artwork credit: Agnes Hamerlik, 2022
Fashion Design Facilities & Resources
Fashion Resource Center
As one of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's distinguished SAIC's Special Collections, the Fashion Resource Center (FRC) maintains a unique hands-on collection of late-twentieth and twenty-first-century designer garments and accessories representing extreme innovation.
Fashion Service Center
The Fashion Service Center (FSC) has a wide range of tools that can be checked out by students enrolled in Fashion Design courses. You can visit the FSC in person on the seventh floor of Sullivan, room 713, near the student lounge.
List of stock available for use by students at the FSC
Sullivan Advanced Output Center
The Advanced Output Center is SAIC’s prototyping lab specializing in laser cutting and 3D digital input and output. With very few stipulations, all of our facilities are open to the entire SAIC community. Availability of laser cutters/ 3D scanners and authorization times are available online.
Learn More About Laser Cutting At The Advanced Output Center
Ryerson & Burnham Libraries
The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries constitute a major art and architecture research collection serving The Art Institute of Chicago and scholars within the fields of art and architectural history with over 500,000 print titles, 100,000 auction catalogs, 1,200 current serial subscriptions, and extensive digital collections.
Equipment and facilities in the Department of Fashion Design include:
- Classroom studio spaces equipped with large tables and smart room equipment
- Wolf and Alvaform dress forms in a variety of sizes and body shapes
- Industrial sewing machines labs with straight stitch, overlock and coverstitch machines
- Industrial gravity-feed irons
- Specialty sewing machine lab with blindhem, buttonhole, binder foot, and zigzag- machines
- Fashion Service Center: On-site facilities support, as well as check-out access to half-scale dress-forms, portable sewing machines, knitting machines, grommet presses, machines attachments, small heat press.
- Knitting lab with regular, bulky, and rib knitting machines
- Kniterate digital knitting machine
- Fully equipped footwear lab with belt-sanders, skiving machines, drying rack, rolling-foot and high-post industrial sewing machines, and lasting equipment.
- Fur machines
- Dye facility
- Computer lab and remote access to Gerber digital pattern making and 3D modeling software
- Plotter for computerized patternmaking
- Exhibition display space
- Illustration classroom equipped with iPads for digital illustration
- Graduate space with crit space and individual graduate studio bays
- Printers and copiers
