FIT’s Troy Richards On The Future Of A World Class Fashion Education

“The Museum at FIT is the only museum dedicated to fashion in the city of New York,” said Troy Richards, the Dean of the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. “It draws people from all around the world. We have people from our competing colleges, that come in and view the exhibitions and the archive. It’s something we’re proud of, it’s an incredible resource for our students.”

The Museum at FIT, whose director is Valerie Steele, was founded in 1969, and was specifically designed and built to serve the needs of the college and its students. When this all happened, the Fashion Institute of Technology was part of SUNY, the State University of New York system.

I asked Richards if he could give me some general information, as I feel rather certain that there are people in the world who do not understand exactly what it is students do in fashion school, let alone why a college might believe that a dedicated museum was absolutely essential to the success of its students, before even considering the benefit to any college’s larger community.

“Our faculty will take the students in to see every exhibition,” Richards told me. “They often create projects around the exhibitions, then they go into the archives where they can see they can touch fabrics, look at patterns from decades ago and then go through old issues of Vogue and other publications. It informs their work as students, their thinking as designers. Really, it’s a powerful, powerful resource for us.”

I asked Richards about Steele, the museum’s director, and her work with students and her curators.

“She has so many great ideas,” Richards said. “She really is interested in engaging the students and in keeping this museum open to the public. There’s no cost to go. It’s about availability and accessibility. That’s really the ethos of FIT. We were founded in 2010 as a community college. We’re in the heart of the fashion district in New York, and we serve our community. We are a state school.”

When the teaching museum began to give exhibitions, this was in the 1970s, they were working from collections on a long-term loan from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where, by the way, a Department of Costumes and Textiles has existed since 1903.

Please allow me to fill in a little history here. There is are a lot of fascinating fashion stories which ought to be remembered a little louder, and I’d like to provide some context to prove how FIT is working hard to ensure that past and present, history and technology, are preparing young designers for the work they’ll need to do to achieve their wildest dreams.

In 1954, Mercedes de Acosta donated the wardrobe of her sister, who had died in 1929, Rita de Acosta Lydig, to the Brooklyn Museum. Lydig’s full name, just because its fun, was Rita Hernandez de Alba de Acosta Stokes Lydig and she was the type of lady who routinely traveled with 40 Louis Vuitton trunks of haute couture. Much of which seems to have sat in storage after Rita’s death in 1929. But, with zero hyperbole, Lydig’s death and the philanthropic gift by de Acosta of her sister’s wardrobe; this is the beginning of what the world now thinks of as the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.

But that is another story for another day. Here is how this is connected to FIT.

In an honest coincidence, 1929 was also the year that Stewart Culin died, who began his career as a curator and… er…, procurer, at The Brooklyn Museum in 1903, the same year as the museum created its textiles and fashion department. Culin had a close professional relationship with Morris Crawford, who worked, for a time anyway, at both at the Brooklyn Museum and Women’s Wear Daily. (If anyone does not recognize the name of that publication, it is the trade periodical of the American Fashion industry, in the finest stable Fairchild Publications has had to offer, basically since the earth cooled.)

Along with a few fellow precogs, Culin and Crawford set in motion a plot which, long after both had died, eventually came to fruition: The Edward C. Blum Design Laboratory, named for the man who spent his life fighting for museums and funding for their educational programming in New York City. It was a state of the art museum-slash-workspace, but also a literal laboratory, created to fit the inspiration and research needs of everyone from fashion designers, commercial designers, and fine artists.

It’s too long a story to tell now, but Michelle Murphy the most important forgotten innovator in American Design Education, who got the Blum Lab off the ground and made it into a massive success, including the one and only exhibition ever of the haute couture dolls from the Merci Train, died tragically early from cancer in 1954. The wonderful Robert Riley stepped in, though the Blum Design Lab ultimately closed and its collections absorbed into the museum’s larger Education Department.

The fashion Gods must have been happy about something, because it seems like three decades of events resulted in much of that fabulous collection finding its forever home in the place which would need and use it most and best; the newly formed teaching museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

When lauded publications repeatedly give FIT the title of Best Fashion School in the World, at least part of this is due to the wonderful things the college and museum staff have done, and have been doing, in the decades between that loan with Brooklyn.

Today, the Museum at FIT’s collections have grown to now include more that 50,000 pieces of apparel and accessories, material culture which spans the years between the 18th and 21st centuries. And that’s not counting the patterns, textiles, toilets, and thousands of other museum materials related to the history of what people have worn. For those of us who half live in the past, or would like to pretend to, it is the museum equivalent of the costume department in Connie Willis Doomsday Book or To Say Nothing of the Dog.

And yes, it is free to attend an exhibition at the Museum of FIT. The conversation I had with Richards was over a week ago, and I’m still sitting here trying to understand the math. Because with all the resources, the incredible faculty, the bevy of innovative arts and fashions majors, with and administration that puts focus and funds spent on projects like maintaining and growing this museum I keep going on about, it should be impossible that the cost of attending FIT is a tenth of the cost of some of the most famous names in fashion education. It can cost as much as $50,000 less to attend the best fashion school in the world.

It was 2017 when Richards became the Dean of FIT’s School of Art and Design. The Rome means he oversees 17 different associates and baccalaureate degree programs and a gallery space. Richard’s earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking, then earned a Masters degree in painting from the Cranbrook Art Academy.

Of course admission is competitive; this is a college that turns out award-winning designers like Khoboso Nale and Margaret Smith, both of whom I had the pleasure of writing about earlier this year.

Richards is an artist in his own right and I wanted to know about the transition into a more administrative role, how he found times and ways to continue his own art and work.

“My own practice for many years was interdisciplinary,” Richards explained, “and often collaborative. I’ve created video games, worked with VR and guitar playing robots, collaborated with people from computer science and mechanical engineering, created sculptures and installations. My work has in exhibitions at White Columns, PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, around the city quite a bit.”

“I’ve always been very interested in collaboration,” Richards told me. “I’ve always been very idea-driven. The concept has always dictated the form for me. I think that my habit of collaborating led me to administration because, to be honest, I just really enjoyed meeting people from different backgrounds, from different disciplines, hearing their ideas, and doing what I could to help them realize their ambitions.”

The time which has passed between 2017 and today feels like a lifetime to any of us who made it through COVID and years of international turmoil which have seemed to constantly reverberate ever since. And while many of the cultural changes have been immense, it is often the smaller, more incremental changes which make for the most systemic change. I asked the Dean what was most different in the world of arts education between the beginning of his tenure at the world’s best fashion school and today, with 2026 looming ever closer.

“Right when I arrived at FIT,” Richards said to me, “we were really implementing BrowseWare and Clo3D. Now, there’s software that went beyond that, like the Adobe suite of Illustrator and Photoshop. Illustrator used to design flats, and that would be understood as a technology in fashion. But then you bring in something like Browseware and Clo3D, and all of a sudden you can see what the garment you’re designing will look like on a human figure. You can animate that figure. You can change the size of the figure. It really changed design, and that workflow, entirely.”

Though a lady doesn’t always mention such things, when this writer was studying apparel design, much of the digital design was only possible in 2D, in AutoCAD. I remember acutely the feeling of utter despair after not understanding I’d done something terribly wrong, irremediable, a flippant key stroke so incorrect that when a pattern was supposedly being scaled for sizes, I got to watch an (uncomfortably close to animated) illustration of my failures appear. So did my class if it was my giant, candy colored iMac G3 that happened to be connected to the classroom/lab’s projector.

“That was the first one I learned,” Richards replied with a laugh. “And I remember we could do these fly-throughs on the model and all our minds were blown, us looking at AutoCAD, like, wow!”

“I think it’s changed,” the Dean continued. “When I arrived at FIT, we were implementing BrowseWare and Clo3D. Now there’s software that goes beyond, let’s say, the Adobe suite. Illustrator used to design flats, and that would be understood; this is technology and fashion. But then, you bring in something like Browseware and Clo3D, and all of a sudden you can see what the garment you’re designing will look like on a human figure. You can animate that figure. You can change the size of the figure. it really changed design and that workflow entirely. we’ve seen so much faster of a turnaround, companies are not spending so much a year sending samples back and forth. We can go from design to production in a matter of months. I think that was the biggest shift we’ve experienced. For me, it was exciting, I work with 3D modeling. But this was like another experience, another level.”

InDesign was a novelty once, and it became part of Adobe’s suite in 2003, which reminds me how wonderful it was to get that student access to Illustrator. In an industry that had spent hundreds of years moving through the entire apparel production process, from the inception of an idea to logistics, being able to manipulate vectors in a digital drawing, croquis or flats. It was a huge deal.

“What we’ve seen,” Dean Richards told me, “is a much faster turnaround, so companies are not spending so much each year sending samples back and forth. We could go from design to production in a matter of months. I think that was the biggest shift we experienced. I felt it was exciting for me when I arrived in 2017 to see that. I’d worked with 3D modeling with Maya and others in the past, but this was another experience, another level.”

This seemed like a good place in our conversation to bring up artificial intelligence. AI quickly became ubiquitous, but I’m not sure I know many adults who aren’t worried about what it will mean for their careers, and the industries they work in, pretty quickly over the next few years. I wanted to know what he was hearing from students. I was curious about how AI was changing fashion education, because to this writer, AI can be a wonderful tool. But I would never ask it to write for me, the writing is the fun part. It seemed safe to presume that other creatives and artists might have similar, cautiously neutral feelings about it.

“What’s really exciting,” Richards said, “as an artist, very often the idea comes to you rather quickly and you can sketch a thing out. I think what AI does, is it helps you iterate much faster than you would with the technology prior to AI. So, I have an idea and I want to look up different eras of fashion, and I want to get examples. AI can generate research for me very quickly and then work with me as I go through the process of sketching out the idea. I think where it works best is really as that assist for the artist. When it extends your vision, and speeds up that design process, those iterations.”

I asked about the other side, the challenges, the potential for ethical issues or the questions about what students were actually learning if an app was doing some, or most, of the legwork.

“You need to really be clear that you don’t lose your voice or your vision as the designer or as the artist,” Richards explained. “And that requires a level of discernment. I know I have to look at what is generated, and is this true to my vision? This is the quality that I’m seeking. I have to prod the AI to do more, to be more in line with my thinking. then I should be able to step away and continue my work, my thinking, and my sketching. There’s a back and forth there. It should really be seen in a much more collaborative manner, though you are the lead. I think the challenge for people will be in giving up that creative vision or that control, because it’s too easy at times to say, ‘well, that’s close to what I’m looking for,’ or ‘that seems right.’”

“You’re a writer,” the Dean said to me, “ so you’ve probably seen this already with AI writing.”

I have seen this challenge play out, not in my own AI use, but certainly in a lot of online content, especially on social media, at least on the apps that let a person post whole walls of text. As a person who does a lot of work online, sometimes on social media, sometimes in conversations like this one, I told Dean Richards that what he was telling me resonated with something I already believed; the best, most useful skills that I got from my own fine arts education are the capability to hear critique and the ability to self edit.

“Years ago,” Richards told me, “I presented a paper with a colleague of mine. It was early in the days of social media and we called it ‘visual editing’, right? And the idea was that with social media and the new technologies that were emerging, 15, 20 years ago, we were beginning to see that that creative’s role was as much about curation and selection, as it was about creation. That you need to know what not to include as much as what to include. That’s where I go back to that basic premise that I mentioned about my own practice, which is the idea is always central. And as an artist or designer, you’re asking a question. And the difference between the two is often that the designer is looking for that creative solution, and the artist is just looking for better ways to refine or ask that question.”

This conversation with Dean Richards, occurred after I wrote about a couple of FIT’s award-winning graduates from the class of 2025; Khoboso Nale and Margaret Smith, which was fantastic, because I was very curious about the Future of Fashion x Macy’s contest when Nale and Smith’s work had been singled out as particularly exceptional.

Macy’s is one of very few American department stores that has not just survived into the 21st century. Founded in 1858, the brand’s name is very well known, and it made a ton of sense to me that Macy’s would want to find ways to partner with and support one of the best, if not the best, fashion design college(s) in the world. But I wanted to know, from FIT’s perspective, what made a partnership like this possible?

“It’s actually a really great story,” Dean Richards said to me with a smile. “Our development team from the FIT Foundation connected with Macy’s and the Foundation asked me about ideas that would be helpful that might help us connect with Macy’s better. The thing that came to me was how exciting it would be to create a capsule collection, that was a competition where students from the final year at FIT.”

The idea expanded, and a program was born. Students can apply with preliminary work, their sketches and ideas, and those who are selected for the next round are expected to produce the garments. Everything leads up to a fashion show, which Macy’s produces, and one winner gets to have their garment produced by Macy’s and sold at their historic Harrold Square location.

“At FIT,” Richards explained, “we don’t just teach the students about the concepts of fashion, we really teach them how to make it. There’s this wonderful blend of the creative and the practical, which I really think is reflected in the Future of Fashion. It’s been wonderful. They’re a wonderful team and they get excited about it as well. We had a terrific launch last spring, for the last winner of that competition. And it was just electric. I mean, everybody was just so thrilled, the relationship has been nothing but positive. I mean, I get goosebumps when I’m at that store and there’s the FIT logo, on a garment designed by one of our students, and being sold at Macy’s.”

I very much enjoyed learning about FIT’s Future of Fashion program and show, I loved seeing such a wide array of thoughtful, interesting work by students who, very obviously, were doing work that was already deeply personally meaningful. There’s a real sense of community, a real feeling of belonging, and its not just students and faculty. There are a lot of important people who make time in busy schedules to work with the college and its museum.

I very much enjoyed learning about FIT’s Future of Fashion program and show, I loved seeing such a wide array of thoughtful, interesting work by students who, very obviously, were doing work that was already deeply personally meaningful. There’s a real sense of community, a real feeling of belonging, and its not just students and faculty. There are a lot of important people who make time in busy schedules to work with the college and its museum.

“It is amazing how committed people are to the college,” Dean Richards said. “But beyond the faculty, we have these great industry partnerships and we see examples of that through the many contests that are run here. We’ve had contests with Disney, Gucci, we have a wonderful relationship with Michael Kors, an alum and someone who gives back to the college with scholarships every year.Michael does a wonderful thing where he gives a scholarship to a student with financial need that actually includes a year in Italy.”

I told FIT’s Dean of Art and Design how every time I looked through the photos of celebrities coming out to support FIT at one of its events, I always saw Fern Mallis and Douglas Hand there, obviously thrilled to be surrounded by the great designers of tomorrow.

“They are great, ” Richards told me. “Fern is just so wonderful and she just gives to the college, She loves to connect with the students and mentor the students. And then she provides free tickets for her talks at the Y. And, I mean, I go for Fern, for the guests, but I always walk away having learned something. And really, that’s what we get at FIT, the people who connect with the college. The people who want to make that difference and who want to work directly with the students.”

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