Cornwall Today 108

FEATURE 2010

katrina aleksa

108 Cornwall Today

The first ever Graduate Fashion Show at University College Falmouth will showcase collections from more than 30 BA(Hons) Fashion Design and BA(Hons) Performance Sportswear Design students.

The Show will begin with projects from level 1 and level 2 students, including yogawear, swimwear, ski and snowboardwear. The level 3 student col-lections include glamorous wetsuits designed by girls for girls, swim and beachwear, luxury loungewear, stretch clothing for athletics and women’s football, snowboarding gear and ten-nis dresses. There will also be urban streetwear with a twist, ecological and recycled sustain-able collections and stunning eveningwear.

Today’s fashion frontline isn’t the catwalks but the streets. Fashion Design at Falmouth re-flects this, focusing on the modern streetwear and leisurewear that dominates many ar-eas of the market, and exposing you to the many disciplines that underpin a contempo-rary clothing line. This pioneering course has been devised to give you the very best start in the rapidly evolving global fashion industry.

Studying fashion at Falmouth gives you a glo-bal outlook with a local perspective. New York, Paris, Milan, Tokyo and London may be the design centres of the world - with China soon to follow - but with the global technology rev-olution and advances in ICT and travel, fash-ion designers can now work from anywhere. Falmouth offers an exceptional environment to study fashion for contemporary lifestyles at one of the UK’s leading fashion design schools.

Cornwall Today 108

108 Cornwall Today

Cornwall Today 108

The Cornish coastal town of Falmouth and the wonderful and often whacky world of high fashion might seem an unlikely combination – but next week that is about to change.

The first ever BA (Hons) Fashion design and BA (Hons) Performance Sportswear show from University College Falmouth (incorporating Dartington School of Art) is about to take place on the evening of June 1 at Events Square, Falmouth. And it promises to be spectacular.Rhinestone-encrusted wetsuits and diving suits with high visibility panels that light up have been designed by women to perfectly hug the female form. Dressed with killer heels and sleek make-up for the show and photo shoots, these outfits might look like they lean more towards fashion than practical sportswear but many have been designed and water-tested by Stacey Penny, a keen surfer. The collections look sensational – and they work.Most of these highly individual collections have made full use of the state-of-the-art technical equipment within Falmouth’s fashion department, such as laser cutting, ultrasonic welding, tape seaming, digital printing and fabric bonding technology.The 30 students have worked on projects set by top names in design such as Luella Bartley, Finisterre, Speedo, Decathlon, Gul and Michael Stars LA.

Employing the creativity of stylist Susie Coulthard, who has worked with celebrities like The Kooks, Kaiser Chiefs and Dizzee Rascal and show producer Lucy Richards, who has worked on shows in London Fashion Week, the event is set to rival anything seen on the catwalks of established graduate fashion courses in the UK.University College Falmouth is a British university college in Falmouth, Cornwall. Founded in 1902, it had previously been the Falmouth School of Art and then Falmouth College of Arts until it received degree-awarding powers (and the right to use the title “University College”) in March 2005.

In April 2008, University College Falmouth merged with Dartington College of Arts, adding a range of Performance courses to its portfolio. [4]This merger had been the subject of dispute by some supporters of Dartington.[5]

The College is located on three different campuses across Cornwall and Devon. The main campus, “Tremough Campus”, is in Penryn

The College’s new Design Centre opened at Tremough in the Autumn of 2003 as part of a £50 million development of the Tremough Campus under the Combined Universities in Cornwall initiative, including social facilities, additional teaching accommodation and a Learning Resource Centre.

Under the auspices of the CUC, the University of Exeter’s operations in Cornwall transferred to Tremough in 2004, as this campus has been designated the “Hub” of the CUC (with Cornwall’s FE Colleges forming the “Rim”).In August 2007, University College Falmouth entered The Sunday Times University Guide for the first time, ranked 57 in a league table of 124 universities and colleges in the UK. Falmouth’s entry was the highest for a university college.More than four in five undergraduate students (81 per cent) are awarded a first or a 2:1. This statistic made University College Falmouth the 5th highest-ranked University in the country for awarding first and 2:1 degrees behind Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and St Andrews