Through collaborations with legendary fashion houses, Parsons Paris students in a variety of programs have opportunities to explore and reimagine conceptual work through a modern lens—and directly with industry innovators like Casey Cadwallader.

MFA Fashion Design and the Arts students recently delved into the archives of celebrated fashion iconoclast Thierry Mugler and reinvented iconic pieces by responding to Mugler’s distinctive aesthetic, characterized by a focus on futurism, body shaping, and a celebration of the female silhouette. The partered project gave the brand fresh perspectives from the next generation of designers and enabled students to continue contributing to the vibrant dialogue between fashion brands and academia that is shaping the future of the industry.

Tuomas Laitinen has long seen the value of such collaborations. Laitinen, a Finnish-born fashion designer who taught for a number of years at Aalto University, joined Parsons Paris to prepare the 2021 launch of the Master of Fine Arts in Fashion Design and the Arts program. His focus on external partnerships is the result of years of experience bringing scholarship and industry together in his own career. “You have to be in industry to understand whether an idea is relevant,” he says.

Laitinen now heads the MFA program at Parsons Paris and serves as the BFA Fashion Design program’s creative director. In the three years since the MFA program’s inception, he has kicked off each fall semester with “collaborations that should be a fashion student’s dream,” as he puts it. Initially Laitinen and MA Fashion Studies program director Marco Pecorari brought first-year students into the world of Versace, where they conducted archival research and incorporated the celebrated fashion house’s long-standing “design codes” into looks of their own creation. A similar and equally successful partnership with MM6 Maison Margiela followed. “It’s a trial in combining your creativity with the heritage of a house,” says Laitinen of these matchups.

This year, 20 MFA students from Parsons Paris immersed themselves in the legacy of Mugler, the fashion house established by Thierry Mugler and overseen by Casey Cadwallader since 2018. “Students are working on the same challenge that Casey and all house designers face every season, which is, How do you go into this incredible archive and make modern, desirable garments that don’t just repeat the past?” says Laitinen.

The students applied a modern sensibility in reinterpreting Mugler’s sculptural approach to construction. MFA candidate Wendy Kuo used 3D printing to create attachable forms designed to exaggerate the features of the female silhouette. Kuo’s classmate Araz Yaghoub Nakhjavan Tapeh wedded the Mugler codes of anatomical seaming, lingerie, and corsetry to the power dressing of the Reagan-era office. Taking a cue from the way Mugler himself conceived themes for collections, Tapeh drew inspiration from the famous 1980s bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. She explains, “I wanted to delve into a specific universe and let it inform my design choices.”

The MFA students also worked with professor Chris Vidal Tenomaa to style and photograph classmates’ garments as if they were producing a campaign. “This visual representation is a way for students to demonstrate how their visual and creative worlds look,” Tenomaa says. “Understanding how to express their ideas in a visual and textual way will be developed further when they work on their thesis collections.” Paris was a continual inspiration to Thierry Mugler; accordingly, each student was sent out to photograph a garment in a different arrondissement of the city.  

For years, Parsons students have benefited from engagements with fashion luminaries in both Paris and New York. Figures ranging from Christian Dior to alums Norman Norell, Donna Karan, and Jack McCullough and Lázaro Hernández of Proenza Schouler have critiqued student work on Parsons' two campuses. But the Mugler x Parsons Paris project stands out as an example of the kind of intensive, wide-ranging creative collaborations that working designers must now undertake to bring their ideas to the runway—and the global public's awareness. The Mugler project is helping to serve as a blueprint for future Parsons partnerships with prominent companies and organizations seeking to foster innovation while promoting sustainability and inclusiveness. These exercises are already serving students as they work toward their thesis collections and in the industry after graduation.