College Diploma - Fashion Arts and Business

The Fashion Arts and Business diploma is a two-year program covering the commercial side of fashion — how garments are bought, merchandised, marketed and sold rather than how they are made.

Coursework covers fashion history and trend forecasting, textiles and fabric knowledge, garment construction fundamentals and quality assessment, visual merchandising and store presentation, fashion buying and assortment planning, retail mathematics including markup, markdown and open-to-buy, fashion marketing and brand communication, styling and editorial presentation, event and show production, e-commerce and digital retail, and the supply chain behind apparel production.

Retail mathematics is the unglamorous content that decides careers here. Buying and merchandising are quantitative jobs — margin planning, sell-through analysis, inventory turns — and candidates who can handle the numbers progress while those drawn purely to the creative side compete for far fewer roles. Toronto is Canada’s fashion retail and wholesale centre, which concentrates these jobs locally.

The work placement is a graded part of the program, so you finish with documented Canadian experience and a referee rather than only a transcript.

Humber Polytechnic — formerly Humber College — is Ontario’s largest public college and a Designated Learning Institution (DLI O19376943122). The North campus in Etobicoke is its main site, running technology, engineering, health science, business and skilled trades programs in purpose-built labs and shops rather than lecture halls, with three intakes a year and the deepest employer network in the Greater Toronto Area.

Its field maps to CIP 19.0906 (Fashion merchandising). Important: this is a college credential rather than a degree, so it is not exempt from the November 2024 PGWP field-of-study restriction — eligibility depends on this CIP field appearing on IRCC’s eligible list when you apply. Humber publishes a PGWP-eligible program list with CIP codes; check it, and confirm with an Apply Study Visa counsellor before committing. IRCC makes the final decision.