Hi Aki.Could you just talk a little bit about your role at CCS role and what it entails?
So, I was hired to actually open the fashion school. It didn’t exist until 2015. I got a call when I was in Italy at Polimoda to come and I said I wasn’t interested, but then my buddy in the pub in London said, you have to go and at least see the place. So I did, and I kind of fell in love with the college. It has amazing facilities, which I never had when I was studying fashion. They showed me this empty floor and said, “You can create whatever you want here.”
Weirdly, the person who suggested an accessories designer open the fashion school was Ashley Olsen from The Row. She said that they really have trouble finding good accessories designers in the US, so we opened an accessories school first. So, it was footwear and handbags for the first five years. And then I added apparel. I was very lucky, I found Rey Benedict Pador, an amazing lead for apparel from Antwerp. And now we do both. My role is really to run the department, develop the curriculum, and represent the school and the industry locally, nationally and internationally. And I also teach, so I’m pretty busy.
“The person who suggested an accessories designer open the fashion school was Ashley Olsen from The Row. She said that they really have trouble finding good accessories designers in the US, so we opened an accessories school first.” – Aki Choklat
So it’s a reasonably new programme in the scheme of fashion colleges, then. I guess that’s interesting for you as it gives you an opportunity to start something from the ground up, but it also means you have to build a reputation quite quickly in the process?
I just saw this incredible opportunity in Detroit. I used to live in Williamsburg before it became unliveable, and it had a kind of a similar atmosphere. The whole city can be your laboratory as a student, this huge amount of space. To get interest, well, we had to work on that a little bit, you know, to get people to come. Now all the big companies see the quality of the students’ work, and that’s what it’s really about – hireable students. We’re very creativity-focused in Europe, at Polimoda, for example. In the US, they pay a lot of money to go to school. So you really want to have those core skills that everybody always asks for and not just be, you know, a visionary thinker.
“All the big companies see the quality of the students’ work, and that’s what it’s really about – hireable students.” – Aki Choklat
When you mention getting companies interested in your school, how does that work? Are massive luxury fashion houses a good thing for fashion education, does it trickle down?
When Bottega came to Detroit [then-creative director Daniel Lee staged the brand’s SS22 show there], I was hoping that they’d take one student to help with dressing; they hired most of our students and paid for this work. It was an incredible experience for the students. Bottega set up a atelier with sewing machines, steamers and cutting tables, and the day after the show they called us and asked if we would accept the machines as a donation to our college. We gladly accepted a total of 15 Juki machines plus steamers and tables. This was perfect timing since we were launching our apparel section.
The key tactic with this corporate, big fashion house relationship is that we have an advisory council for my department. My main job is to train students with skills that will land them a job. So each year, I ask the council if there are any changing needs that I can consider and address. While it is not easy to change the curriculum, we can always offer workshops to meet new needs. I ask the council to review new classes and programs.
Do they make a lot of money? Of course they do. I think I once calculated the total value of our advisory board and it’s something like $350 billion. I mean, it would be great if we could get some of the money to develop the educational system for students that cannot afford to go to fashion schools. That’s a goal that we are working on.
The cost of private art colleges in the US and across the world has gone up and up over the last few years. As someone who’s been teaching throughout that period, has the scale of the cost of these courses changed the way you teach?
Well, you have a different kind of respect, actually, for the student, when they put that kind of money into education. You have to deliver. These students are not wealthy. And I have to say one thing: we are not for profit, so all the money that comes to the school goes back to development, the school programme, and we also have a high school in the building that is very well-known for the local community, so we also are community connected.
But the change is that I really want to break down that kind of traditional system of the classroom and the teacher. I want it to be this idea of togetherness, and I do understand that the students, after all the aid, will have debt after they leave. So, I want to make sure they get a job. I just want to make sure that they’re well-trained so they can pay their student loans and have a successful life. The late Hilary Alexander asked me on a sustainability panel in London once, ” “How do you talk about the importance of sustainability in fashion?” and I said, “I want the students to be sustainable themselves first.” You know, earn money, eat, have a place to live. And then expand your concerns about the world and our industry.
How about the students, has there been a change in the way they engage with these courses? You joined CCS around 2016, the year something shifted in the world, young people became increasingly alienated from politics and awareness around the climate crisis really started to amplify. Do you find that these factors have fed into the way the students work and behave on fashion courses?
We do have conversations about socio-cultural, political conversations all the time. Students can come to me and express their concerns about the environment.You have to take into consideration that the planet is going in the wrong direction. I have a student who wanted to ban SHEIN at CCS – so students shouldn’t be allowed to order it. Of course I can’t ban anything, unless it’s illegal in the state of Michigan. But it started a whole conversation. I have to say that this last cohort of students that came to CCS – I think it’s kind of the first post-COVID group – they’re so hardworking, and we are so happy about that. Not that the previous ones weren’t, but this is a different kind of a group.
It’s interesting that these students are so hardworking. What about their aspirations, have they changed too? Like, did students previously want to launch their own labels, but now they just want to go straight in-house and rise to creative director?
It’s actually the other way around; everybody wanted to be a creative director, to work for this big trophy corporation. Now I think it’s kind of a half and half [with students wanting to start their own label]. Of course, it’s our responsibility to tell the students they need to get industry experience and not make the same mistakes I made – I launched a brand without any idea what I was doing and lost a lot of money. But a lot of people are questioning where they want to work, and there’s sort of a new type of student that is trying to figure out how to be a designer-maker, you know, sort of small-scale existence, which is very difficult. But this is why I’m saying: come to Detroit, this is a good place to launch that.
There are students who are not too bothered if they don’t get the massive internship and there are other students that are very driven to move to a big city. We have a student who was hired by Louis Vuitton in Paris, which is amazing, our first placement in a big luxury house, and she’s super happy. And there’s another group of students that want to open their own studio in Detroit.
“There’s opportunity [in Detroit], but it takes the culture to develop, and this is why I think fashion education is at the core of it all.” – Aki Choklat
There was a New York Times article a couple years ago that you probably saw, asking ‘Could Detroit become the next fashion city?‘ It does strike me as a place that – with its history tied to music, clubbing and manufacturing, and the fact that it’s comparatively cheap to live in – has the infrastructure to have a big stake in the fashion industry.
It has absolute potential. I have to say that the infrastructure for fashion specifically still has a long way to go. What we need is a very well-planned system of manufacturing and fabric stores. In New York, students can just walk out of FIT and buy buttons; we can’t do that here. It does need that, but there are so many opportunities here, and I’m so happy that you see that, because it’s mind-boggling how big Detroit is and actually how empty it is. There are not very many people that live here. People don’t just buy studios; they buy buildings. So there’s opportunity here, but it takes the culture to develop, and this is why I think fashion education is at the core of it all. My dream was to educate people, have them go and work with companies, and then come back and teach for us. And this is exactly what’s happening. We’re hiring somebody who went to Ralph Lauren to do the catwalk collections, and now she’s freelancing and will be teaching for us next semester. So we’re creating this circular culture of fashion education. And if the education is there, everything else will build around it.
People will say that there’s a benefit to studying in a fashion capital. What do you think is the benefit of studying somewhere smaller?
I always say that we can’t compete with New York or Paris. And I don’t want to. We are very small; we will be very small. We have 52 students in total. We want to stay personal. The benefit of Detroit is that we can offer a really interesting working environment. You don’t have distractions. I taught at De Montfort University in Leicester, and I thought the work was really good because it’s away from the main circuit of fashion craziness.
“It’s our responsibility to train good designers so fashion doesn’t become just a data-driven industry.” – Aki Choklat
So, let’s say you have a student on the fence, and there are lots of things deterring them from studying fashion. There’s the rise of the celebrity creative director, the economic precarity of creative jobs, and with the looming but not yet fully understood threat of AI. What would you say to encourage them to still study fashion?
I’m originally from Finland, so I can’t always be rosy when I talk about things. I don’t want to sell a fantasy – it’s really hard work. But it’s one of those things we would not be in unless we really, really loved it. The industry is so huge; there are so many different jobs you can do in it. You can work in a factory sewing bras together, which someone ended up doing and loving, or you could work in colour prediction. I just talk about the scope of the fashion world for jobs and not just, “Hey, you can be a creative director.” It’s our responsibility to train good designers so it doesn’t become just a data-driven industry, which is the way it’s going with the very seductive system of ordering things on Instagram and getting them for £2.
