BC Business
“It feels really good when you make a little bit of a difference,” says Liza Deyrmenjian, who founded the fashion design school in 2016
As someone who has been working in fashion design for over 35 years, Liza Deyrmenjian has helped many people find their footing in the industry. But she started to notice a major gap in the education system. “Millennials and younger [generations], there’s just so much information coming at them, their attention span doesn’t work the same way as the generations before them,” she says. “It’s not better, it’s not worse, it’s just different. And schools haven’t put any of that into consideration.”
The realization led Deyrmenjian to launch her very own fashion design academy, the Cut, in Vancouver in 2016. Before that, she ran Fashion Accelerator 360, which specialized in teaching people the business of fashion through master classes in Vancouver and New York. (The course Deyrmenjian currently teaches at the Cut, Launch Your Line, is focused on a similar topic.) Prior to Fashion Accelerator, Deyrmenjian consulted fashion startups through Liza D Productions. And back in the ’90s, she owned and operated two garment factories in Vancouver’s Yaletown. “I mean, now the prices are crazy, but when I opened in 1990, they were still finding dead bodies in dumpsters there,” she says. “But my factories grew really quickly: we manufactured for companies like Westbeach, Zulu Airwear and Umbro.”
In all her time in the field, Deyrmenjian was consistently disappointed by the skill level design school graduates exhibited. “Like, if I were their parent, I’d be upset,” she adds. “They all had a taste of something within the industry, but there was no deep understanding of it. So when I designed the [Cut] and the curriculum, I decided to do it all in deep dives.”
At the Cut, students focus on one discipline per term—like pattern making and garment assembly or fashion design and illustration. Its program timelines are shorter, too: whereas an interior decorating certificate might typically take six to 12 months to complete in Canada, the Cut’s program is three months long, according to Deyrmenjian. Classes are also limited to eight students so that each student gets ample support.
In July, the Cut announced $260,000 in scholarships for aspiring creatives. The breakdown goes as follows:
Graphic Design
Makeup Artistry
Interior Design
Fashion Marketing
“It feels really good when you make a little bit of a difference,” Deyrmenjian says. “Life is tight and knowledge is power.” She recalls how one of her students, Clarissa Gallaccio, came into the Cut with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 2018. Wanting to break into fashion design, its those classes at the Cut, notes Deyrmenjian, that helped Gallaccio land a production manager role at Smash + Tess and later become the director of design and development at Apparelmark.
“Quite frankly, for the fun of it, I want to challenge all the schools: let’s this year give $1 million in scholarships so that next year we can give $5 million in scholarships so that next year we can give $10 million in scholarships, so that Vancouver or Canada is known for the support it gives to the next generation to make them strong with information.”