Editor’s Note: This is part nine of Caitlyn’s ongoing series about her day-to-day experiences attending fashion school at FIDM in Los Angeles.

In case you missed the earlier entries, get caught up by reading Diary of a Fashion School Student: Introduction, Majors and Schoolwork, Housing and Having a Dog at College, Ten Awesome Perks of Attending FIDM, Classroom Attire, A College Girl’s Guide to Los Angeles, Fashion School 101: A Comprehensive Guide to Fashion School Majors, and Fashion School 101: How to Succeed in Fashion School. Whew!

Over the course of this series, many of you have asked about the classes I take at FIDM. So today I want to give you a glimpse inside my favorite fashion school courses. As a Merchandise Marketing major, many of my classes are business, math or retail-oriented. Here are my top picks:

Table of Contents

20th Century Designers

Starting college with a class titled “20th Century Designers” was a real awakening to the fact that I was in fashion school.

Our textbook was like artwork (and now mine is a treasured coffee table book!), full of beautiful photographs of the most important garments of all time. Our classes were full of lectures about the history of famous designers and clothing. We learned technical names for the different parts of garments, which we now use almost every day. Overall, the class was a great starting point that taught us the history of fashion in order to better understand and predict today’s trends.

I was enthralled by: I became fascinated by the changing shapes of garments over time. Over the years, the popular silhouettes have shifted dramatically. The 1800s were dramatized by bustles, corsets, petticoats, hoop skirts and crinoline. Then, to the horror of many, Coco Chanel came around and freed women from corsets and women’s clothing became more relaxed. Of course, since we ditched corsets, the styles have changed a lot as well: Personally, I have a special place in my heart for the A-line and shift dresses from the 1960s.