Fashion Retailers Turn Design Schools Into Innovation Labs

Fashion retailers are treating design classrooms as their newest innovation labs, and schools are retooling their industry partnerships accordingly.

At Parsons School of Design, recent industry partners have included Saks Fifth Avenue, Levi's, Zara, Hugo Boss, Kering, Coach, Under Armour, and Theory, according to the school. Parsons now explicitly offers companies "innovation-focused" collaborations aimed at solving business challenges, according to the school's website.

For Ben Barry, dean of Parsons School of Fashion, the shift keeps fashion education grounded in commercial reality.

"Partnerships with brands are so important for fashion and design schools like Parsons because it allows us to ensure that our curriculum, what we're teaching our students, moves beyond the theoretical to be truly grounded in the complexities, the contradictions, the realities of industry," Barry told Retail Brew.

Recruiting still matters to retailers, but Barry said they also gain access to classrooms that function as what he called "creative innovation hubs," where students can experiment without the constraints placed on teams inside established companies.

The work is concrete. Last year, Parsons fashion management graduate students worked with Tory Burch to select a product and design a pop-up retail experience around its launch, weighing marketing, consumer culture, and fashion's role as entertainment. In another Parsons course, fashion design students teamed with Macy's and disabled collaborators to design clothing for people with disabilities.

The model has changed structurally, too. Barry said brands no longer want to simply send executives to campus for talks. They want to help create the brief, meet students throughout the semester, provide feedback on work in progress, and return for final presentations. These projects, he said, can lead to "paid internships, to jobs, to scholarships, to awards for our students."

The Fashion Institute of Technology is moving in the same direction. Jason Schupbach, president of FIT, told Retail Brew in an email that brands and retailers are shifting from one-off sponsorships toward more formal strategic relationships with schools.

One example is Gap Inc.'s Doris Fisher Creators Program, launching this fall. The program will give 30 FIT students access to Gap leaders and creatives through a mentorship program spanning fashion design, graphic design, and fabric styling.

FIT also runs a years-long partnership with Macy's in which Fashion Design BFA students compete to create collections the retailer ultimately produces and sells under its private brands. Earlier this year, FIT graduate Khoboso Nale's knitwear capsule launched at Macy's Herald Square under the retailer's Bar III brand, after she worked with company executives and visited retail and manufacturing facilities during development.

The skill sets companies seek have evolved alongside the partnership structures. Barry said companies increasingly value adaptability, collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and a willingness to work with evolving technologies rather than preparation for a narrowly defined role.

"We're thinking they're being prepared for jobs that we don't know what they are yet, but they will exist when they graduate, and they'll continue to change," he said.

Intellectual property terms favor the students. When a company wants to pursue an idea developed during a Parsons course, Barry said students retain ownership of their intellectual property and can then work directly with the brand to develop it.

As AI and other technologies reshape both fashion and higher education, Barry expects the line between education and industry R&D to blur further.

"We don't have the same constraints that one might have in industry," he said. "And so that really allows this freedom of thinking, these new ideas to be played with, to fail, to try again, to iterate."

For marketers, the implication is direct: the classroom has become a low-risk proving ground for product concepts, retail experiences, and inclusive design, with student-owned IP available for brands to commercialize on negotiated terms.