At 126 years old, the Heriot-Watt School of Textiles and Design is one of the world's most venerated fashion universities - and it's bringing its campus to Dubai. Gemma Champ reports.
Imagine, if you will, the life of a fashion designer. Said genius renders sketch after fantastical sketch as gushing minions scuttle around him or her, bowing and scraping, accepting edicts and diktats on the benefits of crêpe de chine over silk jersey. In between creative surges, said designer bestows monologues and bons mots on grateful fashion journalists, eager to record every utterance before they follow his spectacular couture show, when he or she runs down the catwalk, waving graciously to fervent applause.
It's a lovely image, and certainly holds a fond place in the mind's eye of many a budding designer. In the Middle East, where status and glamour have such immense sway, the cult of the personality is a crucial part of buying and creating fashion. Every designer who has ever customised a T-shirt or sewn a skirt gets to command prime space in the press and a catwalk show to display their wares. But while the auteur idea works for a very few designers around the world, it's only the tip of the fashion iceberg.
From the textile specialists who create funky prints for Topshop frocks to the visual merchandisers who dictate the direction you walk around the shop and the order in which you examine the stock, there are a plethora of creative, valuable roles to be filled. To this end, Heriot-Watt's School of Textiles and Design, which at 126 years old is the second oldest textiles school in the world (second only to Philadelphia, which started six months earlier), has launched two of its highly rated fashion degrees on its Dubai campus, commencing in September this year.
With the likes of Vivienne Westwood and the venerable fashion historian and writer Colin McDowell among its honorary graduates, the college is certainly no mere training institution, but nevertheless its emphasis is very much on the practical skills of fashion that will, it believes, translate into real jobs and take its graduates into the heart of the fashion world. It's an unpretentious, uncomplicated approach that is badly needed if Dubai is to take what many consider to be its rightful place as the centre of the Middle East's fashion industry.
The UAE does not lack fashion courses - most famously, Esmod, the French private fashion university, has a campus just down the road from Heriot-Watt's building in Dubai International Academic City. But the two institutions have very different approaches to education, with Esmod's lofty couture style being much admired but not entirely practical for all students. "We produce graduates who are eminently employable, and that's what we've been doing for about 200 years," says Professor Brian Smart, the deputy principal of Heriot-Watt University and the executive dean and head of the Dubai campus. "We're more oriented towards the vocational aspects of fashion. Esmod is doing its own particular thing that appeals to a certain group of people in Dubai. We're really looking for people who are very, very serious about their career, a career that relates to what really makes fashion work on a day-to-day basis. We're looking at building on the connections we have with big companies such as M&S, Debenhams and so on, preparing graduates that these companies will welcome."
One of this year's graduates, Emma Ross, 22, from West Lothian, confirms that this is what the course has provided. "All the courses cross over and interlink. This one was very creative while being commercial at the same time: I've specialised in knitwear and in the last year I've combined electronic knitting with hand knitting, and I did a work placement last year with a knitwear designer." Ross, like many of her fellow Heriot-Watt graduates, is ambitious but realistic about the job prospects of fashion. "I want to design for an upper-end high-street company, going into a commercial market rather than too high-end - something you can really see people wearing."
Mark Timmins, the fashion degree's course director at Heriot-Watt, wants to instil no rivalry between the institutions, however: "I hope we can work with Esmod and the Indian university Manipal - they're just next door. Because we're so different - Esmod does very elegant French fashion and we're a bit more British and edgy. There are so many fashion schools in the UK yet everybody gets on well with everybody else, so it's just about growing that culture in Dubai."
This can only be good for the city's industry, which is full of endeavour and enterprise but lacks cohesion, with its many PR-led fashion shows. Timmins says: "What's missing is a bit more of the fun element. Dubai is like a crossroads of production from India, design in Europe and retailing in Dubai, and there's something missing... It's just not old enough yet; it's still toddling about trying to find its feet, and I think we can add something to that. I'm not saying we're saving Dubai fashion, but I think we've got a part to play in holding a hand and saying, yeah, go play with that, chuck that ball about and see what happens."
Timmins is, of course, referring to the notoriously experimental nature of British fashion and retail. Speaking at Britain's Graduate Fashion Week last week in London, he is surrounded by the weird and wonderful creations of the graduates of the likes of Central Saint Martins (his alma mater, where he studied with John Galliano). He maintains, though, that the Heriot-Watt approach has a practical side that makes it stand out for employers and results in graduates who are more equipped to make careers in the workplace, with an impressive 85 per cent of last year's fashion graduates being in graduate-level employment. In tough times, this is a reassuring figure, as companies have less time for whimsicality and more need for genuinely knowledgeable employees.
"They're going into buying, setting up their own businesses, working in New York, India, China - right across the world. There are people at Gap, Next, Ralph Lauren, two trend companies in New York - they like the fact that we're British but also that we're Scottish. They just love the quirkiness." The degrees being launched on the Dubai campus are BA (Hons) fashion and BA (Hons) fashion marketing and retailing (the next open day takes place on June 19), but Timmins puts the course's success down to the college's long history as a centre for textile training - which is, he says, at the heart of successful fashion. Heriot-Watt's School of Textiles and Design, which is based in a former textile mill in Galashiels in the Scottish borders, was born out of the need to train workers in the skills needed for the once-booming weaving and knitting trades of Scotland and the north of England. As a result, textiles remain at the heart of the college, whether it is learning to use the immensely well-equipped studios of looms and other textile machines or simply appreciating the qualities of fabrics and how they work in clothes.
"We do very interesting and innovative textiles as well as silhouettes," says Timmins. "So people have been coming up to the Graduate Fashion Week stand saying: 'Oh, they're really exciting silhouettes, but they feel amazing too.' When you're shopping you buy a silhouette but also something that feels really good." Students undertaking the fashion degree at Heriot-Watt will learn not only the practical skills of pattern cutting and stitching, but also will concentrate on knitting and digital printing technology and working with textile factories in the Emirates and India.
"I've just progressed so much with design, illustrations, computer skills, printing, knitting - it's just fantastic," says Katie Whyte, 22, another of this year's graduates. "People from other universities are amazed at how much we've learnt in a short time. And the feedback from the industry on my portfolio has been really good." The university hopes to attract students from India and Pakistan as well as from the local and expatriate communities of the UAE. "We already have many postgraduate students from India and Pakistan, because of the tradition of textiles there, and the fact that the production has returned to that area," says Timmins, "but obviously it's easier and more financially viable for them to come to Dubai rather than Scotland. And we will be doing exchanges between the Dubai and Galashiels campuses."
This will be one of the most thrilling opportunities for students from both sides of the course. The syllabus will be the same in both locations, so there will be no disparity in standards, meaning that Galashiels students can discover Dubai's opportunities, while Dubai students will be able to utilise the incredible technical facilities in Scotland. "The rules and regulations that apply in Edinburgh apply here too," says Smart. "This is nowhere near a remote, loosely associated campus, so the transfer of students is absolutely bang-on. Third-year transfer is offered in our other degrees and increasingly being taken up."
The university is known for its connections with the fashion industry in the rest of the world, and one of the key aims for the launch of this degree has been to create links with Dubai's malls and retailers, benefiting both the fashion and the marketing students. "A group of interested retailers has already been established," says Smart, and Timmins adds: "We're talking to a couple of the malls about projects we can do with our Scottish and Dubai students, and there are lots of retail innovations that we'd like to transfer to Dubai, such as pop-up shops and flash mob catwalk shows."
Those connections will be within the degrees as well, as videoconferencing and trips mean that the students of Galashiels and those of Dubai will be able to collaborate and to know one another. Equally, the students of the fashion degree and the fashion marketing and retailing degree will work together through the course. "The fashion students will create collections," says Timmins, "and the marketing students will be working with them, thinking about what's our target market, how are we going to talk to them."
Of course there are going to be some challenges: how, for example, to effectively recruit students from schools that are less aware of the concept of portfolio preparation? The college is keen to help, and the course can include what Smart calls "year zero" - effectively a design foundation year that is shared with the university's engineering students. The university staff are also going out into schools to talk to them about the requirements of the course.
In the end, though, the degree will be as varied as the students who take it. Of the current crop of graduate collections, Timmins says: "Some of it is very commercial, some is very esoteric... I have a student who's designed a very high-street denim collection and very academic, conceptual fashion, too. When the students do their final portfolio, they photograph the collection as if for a contemporary magazine. They 'diffuse' their collection for the high street, they do a collection for 18 months hence and they do a commercial project."
All of which proves that if there's one thing we can predict about fashion in the UAE, it's that we can predict nothing. gchamp@thenational.ae
