Influential Fashion Educators: Craig Green at Modeklasse Vienna
The designer is betting on the freedom to not yet know, and letting his students interview him about it.
By Jorinde Croese
Photographs by Erli Grünzweil
Craig Green did not set out to become a professor. When the invitation came to lead University of Applied Arts Vienna’s Modeklasse – the fashion department shaped since the early 80s by a run of designers that includes Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Raf Simons, Bernhard Willhelm and, most recently, Grace Wales Bonner – what struck him first was the calibre of teachers that came before him. “It’s an honour to be part of that,” he says. What kept him was something less ceremonial: a school that felt, to a designer trained at Central Saint Martins, almost unrecognisably free.
There are no fees here. A student from architecture might spend a semester in the fashion studio; a fashion student might disappear into fine art. If someone isn’t ready, they can leave and come back. Green has students graduating this year who first enrolled a decade ago. Around 50 students in total, an acceptance rate at around 5%, tutorials that stretch to 45 unhurried minutes rather than the 10 he remembers from London. “That kind of freedom is quite a magical thing,” he says. “It’s how you imagine art education should be.”
That freedom is also the argument this piece is really about. At a moment when students arrive on day one already anxious about employability, already building a persona online, already asking how many designers the world can possibly need, Vienna is making a bet on the opposite instinct: that the most useful thing a fashion education can protect is the room to not yet know. “Studying at university is not an internship,” says the theorist Monica Titton, who teaches fashion history here. “In between there are four years of artistic and intellectual freedom which they will never have again in their lives.”
It is a bet placed by a team, not a figurehead. The Modeklasse faculty – more than 10 tutors spanning pattern-cutting and moulage, drawing, business and theory, practising artists and working consultants – describe their method as a constant renegotiation, tuned to each student rather than to a house signature. “There is no balance,” Titton says of concept versus craft. “It is a constant tension.” Craig hopes that it results in individual voices rather than a single statement curated for the year.
To test that, we did something slightly unusual. Alongside our own questions, we asked Craig’s students – from first-years to those completing their diplomas – to interview their professor directly. Their questions, and his answers, close this piece. Photographed here in the studios with their work, they are the clearest evidence of what a school like this is for.
What was it like to join Modeklasse and how did it compare initially to the schools you’d taught at before?
There was something daunting about joining the list of people who had been professors there before. What really intrigued me when I first visited was that I’m used to UK education, which has a very different feeling, and Modeklasse felt very much like an art school. The classes were fairly small, there was a lot of freedom. That freedom is a magical thing, really. It’s how you imagine art education should be, in a way, because having these different paths and the freedom to try different things has a totally different outcome. I’d guest-lectured before – at Glasgow School of Art, on the textiles and fashion course, at Middlesex, and at CSM – but this was the first time that I had a more long-term role somewhere, and a more senior role. Plus it’s public education, and with that comes a certain amount of freedom for the students. That was a new thing for me.
It must be very different in terms of how students feel pressure, or the lack of pressure. The fact that they can take time is probably also because they’re not paying the very high fees students pay in the UK, which gives them more room to ask: how do I actually want to develop? Can I try different things? Can I think differently?
It is an art school, so having that kind of freedom feels important. When I go there, sometimes in the tutorials with the students, we can spend half an hour to 45 minutes talking as a group and really getting in-depth about their work. I’m more used to – not saying one is better than the other – having tutors come in and have to see 30 people in a day. You really had 10 minutes. There are benefits to that system too, because you learn different skills, but this is just a different way.
When I first started, CLO3D [fashion design software] and things were happening, and it was the beginning of the discussions about AI. I really wanted the course to be about making. I’m a strong believer in designing through making. We had David Curtis-Ring [artist, set designer and prop maker] come for a workshop, we had Daisy Collingridge [artist] come for a workshop, where it was really about working with materials, designing through process. I always believe in that. If you get stuck, or if you are going round in circles about your work, it’s really important just to make. See something physical, do something physical with your hands.
So I always encourage that kind of work to happen in the course. Of course, research is really important, and sketching and pre-design work are really important, but until you start physically seeing something in reality and making it, it’s really hard to understand it in the same way. And as soon as you see it in reality, you want to change it anyway.
From your position, what does fashion education need to do now that it maybe didn’t do 10 or 20 years ago? There’s AI, obviously, but also different pressures for students: professionalisation, starting their own brands, building a persona on social media. What do you think fashion education needs to do now?