Fashion Design Online
Online Bachelor of Fine Arts
Your Runway to Success

Working in the fashion industry takes more than just being a trendsetter with impeccable taste—fashion is art. It’s not just about designing clothing. It’s about creating something that makes a statement. Make your mark on the world’s runway and turn your passion for fashion design into an exciting career at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design.
Program Overview
As a student in the Online Fashion Design Program, you’ll develop your own fashion portfolio while learning innovative techniques to evolving your unique designs. Essentials of product development, sales, and marketing are taught to help you gain an understanding of the consumer culture in fashion design.
You’ll graduate with not only strong communication, business skills, and the ability to forecast industry trends, but you’ll also have developed your own artistic vision!


Program Highlights
Fashion Illustration
Students explore a range of materials and processes to develop a personal visual communication style and personality. Drawing, illustration and presentation techniques are developed to convey design ideas, fabric textures, prints and patterns and construction details on fashion flats, floats and figures.
Draping + Patternmaking
Students learn to explore creative dimensional forms in relationship to the body through manual and digital patternmaking, draping, construction and production techniques to successfully actualize garment designs.
Textiles + Materiality
Students explore and ideate textile strategies through conceptual and experimental frameworks related to structure and form, colors and patterns, materials and surfaces, environment, and community.
CAD Design
Students learn current and industry appropriate technologies to present concepts and illustrated designs, including production and manufacturing elements such as digital sewing and pattern-making, technical packages, grading, and 3D virtual fittings.
Sustainable Design Thinking
Students demonstrate conscious and sustainable research and diverse design thinking that relates to a broader cultural, socio-economic, historical, and environmental context.
Product Development + Management
Students articulate creative strategies and communicate design ideas professionally through verbal, written, visual, and digital methodologies, while developing business skills to position students as leaders in the fashion industry.
Liberal Arts
The Liberal Arts curriculum is an exciting part of every student’s academic and creative journey at RMCAD. These courses provide the opportunity for students to engage with complex questions and ideas to develop critical thinking skills, a global consciousness, and awareness of art historical foundations that are essential for their intellectual, creative, and personal growth.
Global Consciousness
The curious engagement with communities, perspectives, and narratives that do not match our own offers the opportunity to see one’s personal and creative role in our local, national, and global communities.
Critical Awareness
The willingness to ask questions and resist easy answers & simplistic dualities offers the opportunity to more clearly understand the complexity and multifaceted reality of history, creativity, and human communities.
Information Literacy
The ability to read closely, critique freely, and seek additional verifiable information offers the opportunity to more holistically discern the veracity of the information that inundates our lives.

Online Degree Requirements
RMCAD’s Online Fashion Design curriculum is designed to bring form and function together, with key business and communication skills. You will turn your artistic vision into an innovative portfolio.
Tech + Tools
RMCAD’s Fashion Design BFA Online Program features a comprehensive curriculum for the self-motivated and passionate student. Providing students the opportunity to cultivate fashion fluency, an integrated approach to express creativity, and hone technical skills through creative draping and patternmaking approaches and computer-aided design. All while using the culture of fashion with a global context and impact. You will learn the relevance of issues impacting the fashion industry, from social justice and diversity to ethical fashion practices and their environmental impact in order to expand diverse voices, visions and solutions.
Required Equipment
Students in RMCAD’s Online Fashion Design BFA Program will be charged a one-time mandatory equipment fee of $1650.00 in their first academic year. Below is the provided equipment:
- Juki DDL-8700 High-speed Single Needle Straight Lockstitch Industrial Sewing Machine
- Professional Female Dress Form with Collapsible Shoulders and Removable Arms
While in fashion courses, you will also be required to purchase an iPad and Apple Pencil and the apps required for specific classes.


Fashion Design Careers
As the world evolves, so does fashion, which provides many options for your future. A RMCAD Online Fashion Design Degree doesn’t leave you with one path to success, it gives you choices! Our graduates have the opportunity to launch exciting careers in the following areas.
Potential Career Paths
- Fashion Design
- Technical Design
- CAD Design
- Textile Design
- Fabric + Trim Sourcing
- Patternmaking + Draping
- Production
- Product Development
- Fashion Styling
- Fashion Trend Forecasting
- Custom + Sample Sewing
Let's Design Your Future NOW
Student Work + Success
Stories @ RMCAD

Light Will Win Over Darkness – RMCAD fashion designer shares the story behind her new collection
Inspiration can come in several forms, but for Svitlana Pugh’s newest collection, it was sparked by current events happening in Ukraine, where she is originally from. As a senior in RMCAD’s fashion design program, Pugh

Becoming an Expert Sketch Artist One Step at a Time
Sketching is the art of translating real life onto paper. Becoming an accomplished sketch artist is highly important, no matter what art form you practice. Almost every degree at RMCAD, from Fashion Design to Game

RMCAD Professor Inspires the Future of Sustainable Fashion
Today, many people are growing more and more conscious of how their choices affect the environment. ‘Sustainable fashion’ is an increasingly popular phrase that can be heard both in the world and in RMCAD’s classrooms.
Fashion Design Faculty
You’ll be learning from faculty with a history of style and success in the world of fashion design. They’ve worked side-by-side with some of the best and brightest in the industry. As a RMCAD Fashion Design student, you can enjoy immersing yourself in that same well of knowledge and creativity.
Ready to Wear Your Creativity?
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