Italy: Top fashion school to expand presence in nation

Rome: Italy’s top fashion school, Istituto Marangoni, recently expanded its presence in China by doubling the size of its campus in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in a bid to further boost the tech hub’s fashion industry.

The fashion school will move its Shenzhen campus from Nanshan district to a new one in Futian district, which will be about twice the size of the original.

“Our overall enrollment will also at least double,” said Robin Fang, president of the Shenzhen School of Istituto Marangoni, at the Shenzhen campus relocation signing ceremony.

Fang revealed that the school expects to welcome the first batch of new students to the new campus in September this year and has already received inquiries from students in China, South America, Europe, and elsewhere.

In 2016, with joint support of the Italian government and the Shenzhen municipal government, Istituto Marangoni established its Shenzhen school in Nanshan district.

The fashion school offers a variety of courses in the areas of fashion design, fashion communication, and fashion management, as well as luxury brand management and marketing.

“If you want to learn about Chinese women’s clothing, you should visit Shenzhen, especially Futian,” said Fang, adding that since China’s reform and opening-up, Futian has gathered a large number of women’s fashion brands, which demonstrated Shenzhen’s advantages in the fashion industry in addition to technology and finance.

Futian district boasts over 2,000 fashion brand enterprises, including Koradior, Marisfrolg, Ellassay, and Yinger — all well-known brands at home and abroad. Its fashion industry’s scale has surpassed 120 billion yuan ($16.89 billion), accounting for around a quarter of Shenzhen’s total fashion industry scale.

A research report on Shenzhen’s fashion industry released in March last year showed that the metropolis has developed into one of the domestic fashion industry bases with the most comprehensive industry categories, the most original brands, the most well-developed industrial support and the most significant agglomeration effect.

Now, the industry volume of Shenzhen’s traditional fashion fields, such as clothing, watches and jewelry, and emerging fashion fields like consumer electronics and creative design, have both exceeded 1 trillion yuan, the report said.

Emanuele Colombo, teaching director of the Shenzhen School of Istituto Marangoni, has lived in Shenzhen for nearly two years and feels that the fashion industry is quite dynamic there.

“We see a lot of different trends coming out of this place, and I believe these trends will influence China and the world,” he said.

“Shenzhen is also a very open coastal city with a wide variety of sources of inspiration and is friendly to young local designers as they can build their brands here,” he added.

According to Fang, the Shenzhen school will become an important bridge connecting China and Italy, and even the world’s fashion industry, bringing high-level international market education concepts, international market ideas, and global fashion resources and creating a platform for talent training, external exchanges, and fashion innovation for Shenzhen.

“Istituto Marangoni will always be committed to nurturing designers with creativity, skills and forward-thinking, and we look forward to seeing more fashion designers go out from here in the future and shine on the international stage,” Fang said.