P O L I N A S T E P A N O V A

​My path as a lecturer started in 2013. I am absolutely grateful for the experience of working with students from all around the world. Aside from Polimoda, I regularly join other educational platforms, contests and schools as a guest lecturer. 

Having 10 years of expertise in teaching, I have developed programs for Master, Bachelor, Post-graduate level, y as well as for teams of professionals that need to update their knowledge or have a creative brainstorm of ideas. 


As a lecturer I have experience doing workshops, curating the courses and lecturing for Polimoda, YOOX Net-a-porter, Gucci 9, Barbie, Armenia Fashion Council, ZIPHouse talent accelerator, International Cultural Forum in St-Petersburg, American University in Paris, Berlin University of Arts, Fashion Multilogue conference, Fine Arts Academy in Florence, NID New Design Institute PG


Lecture programs and Workshops.

Fashion Trend Forecasting, Contemporary Fashion, Creative Visualisation, and Fashion Illustration


Common points:

All of the above-mentioned lectures give a detailed insight into the recent aesthetic trends and movements as well as the analysis of the latest changes that influenced a modern perception of dress, human, and industry. Each of these courses is taught separately, depending on the direction of the Ma or BA program it is been integrated into.

Trend Forecasting, as Contemporary fashion and Creative Visualisation, are having a similar starting point in letting students observe how aesthetics mirror ethics, and how society visualises its identity through fashion. 

The course is created as a selection of theoretical and practical tasks, in order to allow the participants to expand their knowledge and learn how to apply the new skills in reality. For each of the courses, there are sets of lectures and tools that overlap building the core of the course, while the other lectures are functioning as a “specialisation”.


Fashion Illustration:

Provides students with their own visual identity. The skillset of drawing, painting, and collaging is a necessary part of learning, however, each chapter of this course starts with a new way of developing one’s visual language.

Starting with b&w techniques the course gradually suggests the use of color. The students are suggested to experiment and are always encouraged to go “further” than redrawing the original but building their own content from already existing imagery [image design]. The tasks are designed in a way that students are creating their own images first [collage, photography, draping, etc], and then drawing them in the suggested medium.

During the 2020 semester, this course was adapted into the online one too, including some steps on digital illustration.


Trend Forecasting:

Provides students with practical tools on how to track the trends as they appear, contextualize color, shape, and textile in connection to emotional value. 

As a contradictory discipline that combines together creativity and ‘measurement’, this set of lectures built on purpose as a set of complementary researches, allowing the student to confront: intuitive and data-based approach, product categories and designer inspiration, the archetype as a key to reading trends, psychology and symbolic meaning of colors versus how it is being used in contemporary culture.


Contemporary Fashion:

Provides an understanding that dress is a medium of communication, with the focus on the post-Instagram environment. The major part of the content from this set of lectures focuses on the changes that occurred within the fashion system in the past decade. Links to history and heritage in this sense are very important because it allows students to observe what has truly changed, and what has remained the same: values, motivation to dress, the meaning of fashion and its relation to demographics, the creative process of generating aesthetics.

This course works in close connection to both business and creative profiles. in case of working with creative profile [design students, art direction students], there are more tasks on positioning maps, semiotic maps, brand values, business model [definition of the client as the archetype, product as totem and occasion of use as a state of mind].

In the case of business students' profiles, the focus is going to learning more about how the creative idea develops, analysis of fashion designer’s inspirations, mood board for the brand’s aesthetics.


Creative Visualisation:

Provides students with techniques of researching inspiration, finding a creative starting point, and coming up with innovative aesthetic solutions. This course is developed for a wide audience, that includes everyone who is working within the fashion industry, both within a creative and business, production, marking, and other sectors.

Creative Thinking is seen as a result of following formulas that invite you to juxtapose elements, find connections that are not obvious, and an ability to ‘read’ behind the surface. This set of lectures includes both theory lectures [color harmonies, color symbolism, and psychology, composition, aesthetic evolution trajectory, mood board formula], and practical tasks [moodboard creation, imagining a set of objects the reflect lifestyle, storytelling through color and shape, projection of future aesthetics].

Using Format