Fashioning a master’s degree

Fashion has a varied and explosive history. Our responsibility as educators preparing students and therefore careers for this context places us in a very difficult and complex position. Do we prepare students to be successful or do we prepare them to ‘invest’ in their industry? In this paper we construct our story of developing an ethical, sustainable international masters degree in Fashion Management. It is a journey of development that sees higher education establishments from Belgium and Italy join together with a ‘third-party’ university from an emerging third-world market in sharing and developing a group of international students willing to ‘invest’ and become industry transformers. Integral to our approach is context and the importance of narrative and responsibility for the learner; as such, this requires a return to old ‘andragogic’ versus ‘pedagogic’ education philosophies. Our account provides a full description of the rationale for aligning the ‘pedagogic’ with ‘andragogic’ and this involves learners to actually experience and understand in context. The principal aim of this paper is to explore the experience of introducing narratives between fashion industry and academia in these different locations as a means of ‘raising’ issues regarding future responsibility and thereby develop critical reflexive skills that will be valuable in other geographical and market contexts for the future.