Learning (fashion design) without borders

Now in its 62nd year in fashion education, Slim’s Fashion & Arts School has completely migrated its courses to online learning.

“Now you can be anywhere in the Philippines – all you need is WiFi and we provide the rest” says school director Mark Lewis Higgins. “For each module that you enroll in, every single item you will need for that course will be delivered to your doorstep – including a sewing machine and dress form if you need one. This is a new way of learning – without borders”.

“During the lockdown we used the time to deconstruct and then reconstruct our entire curriculum for online learning without compromising the quality of the courses in any way,” Higgins adds. “And because our lessons are so meticulous and highly technical, this took a while. We wanted to make sure that these courses would be on the same level as our face to face classes. We actually conducted test sessions for all the modules until we were satisfied with the results. This idea was actually something my sister Sandy and I talked about for many years, the pandemic just propelled us to finally do this now.”

According to Higgins, throughout the entire history of the school, there were always people contacting Slim’s and saying that their dream was to one day enroll at the fashion school,but this always would involve moving to Manila, renting a place to live, and staying until the entire course had been accomplished.

“Now, the cost to do this has dropped significantly for the student, in terms of additional rent and transportation. You can study our courses from whatever province you live in,” he explains. “In the past years, whenever Ezra Santos or Michael Cinco, or any of our other Dubai-based alumni would come visit or contact us, they were always looking for design assistants or technicians to hire from our school and bring over to them. With these online courses, I offered to create time slots for students specifically living in the Middle East, so it makes things much easier for the designers. They can now be trained from where they already are.”

And the results have been very inspiring.

“All my teachers reported to me that the students actually perform better. They are more focused, and have far less distractions than during face to face sessions. The quality of their work is also better, which was a nice surprise. So far, we have opened our modules in Patternmaking, Fashion Design & Illustration and Bespoke Men’s Tailoring. We will be launching our Draping course by the end of this year,” Higgins enthuses.

When asked if there were any plans to return to face to face classes in the future, Higgins hastily replies:  “Not anytime soon. At this point, we are very pleased with what we have achieved. We opened up whole new markets for the school by doing this. Can you imagine, we have only just started and some of our entire classes have no students living in Manila – we even have some from the Middle East, Hong Kong and Canada.”