Welcome back

It’s been a strange old time in the world and we haven’t posted in the longest time in the history of the Fashion Place blog (sorry followers!) Our campus has not been its usual hive of activity but the last month has seen most of our students back on campus and it’s been so good to see everyone!

Over the past year, our students have risen to the challenges of blended and online learning, socially-distanced team work and projects – from photoshoots to placements. We’ve seen another cohort graduate online but were pleased to share their celebrations our Instagram profile (do you follow us? If not click here).

We have lots of exciting plans for the year ahead and look forward to sharing these with you. In fact we were delighted to host our first Sustainability in the Creative and Cultural Industries symposium earlier this month. The event saw a host of academics and practitioners sharing their thoughts, research and knowledge around different aspects of sustainability – a crucially important agenda for businesses and timely in the run up to COP26, which takes place in Glasgow this coming week.

The symposium took place online and you can watch all the presentations online by clicking here and working your way through the agenda.

Look forward to sharing more soon!

Placement update

Stage 3 Fashion Management student Hanne Pulkkinen is currently on a year long placement at Polhem – a fashion, beauty and lifestyle public relations agency in Helsinki, Finland.

Hanne has had a fantastic placement experience where she has worked on a range of exciting campaigns. Hanne says:

“The fashion scene in Finland is small and very much a close knit community – made up of editors, stylists, bloggers and influencers. Everybody knows everyone.

My days as an PR intern consisted of media coverage reporting, social media management, showroom management, events management and lots of other tasks from steaming clothes to mailing packages.

My favorite part has to definitely be the events!Because Polhem works with a large clientele of brands, I got to experience and participate in a great variety of events, not only fashion.

Last summer the ice cream brand Halo Top was launched in Finland. To celebrate, Polhem created a SUPER Finnish sauna boat launch event for Halo Top. This was such a fun experience since it was so out of my comfort zone coming from fashion studies.

The last event we organised (before COVID-19) was a SS20 collection launch for Vamsko, a local Finnish family owned shoe brand.

The quirky pink venue was the perfect place to have the event, which was an absolute success with great coverage for the brand and wonderful feedback for us as an agency too.”

Thanks so much to Hanne for sharing her experience and these beautiful photographs!

The 2020 vision

Our beautiful Stage 2 magazine is finally here. So much work goes into this project each year and it’s always so exciting to see the finished magazine!

Well done to everyone involved and to Fiona Blunsdon, Fashion Lecturer and Head of Stage 3, for pulling it all together.

The full version can be found here.

Class of 2020 – we got there!

It might not be how they imagined spending the final few weeks at university but they got there! Congratulations to all of our students for adapting to these exceptional circumstances and finishing their coursework from home.

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We would especially like to acknowledge our fantastic final year students who have had a very different end to their course than any of us would have imagined. We are sad not to have had our usual celebration at the end of term but we were so happy to catch up remotely on Zoom and hear about how they’ve all been getting on. We heard about new exercise regimes, spending time at home with family and pets, discovering local surroundings, digital quizzes, short courses and lots more!

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Wishing all of our students and soon to be graduates all the best for the summer ahead. We look forward to hearing and sharing what they’ve been up to.

It’s a challenging time for graduates in an uncertain job market but we have no doubt that we’ll be hearing about some of their successes soon.

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Happy new year and placement update

Happy new year to all our fashionable followers. We hope you had a wonderful Christmas break and are looking forward to welcoming our students back for the beginning of a new term and, indeed, a new decade!

It’s been lovely to hear from some of our students who are out on a year long placement and who have taken on some really exciting roles within industry. Third year Fashion Management student Liam Troup is on placement in the Creative, Content and Communications team at M&S Food in London and has been working on a number of exciting campaigns and initiatives – some of which he can’t even reveal to us as they’re still top secret! He says:

I’m now just over the half way point of my placement. Over the last six months I have be able to work on countless campaigns. Britain’s Got Talent The Champions and Christmas to only name a few. Looking forward to the coming six moths with some really exciting campaigns planned.

We are so proud to be able to offer our students such a vast range of work experience opportunities – in Aberdeen and further afield. For those who do decide to undertake a outside of Aberdeen, this can be a valuable part of the learning experience! Liam says:

London life is really busy but the buzz of working and living in the city totally makes it worth it and working as part of such an incredible team makes me love what I get to do even more.

In the next couple of weeks more of our students are heading out on shorter placements of between 6 and 12 weeks and we look forward to sharing some of their experiences here on the blog.

Innovation catalysts

We were delighted to see so many Fashion Management students achieving their level 2 ‘Innovation Catalyst’ award from the Scottish Institute of Enterprise in November.

Innovation skills are recognised as increasingly important amongst graduates and SISA is a new awards programme that helps support and develop these through designated workshops and module accreditation. The Scottish Institute for Enterprise is running the programme in partnership with four of Scotland’s Innovation Centres (Digital Health and Care Institute, CENSIS, The Datalab and the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre).

The students attended a workshop in Glasgow and were tasked with working in multi disciplinary teams to explore the future of our resources – inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Scottish Government was one of the first to sign up to these goals in 2015 and issued the National Performance Framework as a blueprint for implementing these at a national and local level in 2018.  Well done to our students  – good luck for level 3, we hope you apply!

Guest panel member

Last week we were delighted to welcome Craig Stevenson, Bon Accord Centre Manager, to be an expert panel member for the fourth years’ Global fashion Strategy presentations. With the changing pace of retail and the pressure for survival, fashion stores have to move quickly with innovative strategies. Students were tasked to work in teams and come up with creative strategies to drive their chosen business forward.

Many great ideas were highlighted on the day, including a pop up shop with integrated mobile technology apps, which lend themselves to the local marketplace and an innovate gym space.

The students benefitted greatly on the day from Craig’s expertise in asking questions, making the presentation feel real to them. Craig said “It is fantastic to hear such creative suggestions from the students.  Bon Accord strives to be as innovative as possible and listening to the presentations gives a feel for what the future could look like!”

Body beautiful

Yesterday we took our first year and Masters students to see the National Museums Scotland exhibition Body Beautiful. Each year we take the students to see the fashion archive but this time we were able to treat them to two wonderful showcases – followed by some shopping!

We look forward to returning with next year’s cohort!

Needle & Thread London

Third year Fashion Management student Rebbeca Favero is on placement this year in the Marketing and PR department at Needle and Thread. Rebecca is loving her placement experience so far and adapting well to busy London life.

She said:

I am gaining valuable experience by accepting challenges and seeing how the dynamics of a successful brand work. The PR and Marketing team is really kind, professional and always willing to get me involved in the evolution of the brand by also co-working with other departments as wholesale and e-commerce… What I love the most is that I am really getting a full 360 degree insight of the work environment – full of responsibilities and objectives to achieve! Lately, we have been very busy at the office as we are soon launching the new Christmas and Bridal Collection, which is very exciting as I am greatly part of it! 

We wish Rebecca all the very best and look forward to welcoming her back for fourth year. We’d like to thank Needle & Thread for providing this exciting opportunity and Rebecca for sharing her experience – and these beautiful photographs.

Scottish innovative student awards

Over the past year, we’ve been working closely with the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) as part of an accredited Scottish Innovative Student Awards (SISA) programme. RGU is the first university to achieve SISA accreditation and we’re delighted to see so many of our students taking up this opportunity and working through the various levels of the programme.

By completing one of our accredited modules (which span across a number of the courses) and writing a reflective statement, 109 students from our School of Creative and Cultural Business have successfully achieved the first level of this award, making them ‘Future Thinkers’. A further 18 of these students went on to achieve the second level of the award after participating in a multidisciplinary workshop facilitated by Ann Davidson of the SIE and are ‘Innovation Catalysts’.  Incredibly we are now also able to report five Level 3 ‘Innovation Champions’ from the School.  Congratulations to Sofia Bonetti, Monica Genova, Sarah Johnson, Mairi Lowe and Eilidh Mellis!

We look forward to continuing our work with the SIE and seeing other students progress through the SISA programme during their time here at RGU.