College Of Fashion Opens In London

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30342, 18 January 1964, Page 2

College Of Fashion Opens In London

[By

ZALIA THOMAS]

LONDON. The recently-opened London College of Fashion, built and equipped by the London County Council at a cost of £750,000, and occupying a site overlooking Oxford street, offers courses of instruction in dressmaking, dress manufacture, wholesale and bespoke men’s and women’s tailoring, millinery, furriery, corsetry, men’s and women’s hairdressing and beauty culture, general and management studies and design and is open to students over 18 years old with a good educational background. Students pay £3O a year in fees and overseas students are admitted at a reduced rate and under certain conditions. The L.C.C. architect’s department, who were responsible for designing the premises, first made a study of conditions within the fashion industries, in order to gather as much information as possible about general working conditions, and to find out what innovations would be desirable.

The College principal, Miss G. M. Hiscocks, B.A. (Lond.), paid visits to training centres and factories in France, Sweden, Germany and America (including the famous Fashion Institute of Technology in New York), as well as centres outside the London area. As a result, the College has been planned with the most minute attention paid to the requirements of students studying all facets of the fashion industry. Gardens On Roof On the roof of the six-storey building are gardens for the use of students for outdoor sketching, for summer dress shows, and as a setting for model photography. The main floor of the College includes a dining room and kitchen, a students’ common room, assembly hall, a library, librarian’s office and library classroom. On the same floor is the model workroom which is intended to provide students with the most modern equipment by which they can further their studies in conditions that most closely resemble the garment factory in which most of them will one day work. The upper floors have nine salons for the teaching of hairdressing and beauty culture and three rooms for the making of postiche—to the layman, wigs and hair pieces. There are 20 workrooms for

instruction in various branches of the needle trades, six general classrooms and three laboratories. The design department has five studios on the roof.

The College offers fulltime courses, leading to City and Guilds of London Institute examinations, as well as evening classes for people already employed in the trade. The college is planned to accommodate 600 students. Over 100 operative hairdressers leave each year, and about 100 trained students enter the various branches of the clothing industry.

The full-time courses included, beside the technical subjects, classes in English, a foreign language (usually French, but Italian, and German can be taken), physical education, or applied science (textHes/hairdressing science), anatomy and physiology, management studies and design.

Short courses in management subjects are offered to practising hairdressers and to executives in clothing firms, and in January, 1964, a sixmonth course in beauty culture for adult women is planned.