Influential Fashion Educators: Leyla Neri, IFM, Paris
How to teach fashion design from the very centre of the industry.
By Ryan White
If teaching fashion design students on the outermost fringes of the industry takes a specific approach (like Detroit, Reykjavik, and Helsinki), then teaching them from the very centre requires another. Here lies the job of Leyla Neri, the Head of MA in Fashion Design at Paris’s Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), a fashion school that rubs shoulders with the teams at the Diors, Chanels, and Vuittons every day.
Leyla is a designer by trade, who studied architecture first, then fashion design, before moving to Italy to do a fashion design MA. A job at Gucci followed, as did a guest professorship at HEAD Geneva. When HEAD’s fashion design programme failed to make university-level accreditation twice and was given six months to pass or close, she was convinced to join and run the programme. “I haven’t left academia since,” she says, leading and creating fashion programs at Parsons Paris, a satellite of the New York school, before joining IFM at a time when it was also struggling with accreditation for its MA design course.
As a result, Leyla has an eclectic mix of pedagogical perspectives, the efficiency of the Swiss system, the certainty of the Americans, and the more ‘Mediterranean’ approach of the French. She also has a PhD in anthropology, because “there were no practice-based PhDs [for fashion designers],” she says. “Anthropology was the closest to my human-centred vision.” But, thanks to her hard work, this recently changed. “We welcomed a first PhD candidate this January into the new doctoral program in fashion design (DFD) that I developed at IFM, in collaboration with the Sorbonne. Three additional fashion designers are expected to join the DFD in October 2026.”
As part of 1 Granary’s Influential Fashion Educators series, we discuss what Leyla’s job entails, what she looks for in a potential IFM student, and how we should teach students in the era of AI.
Tell us about your role at IFM, what does it involve, and how have you shaped the department?
As Head of all MA pathways, I serve as both artistic and academic director of the program. This means I might define the creative direction for the next MA Show in the morning, and in the afternoon discuss the development of a new course on material culture or negotiate a partnership with a jewelry manufacturer. I’m managing the cohesiveness between the four courses: Fashion Design, Fashion Image, Knitwear Design, and Accessories Design.
When I arrived at IFM in 2021, I developed the new university-level MA curriculum, strengthening its foundation in the humanities and advanced research methodologies by integrating them into more ambitious and conceptually driven design projects. I also broadened the MA partnerships, developing new forms of creative collaboration across the industry, from luxury and fashion houses to factories, artisans, archives, and the wider ecosystem that surrounds them.
Before that, there were mostly projects in which students were often giving their ideas away for free, without any form of intellectual protection, something that ran counter to the approach I had developed at HEAD Geneva and Parsons. So I made it clear that this was not a model I could support or encourage.
How have you remodelled that relationship between the Master of Arts and the brands?
I decided to move away from short-term projects and focus instead on collaborations lasting three to four months. If a partner company is interested in a shorter format, it must take the form of a competition, with clear conditions attached, including, at the very least, financial recognition for the winners. These competitions sit outside the core curriculum: students can choose to participate if they wish, but they are not required to do so, allowing each of them to manage their time and priorities accordingly.
Once you make it clear to your interlocutors, whether designers or HR, that you are not working for the sake of a house’s name, but for creative dialogue and field experience with real practitioners, they understand. Within our MA, we can therefore confidently decline a project, even from the most prestigious fashion houses.
This kind of positioning requires time and dialogue. I recall our leather goods design project with Hermès three years ago. It took over a year to bring it to life as it involved a shared reflection on how to integrate an anthropological dimension into our first collaboration. We introduced new ways of examining social behaviors, evolving notions of gender, and other questions that are central to our students’ thinking. Since then, this approach has become a meaningful and enriching framework for collaboration that has led to further projects in different fields, each reinforcing the value of the anthropological perspective as a stimulating and forward-looking tool for designers.
So because you’re in Paris, and most of the big houses are here, and because you have these relationships, you can be choosy?
Yes, exactly, that’s the real privilege. Being at the heart of the industry might suggest a need to align closely with it, but in reality, it creates the opposite dynamic: it gives you the freedom to be selective. You can take the time to build new collaborative projects, to discuss them, and to convince partners of your vision for students’ development, ideally with a social dimension, which I always try to bring into our program. For many of our industry partners, this remains relatively new.