About the SAIC Fashion Design Department

About SAIC’s Fashion Department
SAIC’s Fashion program provides a creative and intellectual context in which the nature and
potential of fashion are closely examined and reimagined. Since 1934, SAIC has been educating
new generations of fashion designers who have gone on to produce some of the most inspired
and respected collections around the globe. Students have fiercely responded to international
influences and set groundbreaking trends for the past 80 years.
SAIC’s first Fashion classes gained inspiration from early Hollywood’s glamour in the midst of
the Great Depression. Students created sustainable and functional garments despite fabric rations
during World War II; and they produced innovative garments using foreign patterns and materials
with the growing popularity of international travel in the years to follow.
Uniquely situated within a vibrant contemporary school of art and design, SAIC’s Fashion
department continues to offer undergraduate, graduate, and post-baccalaureate fashion programs
that build on the connections and relationships between art and fashion that have been evolving in
the past century and that reach an unprecedented level in contemporary practices today.
SAIC’s Fashion program is housed within the Sage Studios for Fashion Design located in the
historic Carson Pirie Scott building. The 25,000-square-foot studio space includes the Fashion
Resource Center, a hands-on collection of late-20th and 21st-century designer garments and
accessories representing extreme innovation, which allows SAIC students the opportunity to
explore the most progressive achievements in the world of dress and fashion. For more
information, please visit saic.edu/fashion.
Notable Fashion Alumni
Matthew Ames
Eunwha Kim
Shane Gabier and Christopher Peters
of Creatures of the Wind
Maria Pinto
Abigail Glaum-Lathbury
Gary Graham
Halston
J. Morgan Puett
Cynthia Rowley
Lawrence Steele