Many of the industry’s most sought-after names learned the ropes at Parsons The New School for Design, from Tom Ford to Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, Jacobs or Wang, newly named at the house of Balenciaga. Joel Towers, Executive Dean of Parsons, says the school learned how to use New York city as a “laboratory”, and hopes to achieve the same in Paris, picked as a European hub of art, craft and heritage. Paris is destined to become one of a network of teaching hubs, with Parsons programmes in the pipeline for Mumbai, Shanghai, and Latin America, allowing an international student corps to draw on the resources of each.
