Course overview
Our groundbreaking MA Digital Fashion degree course at UCA Epsom takes creative thinkers and designers into an exciting and emerging landscape, giving you the skills and confidence to dress the future.
Taught by an award-winning team of researchers, industry pioneers and academics, this course, which was the first of its kind when launched by UCA, presents you with a cutting-edge programme that spans the fields of fashion and gaming. As brands increasingly require 3D skills from their fashion designers and as others from Louis Vuitton to Dolce & Gabbana make moves into the avatar outfits of games from Fortnite to League of Legends, this course uniquely prepares fashion creators for the future of manufacturing as well as self-expression.
You will learn how to create 3D garments and environments which are free from material constraints – whether they are a virtual catwalk show, a brand's digitised marketing campaign, an interactive AR couture collection, a game's ground-breaking skin launch, or a virtual influencer in need of a fashion edge. This is possible through UCA's first-of-its-kind curriculum built around Marvelous Designer, Substance, and Unreal Engine 5.
Already, the game skins industry is worth $5 billion — outfits for avatars can sell for hundreds of pounds, showing just how large an opportunity the market is as gaming becomes increasingly mainstream.
Fashion’s entry into the fourth industrial revolution sees it broadly adopting smart manufacturing practices based around 3D visualisation, while rapid advancements across AI, VR, AR, and GPUs position us in a renaissance of new possibilities for immersive ways to interact with clothes. From AR outfit try-on to real-time cinema-quality avatar wear, entrepreneurial fashion skillsets can shape these emergent technologies and the Metaverse itself.
Digital fashion innovations also allow fashion brands and businesses to market their physical collections in a more sustainable way, reducing cost and waste by eliminating the need for samples and facilitating made-to-order slow fashion. Owing to the broad range of clients keen to take advantage of virtual fashion, this course is open to both fashion and textiles graduates as well as those with a background in games, film, animation or graphic design – though if you come from one of these fields, you should expect to undertake some intensive learning that will bring you up to speed on creating fashion garments.
During your studies, you will benefit from our extensive industry links and industry standard technology and we’ll provide you with the knowledge and skills to step into a growing and competitive job market with confidence.
MA Digital Fashion students have worked on live projects with Farfetch luxury fashion brand and the prestigious Epic Games company.
You can read more about our course in this Guardian article