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KOEFIA PURPOSE & METHOD
An Exclusive School
Since 1951, the KOEFIA Academy has been preparing students for a three-year period strongly oriented towards the practical component of the profession.
Once trained, the KOEFIA student is a professional. It stands out for its ability to intervene in every phase of the creative and production process: from the sketch of a dress on a sheet to the creation of an entire Haute Couture collection to be worn on the show. Koefia’s students become true Couturierand Couturièrecapable of following the entire production process – with a design vitality that goes hand in hand with the manufacturing competence. This is what distinguishes the young professional who studied at the Koefia Academy: the mastery of the classic techniques of high fashion, fast fashion, and digital design tools. Tradition joins Digital Innovation.
The artistic tradition
Along a three-year educational path – the most complete – the young student learns everything he needs to become an independent high fashion professional: he learns to design garments, clothes and fashion collections; learn how to build paper patterns for every type of project, from the simplest T-Shirt to the most complex Theatrical Costume; learn how to tailor the fabrics and decorations that make a high fashion dress precious and exclusive. As for the production, the Koefia Academy teaches now rare artistic tailoring processes: Italian loom embroidery, knitwear, macramé, felt, hat, accessories such as bags and gloves.
Digital innovation in design
Added to this are the innovations that have affected the fashion sector in recent years. The digital revolution has opened up new possibilities for the three-dimensional design of clothes and clothing graphics with which fashion design becomes a work of art.
Cad-cam modeling and professional design with CLO3D software represent state-of-the-art teachings that have the power to weld the certainty of high fashion to the efficiency required by industrial fashion in terms of speed, costs and size development.
The possibilities of employment and insertion in great Maison of the young professional trained in fashion production are multiplied!
THE KOEFIA METHOD: THE ITALIAN “MOULAGE“
Over the years, the Koefia Academy has developed a method based on the construction of the pattern on the mannequin, as a fine-tuning and development of the French moulage.
This method was set up in its cornerstones by Alba Toni Koefia starting from the 1920s, taking up the bias cutting technique of Madame Vionnet to develop it with the use of tissue paper in the first phase. The structure of the dress is created by modeling the tissue paper directly on the mannequin in three dimensions, and then the fabric of the model is created in the second phase; which serves to make the “defect” of the caratmodel in order to make it perfect and able to follow the shape of the body according to what is foreseen by the sketch project.
Those who know this technique have an extra gear not only for the creation of tailor-made haute couture but also for the production of the first sample (sample) of a prêt-à-porter production within a company in the sector.
THE OPERATIONAL TEACHING METHOD OF THE “ATELIER”
Alba Toni Brasini – Madame Koefia – was the architect of many innovations in the field of nascent Italian fashion in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only has he developed the Italian Moulage Method for the construction of prototypes, but he has also revolutionized teaching, characterizing it for the strong practical component that remains today to characterize the Koefia Academy, faithful to its tradition.
The students do not study on books written by others, but on texts made by themselves starting from the teaching of the Masters, from the notes taken in the Atelier, from the corrections and from the continuous exercises conducted to create the intermediate products of the fashion production work: silhouette , fashion sketches, patterns, canvases, embroideries, garments and outerwear. Each student makes a fair copy of the materials and teachings received, creating characteristic Vademecum that remain to characterize his style and his ability in an exclusive way.
Because every stylist, every couturier has a taste, a style and a sartorial ability different from the other.
Koefia Academy pays great attention to optimizing learning in an individualized way. Each student is different in objectives and basic skills and must be guided in a natural way to realize his artistic expression and his ability to work manually. The learning techniques practiced in Keofia are “active techniques” (ie procedural activities that actively involve the student in the learning process). The Atelier learning method tends to develop different and more autonomous learning processes; ensure a customizable training offer; promote and / or consolidate the interest and motivation of students.
The Didactic Method of Koefia’s Atelier has the result of activating training processes within an “equipped mental space”, a mindset, which become a way of interacting with reality to understand and change it. With the work in the Atelier the student dominates the sense of his learning, because he produces, because he works concretely, because by “doing” he knows where he wants to go and why.
The aims are to know and to learn through action.
