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!

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!”

Flying the fashion flag in Aberdeen

It’s great to see so many of our students involved in local fashion events and initiatives across Aberdeen. We love seeing what they get up to through our @fashionplace_rgu Instagram. Keep tagging us everyone!

Here are some of our students (from across the various years) at the Stellar Aberdeen and Must Have Dresses UK fashion show event last week!

We have a group of second year student helpers and models taking part in the MISS fashion show later this month at Aberdeen’s Marcliffe Hotel and we look forward to sharing more on their experience… We were also delighted to offer the opportunity for a group of students to attend the LOVE fashion event this week!

Fashion road trip

Today we took our first year and MSc Fashion Management students on their annual trip to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

We enjoyed a guided tour of the fashion gallery, followed by an insightful talk on ‘Diversity on and off the Catwalk’.

After our visit the students (and staff) had some free time to browse the shops before boarding the bus to Aberdeen. We hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did and we’re already looking forward to our trip next year, which is set to coincide with a special showcase of diversity in fashion.

Study abroad

Our students have the opportunity to study abroad during either their second or third year at RGU.

We have a number of partner institutions across the globe including in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia and we continuously work to build partnerships with new and existing institutions in order to grow the opportunities we are able to offer our students.

Study abroad is an excellent addition to students’ CVs in the increasingly competitive job market today. Particularly in the fashion industry where students need to be adaptable and able to understand different cultures and markets across a dynamic, global sector.

Stage 2 Fashion Management student Kelsie is spending the semester at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada and says of her experience so far:

“I’m having the best time! It was so easy to settle in and I’m really enjoying the course here too. The course coordinator has been amazing and gave us a tour of the campus and surrounding area. She said she was really pleased to have two fashion management students from RGU”

Kelsie and Emma have been enjoying exploring Canada and learning about the place as well as the exciting modules on the course.

Colouring our campus

This week our eleventh cohort of first year Fashion Management students have injected some colour into the campus with their fashion exhibition. Each year, as part of their Fashion Design Concepts and Communication module, the students are tasked with working in teams to create a colour exhibition.

The module aims to introduce our students to the basic components of visual communication and familiarise them with industry standard design software such as Adobe Photoshop and Kaledo Lectra.

It’s the first of a series of creative exhibitions that the students present during their time on the course. We look forward to seeing what else they have in store…

The last board (below) is particularly fitting with the autumnal mood on campus!

To the nines…

The ninth edition of our fashion magazine made it to the front page of tonight’s Evening Express supplement. Well done to our second (now third) year Fashion Management students – we’re so proud of you!

Next up, the tenth edition! Watch this space…

Fashion destination exhibition

This week marked the end of our first years’ exhibition, which showcased fashion destinations from around the world. We’re delighted to share some of their creative ideas, captured beautifully by third year BA (Hons) Media students (Christie Breen and Alexis Flores) who’ve been on placement with our media team.

 

This project required students to work in teams, across a range of courses (fashion, events, PR and tourism) within the School of Creative and Cultural Business at RGU, in order to plan a creative exhibition and organise a launch event. Ten teams of students were assigned a charity and given £10 with which to buy a garment from the charity’s local branch. Their aim was to communicate a fashion destination of their choice, using the garment and charity as inspiration. Showcases included Scotland, Paris, Nigeria, Moscow, New York, Kenya, China and Hollywood.

During the launch event, students were tasked with promoting their charity and many chose to fundraise through bake sales and competitions. One team even brought along a mascot in the form of Lily the dog; this tied in well with their charity (PDSA) and she gained their team a lot of attention at the event.

We’re so proud of the commitment and enthusiasm our students gave to this project – well done to everyone involved!