA programmes to enable students to unlock their full potential regardless of their financial circumstances. Preference will be given to students from underrepresented communities.
Eligible Programmes: Print MA, Digital Direction MA, Visual Communication MA, Fashion MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: Up to seven full-fee tuition fee scholarships
House of Fraser Bursary
Supporting students in any MA programme from the UK (Preferably a Scottish national), experiencing financial hardship
Eligible Programmes: Architecture MA, Interior Design MA, City Design MA, Environmental Architecture MA, Ceramics & Glass MA, Contemporary Art Practice MA, Curating Contemporary Art MA, V&A/RCA History of Design MA, Jewellery & Metal MA, Painting MA, Photography MA, Print MA, Sculpture MA, Writing MA, Animation MA, Digital Direction MA, Information Experience Design MA, Visual Communication MA, Design Products MA, Fashion MA, Global Innovation Design MA/MSc, Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, Intelligent Mobility MA, Service Design MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: £10,000
Kay Cosserat Scholarship
Supporting MA Textiles or MA Fashion students experiencing financial hardship and specialising in knitting/knitwear
Eligible Programmes: Fashion MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: One full tuition fee (£13,500) scholarship in either MA Textiles or MA Fashion
Marks and Spencer Bursary
Supporting MA Fashion students from the UK, experiencing financial hardship
Eligible Programmes: Fashion MA
Eligible fee status:
- UK fee status
- Enrolled full time
- Demonstrating financial need
Value: One bursary of £10,000
Max Mara Scholarships (UK)
Supporting UK Fashion students in financial hardship and from underrepresented communities
Eligible Programmes: Fashion MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: Two scholarships valued at £30,000 each
Roger Walls Binns Bursary
Supporting MA Fashion and MA Textiles students experiencing financial hardship
Eligible Programmes: Fashion MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: Full fee scholarship
Sir Frank Bowling Scholarships
The Scholarship supports 21 UK MA, MRes and PhD students every year from across all RCA MA, MRes and PhD disciplines.
Eligible Programmes: Architecture MA, Interior Design MA, City Design MA, Environmental Architecture MA, Architecture Pathway MRes RCA, Architecture MPhil/PhD, Ceramics & Glass MA, Contemporary Art Practice MA, Curating Contemporary Art MA, V&A/RCA History of Design MA, Jewellery & Metal MA, Painting MA, Photography MA, Print MA, Sculpture MA, Writing MA, Fine Arts & Humanities Pathway MRes RCA, Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD, Animation MA, Digital Direction MA, Information Experience Design MA, Visual Communication MA, Communication Design Pathway MRes RCA, Communication MPhil/PhD, Design Products MA, Fashion MA, Global Innovation Design MA/MSc, Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, Intelligent Mobility MA, Service Design MA, Textiles MA, Design Pathway MRes RCA, Design MPhil/PhD, Healthcare & Design MRes, Intelligent Mobility MPhil/PhD, Materials Science MPhil/PhD, Computer Science MPhil/PhD
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: £21,000
The Anne Tyrell Design Award
Supporting MA Fashion experiencing financial hardship
Eligible Programmes: Fashion MA
Eligible fee status: Any
Value: Two bursaries of £4,000 each
The RCA Logitech Scholarship Programme
To provide scholarships to students in any RCA programme, from underrepresented communities, and facing financial challenges. Preference will be given to those identifying as Black or Black British; Asian or Asian British; or from a mixed background.
Eligible Programmes: Design Products MA, Fashion MA, Global Innovation Design MA/MSc, Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, Intelligent Mobility MA, Service Design MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: Any
Value: Up to sixteen full-fee scholarships
The Tony Snowdon Scholarship
Applicants must make an application via the application portal on the Snowdon Trust website from Jan 2023: https://www.snowdontrust.org/scholarships
Eligible Programmes: Architecture MA, Interior Design MA, City Design MA, Environmental Architecture MA, Architecture Pathway MRes RCA, Ceramics & Glass MA, Contemporary Art Practice MA, Curating Contemporary Art MA, V&A/RCA History of Design MA, Jewellery & Metal MA, Painting MA, Photography MA, Print MA, Sculpture MA, Writing MA, Fine Arts & Humanities Pathway MRes RCA, Animation MA, Digital Direction MA, Information Experience Design MA, Visual Communication MA, Communication Design Pathway MRes RCA, Design Products MA, Fashion MA, Global Innovation Design MA/MSc, Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, Intelligent Mobility MA, Service Design MA, Textiles MA, Design Pathway MRes RCA, Healthcare & Design MRes
Eligible fee status: Any
Value: Up to £15,000 in tuition fees + £15,000 maintenance support
The Virgil Abloh Scholarship
Supporting School of Design students from the UK from under-represented communities. Preference for those identifying as Black or Black British (Caribbean); Black or Black British (African), or another Black background.
Eligible Programmes: Design Products MA, Fashion MA, Global Innovation Design MA/MSc, Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc, Intelligent Mobility MA, Service Design MA, Textiles MA
Eligible fee status: UK fee status
Value: One scholarship valued at £35,000