The competition for America’s budding fashion talent is about to get stiffer.
Istituto Marangoni — a top-ranked European fashion school with campuses in Milan, Paris and London — has opened a New York office to recruit aspiring designers, executives and editors.
The 75-year-old institution is touting its clout and connections with Europe’s great fashion houses, from Gucci to Prada to Dolce & Gabbana. The school isn’t shy about mentioning the fact that Domenico Dolce, co-founder of the latter, is a Marangoni alum.
Marangoni also boasts among its graduates Franco Moschino and Alessandra Facchinetti, who has landed high-profile gigs at Gucci and Valentino.
Still, the school remains relatively obscure in the US, despite the fact that it was acquired in 2007 by Chicago-based Career Education Corp. One sticking point has been the lack of a US campus, which thus far has prevented Marangoni from offering loans to American students.
For those with the means to attend, Marangoni is no country club for rich kids.
“I think it would have been easier to have a baby than it was to complete the nine-month course I took,” said Christine Tortora, who earned a master’s degree in accessories design from Marangoni in 2006 after working for several years at Saks Fifth Avenue and Polo Ralph Lauren.
While the Milanese institution aims to open classrooms in New York within the next few years, it will face formidable competition, as the Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology have dominated the business of training and educating New York’s fashion industry for decades.
Looking to lure away US students, Marangoni highlights its emphasis on staying current with apparel-industry design trends.
“We don’t have teachers who are only academics because we think academics can become detached from reality,” says Roberto Riccio, Marangoni’s managing director. “Time is key in fashion. If you’re not able to change yourself and your mind at least twice per year, you risk losing touch.”
Tortora, a native of Sheepshead Bay who in January landed a job as director of product development for handbags at Elie Tahari in New York, remembers her stint at Marangoni as “insanely demanding.”
In addition to learning how to organize big projects, Tortora notes some US students may be challenged by the language issue. While there are simultaneous translators for all classes taught in Italian, communication can still be a scrappy affair, students report.
What’s more, only 3 to 5 percent of Marangoni’s students are currently from the US. The school is looking to raise that percentage to the double digits. Asians comprise about half the student body.
“If you’re smart, you’ll circulate with Italian people, you’ll watch Italian TV and Italian movies, and you learn Italian,” said Gabriella Mileti, who landed a job at Italian Glamour after graduating last June.
While Mileti thinks a degree from a European institution would make her “stand out” should she go job-hunting in New York, she said she’s content to soak up the European lifestyle for the foreseeable future “unless Anna Wintour is begging me to come to New York.”