Fashion

Our spacious, airy fashion studios sit in the Mercer Building, and contain a range of dedicated workspaces and equipment for fashion design and construction, and group working.

The main studio contains steam presses and an edge fuser with a cutting table, alongside large professional pattern cutting tables. There is a collection of both female and male tailors’ mannequins available throughout the space for shaping and sizing as you design and develop your ideas.

The main sewing machine room has flat-lock industrial sewing machines with 4-thread-over lockers and 3-thread cover-stitch machines for a professional finish. We also have a dedicated Gerber Suite giving students access to Gerber technology and software, which is used to convert hard patterns to digital for use in the pattern design, grading and marker making software system. Users can capture patterns with a high quality digital scanner or camera, effortlessly blending paper designs with digital capabilities.

Students enjoy the benefit of using the range of facilities in the textiles and print processes workshop, including our Mimaki digital textiles printer, which uses both reactive and sublimation dyes, and our steaming, washing and heat pressing facilities for cloth up to 74cm wide.

A wide range of printing and dyeing equipment is also available, including a dye lab and equipment to support paper and felt-making. Sewing machines and embellishers are also available, along with large-scale tables and work areas.