If You Want to Be a Famous Fashion Designer, Here Are the Best Colleges

It had to happen sooner or later. There’s a ranking for everything these days, after all, and August is a pretty slow news month (At least in fashion terms, hence the desire to create interest with idle speculation such as the “Is Phoebe Philo leaving Céline?” rumors. O.M.G.! O.M.G.! The brand, not surprisingly, says no).
So in the footsteps of Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List comes the Business of Fashion’s Global Fashion School Rankings — the first listing of such institutions I know.
Unlike the Vanity Fair list, which is a bit surreal (Jony Ive?), the BoF one, which has a pretty rigorous and transparent methodology, is worth reading — both because of what its sheer existence says about the importance of fashion education and how it may no longer be the sad stepchild of arts college programs, but also because of the schools that make the list.
Some of them may surprise you. They surprised me, and, it seems, even the editors at BoF who compiled the ranking. “Perhaps the most surprising outcome of our Global Fashion School Rankings was the outstanding feedback from students and alumni from schools off the beaten path, suggesting that prospective students may want to carefully consider a wider range of colleges when making decisions about higher education in fashion,” wrote the editors Imran Amed and Robin Mellery-Pratt in an accompanying op-ed.
So what were these unexpected institutions?
In the undergraduate list, Central St. Martins (C.S.M.) was top, as you might expect, but Kingston University, near London, was No. 3, and Drexel University in Philadelphia was No. 10. Philadelphia University was No. 16, and the University for the Creative Arts, in Epsom, England, was No. 17. Pratt, by contrast, was 21.
For the master’s programs, the famous British schools (Royal College of Art, C.S.M. and London College of Fashion) took first, second and fourth, with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in third place. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (R.M.I.T.) in Melbourne, Australia, was No. 6, and Philadelphia University showed up again, at No. 10.
Philly: hotbed of fashion invention. Who knew?
Of course, not every famous designer is formally trained (Miuccia Prada being a case in point), and an M.A. is not de rigueur for making it in style, though it does help. But as Balenciaga continues its search for a new creative director, and as we embark on that period of summer known as back-to-school and a host of 11th and 12th graders start thinking about their next educational opportunity, this ranking gives the fashion landscape a provocative new look.