Istituto Marangoni Shanghai's COO: Preparing fashion's next generation for an evolving industry

As the global fashion landscape moves beyond transactional retail toward immersive, narrative-driven experiences, the framework of fashion education is evolving alongside it. In this interview, Ying Ting Cheng, Chief Operating Officer for China & APAC at Istituto Marangoni, discusses how the Shanghai campus is preparing the next generation of creative leaders through initiatives like the multi-disciplinary VIA NOMADIS showcase.

From leveraging bio-based materials like mycelium bio-leather and defining the role of AI in creative direction to bridging European luxury heritage with China's fast-moving market innovation, Cheng highlights the essential balance between technical expertise, critical judgment, and transferable aesthetic thinking needed to navigate today's industry.

How does the immersive VIA NOMADIS format reflect the school’s core educational philosophy?

VIA NOMADIS is built around the ideas of movement, exploration and self-discovery, and I think these ideas are very relevant to the way a new generation of fashion talent is developing today.

Our students are digital natives. They have immediate access to different cultures, aesthetics and creative communities around the world, and their interests increasingly move across fashion, art, technology, business and lifestyle. At the same time, access to so much information creates another challenge: how do you move beyond simply absorbing or reproducing what you see and develop an independent point of view?

For us, fashion education is therefore not only about teaching technical skills. It is about helping students develop the ability to observe, question, select and ultimately transform what they encounter into their own creative language.

That philosophy shaped VIA NOMADIS. Rather than presenting the graduate collections through a conventional runway alone, we brought together fashion design, visual communication and fashion management students to create an environment combining garments, space, moving image, light and storytelling. The students had to consider not only what they were designing, but how an audience would encounter, understand and experience it.

In that sense, the format reflects a fundamental principle of our education: students should develop strong expertise in their own discipline, while learning to understand the wider ecosystem in which fashion exists.

How is the curriculum evolving to prepare students for retail's shift toward storytelling and experiential design?

The role of physical retail is changing significantly. It is no longer simply a point of transaction. Increasingly, it is where brands communicate culture, create emotional connections and allow consumers to experience a particular world or lifestyle.

This changes the skills that fashion companies need. A designer can no longer think only about the product in isolation. From the moment a product is created to the moment it reaches the consumer, there is an entire system around it: brand positioning, visual communication, content, merchandising, spatial experience, retail and consumer engagement.

Our curriculum responds by bringing these different disciplines closer together and by using real industry scenarios as part of the learning process. We increasingly work across fashion design, visual communication and fashion business rather than keeping students within isolated professional disciplines.

VIA NOMADIS is a good example. We introduced the concepts of Immersive Retail and Editorial Retail to reproduce some of the ways contemporary brands are approaching launches and physical experiences. Fashion design students developed the product; visual communication students worked on narrative, imagery, film and the visual environment; fashion management students considered audience, commercial logic, consumer experience and retail execution.

For us, this is not simply a new way of staging a graduate show. It reflects a structural change in retail itself: stores are becoming media, displays are becoming content and products increasingly exist within a broader story and experience.

What role do digital tools and AI play in developing students' "transferable aesthetic thinking"?

Digital tools and AI are already changing the way fashion professionals work, and students need to know how to use them. But we are very clear that technology should support creative thinking rather than replace it.

AI can generate images, concepts and alternatives extremely quickly. What it cannot provide in the same way is an individual's lived experience, cultural memory, emotional sensitivity or personal point of view. These are precisely the qualities that allow a designer to create work that has meaning and can connect with another person.

So alongside digital fluency, we place a strong emphasis on critical judgement. When a tool can generate hundreds of possibilities, the important question becomes: which one matters, and why? Students need to be able to select, question and edit rather than simply accept what an algorithm produces.

This connects to what we describe as "transferable aesthetic and lifestyle thinking". We want students to develop an underlying ability to understand people, culture, visual language and experience that is not limited to designing garments. That way of thinking can be applied across fashion, retail, communication, spaces, digital experiences and other creative industries.

Tools will continue to change very quickly. The ability to think independently, to make aesthetic judgements and to understand human experience is much more transferable.

How is Istituto Marangoni Shanghai embedding sustainability and eco-innovation into its design curriculum?

We increasingly approach sustainability through practical engagement with materials and the supply chain rather than treating it only as a theoretical subject.

Sustainable materials are already incorporated into our teaching, and we also want students to have direct exposure to the companies developing the next generation of materials. This year, for example, our collaboration with SynMetabio introduced students to innovative bio-based materials, including mycelium-based bio-leather, and challenged them to explore how these materials could actually be applied within fashion design.

This is important because sustainability requires more than awareness. Designers need to understand how a new material behaves, what its possibilities and limitations are, how it changes the design process and how innovation can ultimately be translated into a viable product.

We see sustainable fashion and new-material application as an increasingly important area for the Chinese fashion industry. It is also an area where education and industry need to work very closely together, because innovation is developing rapidly. Our role is to give students access to these emerging resources and encourage them to experiment with them while they are still at school.

How does the Shanghai campus bridge European luxury heritage with East Asian market innovation?

Shanghai occupies a very particular position within Istituto Marangoni's international network. The school brings to China a European fashion education tradition grounded in craftsmanship, design methodology, brand building and the relationship between creativity and industry. At the same time, Shanghai places our students at the centre of one of the world's most dynamic fashion and consumer environments. China's role in global fashion is also changing. It is no longer only one of the world's major consumer markets; it is increasingly a testing ground for new brands, new retail models, digital innovation and new forms of consumer engagement. We are moving from a period defined largely by "Made in China" toward one in which "Designed in China" has much greater international relevance.

This creates a two-way exchange. We bring an international fashion framework and our global network into China, while the speed, creativity and market experimentation taking place here also inform the way we think about fashion education.

Our aim is not to train Chinese students simply to reproduce a European model. We want them to understand the foundations and systems that have made European fashion successful, while developing the confidence to draw on their own cultural references and the realities of the Asian market.

Ultimately, we hope to develop talent that is rooted in local culture but capable of communicating internationally — people who can translate Chinese and East Asian perspectives into a contemporary fashion language that can be understood globally.

How do industry partnerships with houses like Scabal and SynMetabio shape student opportunities?

Industry collaboration is fundamental to the way we approach fashion education because we believe students should encounter the realities of the industry before they graduate.

The collaborations with Scabal and SynMetabio during VIA NOMADIS illustrate two different but complementary dimensions of this approach. Scabal brought students into contact with the heritage, quality and material expertise of an established European textile house, while SynMetabio allowed them to experiment with innovative bio-based materials and think about how emerging material technologies can be translated into fashion applications.

These were not partnerships that existed only around the event. The materials became part of the students' creative process. Scabal supported one of Ruiyang Qin's looks with fabrics, while SynMetabio materials were used for a complete look by Ziqi Liu as well as accessories by Ruiyang Qin and Natlie Sung.

That direct interaction is valuable because students have to respond to real materials, real possibilities and real constraints. It begins to close the gap between a school project and professional practice.

Looking forward, we want to deepen this model further — moving beyond individual internship opportunities toward partnerships in which brands, designers, retailers, material innovators and supply-chain companies can participate in courses, projects, product development and commercial incubation.

What distinct creative edge sets Shanghai graduates apart from those at your European campuses?

I would not describe it as one campus being stronger than another; each city creates a different cultural and creative environment. Milan has an extraordinary foundation in craftsmanship, textiles, manufacturing and product culture. Paris has a very powerful tradition of luxury, couture and fashion storytelling, while London has historically provided an environment for experimentation, subculture and more radical creative expression.

Shanghai has its own character. It is a city where Eastern and Western influences constantly meet, but also where creativity exists alongside an extremely fast-moving commercial and digital environment.

Young designers developing here tend to be highly sensitive to new consumer behaviours, social media, new retail formats and rapidly evolving youth culture. They are accustomed to speed and to moving between different contexts. At the same time, we see increasing cultural confidence among Chinese designers. Rather than simply referencing traditional Chinese symbols, the stronger emerging designers are learning how to translate cultural memory, Eastern aesthetics and contemporary Chinese life into a language that feels relevant today.

That combination — cultural confidence, market sensitivity, speed of execution and an international outlook — gives Shanghai graduates a distinctive perspective. European fashion education provides an important foundation in systems, craft and brand logic; Shanghai adds the energy of a market that is actively inventing what comes next.

How do experiential showcases like this directly impact the group's 91% graduate employability rate?

The group's 91% graduate employment rate, reflects a much broader educational model, so I would not attribute that figure to any single showcase. But projects such as VIA NOMADIS demonstrate an important part of why we place such emphasis on industry-oriented learning.

Our philosophy has always been that education should remain closely connected to the industry. Today, companies are looking less for people with only one isolated skill and increasingly for what we call T-shaped talent: people with strong vertical expertise in their discipline but also the ability to understand users, business, digital tools and the wider creative process.

An experiential project puts those abilities under pressure in a way that a classroom assignment cannot. Students have to collaborate across disciplines, manage constraints, communicate ideas, respond to materials, consider audiences and ultimately turn a concept into something that can be experienced in the real world.

With VIA NOMADIS, students were effectively working through the different stages of a contemporary brand launch: product development, visual storytelling, spatial experience, content and retail thinking. By graduation, they therefore have not only a portfolio but experience of how their discipline operates within a larger professional system.

For us, the real measure of industry connection is whether the work, thinking and capabilities students develop at school meet — and ideally anticipate — the standards of the industry they are about to enter.

What key message do you hope industry leaders take away regarding the future of fashion education?

The most important message is that fashion education can no longer be understood simply as the teaching of a fixed set of skills. The industry is changing too quickly. AI, digital fashion, new materials, new retail models and changing consumer behaviours will continue to transform individual roles. If education focuses only on the tools required for today's job descriptions, some of those skills may already be outdated by the time students establish their careers.

What we need to develop instead is a way of thinking that can adapt: strong professional expertise combined with aesthetic judgement, critical thinking, commercial understanding, digital fluency, cross-disciplinary collaboration and the ability to understand people and culture.

I also believe the relationship between education and industry needs to become much closer. We want to move from occasional industry collaborations toward a more integrated ecosystem in which brands, designers, retailers, technology companies and material innovators participate in the educational process, while students are exposed to real challenges much earlier.

Fashion will always need creativity. But the next generation will need to understand how to connect that creativity with technology, experience, business and society. Our responsibility as educators is not simply to prepare students for the fashion industry as it exists today, but to give them the judgement and adaptability to help shape what it becomes next.