Foundation Studio
Two studio afternoons a week. Students learn observation drawing, hand-stitching, natural dyes from the school garden and the vocabulary of cloth — ending the year with a class "mini-collection" shown to parents.
Programme Dates →
Discipline 01 — Fashion
Fashion Design
Couture, textiles and the silk heritage of Bhagalpur — taught in an atelier with sixteen looms, a dye garden and four centuries of the Silk City at our doorstep.
The Discipline
Apply to the Fashion Discipline →
Learning fashion in the Silk City
Bhagalpur has woven Tussar silk for over four hundred years. At the Citadel, we believe the best place to teach fashion is not a glass tower in a metro — it is here, in the weaving lanes of Nathnagar and the loom courtyards of Falmandi, where cloth is still made the slow way. Our Fashion Design discipline was the school's first, and remains its most sought after.
Students begin with the discipline of the hand — drawing what they see, stitching what they draw, draping what they stitch — and grow into designers who understand cloth from fibre to finished garment. Studio work runs alongside a rigorous academic core, and every collection is shown: on the amphitheatre runway each March, and at the Silk & Loom exhibition each February, where our students exhibit beside the master weavers of the city.
Graduates of the programme have gone on to NIFT Delhi, NID Ahmedabad and the National Institute of Fashion Technology's Kolkata campus — carrying portfolios that began on our looms.
16
Handlooms in the Atelier
The Programmes
Three ways to study with us
Fashion at the Citadel is a journey from Class VI to Class XII — with a summer intensive open to everyone in the district.
Senior Programme & Portfolio
Pattern-making, draping, textile science and garment construction — with a personal portfolio for NIFT/NID entrance. Seniors design one original collection per year and stage it on the March runway.
Programme Dates →Silk City Summer Workshop
A four-week immersion each summer — open to students of every school in the district. Mornings in the atelier, afternoons with weaver collectives, closing with a public showcase in the atrium.
Programme Dates →
Curriculum
What you will learn
- Design illustration & concept development — from mood board to technical drawing
- Pattern-making, draping & construction — flat pattern, drape and the discipline of fit
- Textile study — fibre to fabric, with Tussar, Matka and Ghicha silks of Bhagalpur
- Natural dyeing & surface craft — grown, gathered and ground in the school dye garden
- Fashion history & the Silk City archive — the weavers' story of the Ganges valley
Teaching is shared between our full-time faculty and visiting master weavers of Nathnagar — students are examined on garments they have made and collections they have staged, not only on paper.
From the Atelier
Recent work from the studios
A glimpse of what leaves our looms and runway — see the full gallery on the Student Work page.
Join the Atelier
Thread by thread, a craft is learned
Places in the Senior Programme are limited to fourteen students per year, and the summer workshop fills by April. Begin your application — or write to us and visit the atelier first.