05-Feb-2018
Masterclass by Clare McTurk
Ms. Clare McTurk, the Principal Lecturer for Student Experience and MA Programme, Coordinator for Fashion Buying and Merchandise Management at the Manchester Fashion Institute, UK conducted a Masterclass at ARCH College of Design and Business at Malviya Nagar in Jaipur on Monday, 5th February 2018. Attending students were detailed on the finer aspects of ‘Fashion Buying’ and ‘Merchandising Management’, followed by a detailed discussion on understanding and identifying different types of customers based on the different categories of fashion - luxury, designer, middle mass market and value, and demographics based - age, gender, income, ethnicity, lifestyle etc. Sustainable fashion and technology in design reflected through the use of vegan leather, bio-couture, garments that monitor health, special effects coatings that activate under the influence of light, temperature change and moisture were the other topics of discussion.
Clare said, “season, competitor’s activity, market appraisal, promotional activities were the chief factors which are to be analyzed for planning a new product range”. Students were given a 'Range Planning' activity in which they had to identify kids’ wear garments that should ideally make it to the next season's range, based on global trends. Range planning is the list of garments that can be bought within budget, that form one or several collections. She also made students understand the concepts of biomimicry, fabric innovation, biometrics, 3D printed fabrics Pringle, special effects coating and sustainability in context to the fashion industry. It was a highly detailed and sophisticated Masterclass session that gave the students of ARCH an edge over real world design problems.
