Photograph courtesy Zachary Hoh
One of the key reasons Cincinnati has a sneaky good fashion scene is inside the rambling, multi-colored DAAP building on the University of Cincinnati’s campus. The esteemed fashion design program at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning offers a four-year program spread over five calendar years, with eight traditional academic semesters interspersed with five semesters of professional co-op experiences off campus.
Zachary Hoh, associate professor of practice and fashion design program coordinator, is an excellent model (pardon the pun) for what fashion students aspire to. Growing up on Cincinnati’s West Side, he studied at Kent State University before a design career with luxury clothing brands in New York City. He co-authored the book Apparel Design Through Patternmaking and has been teaching full-time at DAAP for almost nine years.
The program’s co-op experiences, he says, prepare DAAP students for real-world careers. “Our students will get to dip their toes into a lot of different facets of the fashion industry, whether that’s the business side, marketing, design, technical, design, or production,” says Hoh. “They graduate with really solid insight into what they might want to do in this business.”
Explain how fashion design’s co-op program works.
We take a two-pronged approach in the fashion program. The first is that, while you’re here studying with us at DAAP in Cincinnati, we make sure you have a solid design foundation and a bit of business acumen so that you can survive beyond our walls in industry. The other is we’re going to push you out into industry co-ops five separate times so you get a year and a half worth of experience. These two prongs help attract both students who are interested in design and parents concerned about what this degree looks like post-graduation. They want to know how our program really prepares students to be successful in this field, when art and design might sometimes seem like a risky choice.
The first co-op begins in student’s fourth semester, so they’re asked to get ready to interview for co-ops for which they’re competing against juniors and seniors from other universities. That sophomore year is stressful, hard, and competitive, and students are looking to go live in another city. It’s a big jump for some of them, but it’s a great learning experience. There are a lot of soft skills they’ll pick up in the background they’ll really benefit from—negotiating a sublease, setting up utilities, things like that, but it’s all part of the learning process.
Fashion can be a tricky business in terms of what employers want to provide students in an internship or a co-op, so we have some pretty stringent requirements for who we choose to work with, mostly around equity for the students. Is the position paid? Co-op students must be given at least a stipend that equates to a livable wage. We’ve been fortunate to work with some really great powerhouse brands like Abercrombie & Fitch in Columbus, which takes a lot of our co-op students. American Eagle in New York is the same. We have great opportunities with White House Black Market and Chico’s in Florida and quite a few smaller brands in New York like Vera Wang.
Are prospective students surprised to find out such a nationally recognized program exists in Cincinnati?
A healthy percentage of our students are from the tri-state, and they already know that Cincinnati is amazing. We have students coming from abroad and from all over the country. They see value in a design program that’s embedded inside of a liberal arts university with an urban campus that also affords them opportunities to get to many other parts of the country through the co-op program.
We tell our students consistently that your network is everything in this business. And my network, when they graduate our program, becomes part of their network. And I hope they would extend back a little bit, of course, so that if anybody in our world meets a key person, we’d want to know who they are and connect with them.
Do you encourage students to explore small entrepreneurial experiences in addition to big national brands?
One common occurrence I see is people from the community will call and say, I have an idea. Can you throw some students my way to help me kind of experience this? We always want to say yes, absolutely, but it requires a pause to see what the opportunity looks like formally. I owe students an equitable experience, and these entrepreneurial folks rarely have money and often aren’t very organized, but those opportunities are always welcome.
It’s good for students to be able to see the entrepreneurial side of things, especially in comparison to a really corporate co-op opportunity. If a student is at Abercrombie & Fitch for a semester, you might work in women’s hard-woven bottoms focusing just on women’s denim, but then if you do a co-op at a startup or small design firm you’ve got to be the marketer, the salesperson, the technical designer, the pattern maker, the sewer, all of these kind of things. So, I’m always encouraging our students to look for varied experiences.
Many students arrive at DAAP as bright-eyed freshmen saying, I want to be a creative director. Well, that’s a long road, and before you get to that point, you’re going to have to do a lot of stuff. So those entrepreneurial firms and small design brand opportunities are excellent for a broader experience in the business. The program’s focus is on design, but it would be naive of us to ignore the rest of the fashion business puzzle, because at the end of the day the bottom line is really driving how this all works.
What is the on-campus experience like for fashion students?
A large part of the DAAP curriculum is pretty rigid, but we have a mechanism in place for elective coursework. So, if an expert lands in our lap in Cincinnati, we can lean into what their specialty is, especially if it’s something our faculty doesn’t already possess. A great example is Anna Inglis, a DAAP grad from the late 2000s who had a great career at Kate Spade in New York as a handbag designer and technical designer, then moved back to Cincinnati. We were able to make a space for her, and she’s taught an incredibly successful handbag design course for our students over the last couple of years and has come into the fold as another node in our network.
We have plans in the spring semester to bring back two grads to serve as guest critics for the senior fashion show on May 1. A big component of DAAP tracks are critiques, so we’re always looking to engage students with external feedback, because at some point in the semester they’re tired of hearing it from me. We’ve been fortunate to work with some donors interested in supporting this particular facet of our educational experience for the students and providing funding to be able to solicit and then fly in and host a number of guest critics.
We’re accredited as a Bachelor of Science program, so a large proportion of the degree credits our students will take happen within the discipline. Co-op requires us to rigorously prepare our students. There is, of course, a liberal arts requirement. We’re bound by state law to offer up to 36 credits of transferable kind of common knowledge courses.
There are opportunities for students to seek pathways for specialization, like knitwear or digital patternmaking with 3-D models or handbag design. But on the whole students are with us 80 percent of the time, and the other 20 percent is liberal-arts-focused coursework like business classes, and students can certainly pick up a minor.
How does the DAAP program prepare students for a career in fashion?
My first job out of college was for an amazing brand I wanted to work for, but it was in production. I was a little bit apprehensive. It was such a formative experience for me to see that side of the business and to really understand from a much broader perspective what design actually means in the real world. It isn’t just bringing an idea to life on paper and sending it down the runway. There’s a whole host of other activities that contribute to a successful design.
Our DAAP students are in the same boat and often tell me, I want to be a creative director. That’s great. I want that for you. But you’re going to have to do a lot of stuff between now and then to achieve that goal, and you’ve got to be open to all those experiences. Co-ops give them five opportunities to try out different things so when they graduate, they have a better idea of what they want to do and can target their job search appropriately.
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