The Jewelry and Fashion Department has a unique academic structure and vibrant atmosphere. This can be traced back to Bezalel's beginning, reflecting its rich and special history. The department includes three specializations: clothing, objects, jewelry and accessories. In all specializations the individual is the focus, via theoretical, material and technological research, as designer in the design process and as the recipient of the design product. This continuous broad examination of the individual and his environment create an interdisciplinary, critical and pluralistic design dialogue.
Over time with the expansion of the departments range of activity, innovative work processes and new materials relevant to environmental processes have been incorporated with traditional methods. Thus, the students create a mix of tradition and progress and raise critical questions in concept and material about our culture and environment. The curriculum provides a platform for the students to express personal statements, identity and contemporary meaning: attempting to generate a change in the local and global environment. Being aware of our cultural, social and historical responsibility we try to formulate an independent and original standing based on humanism conveying new and relevant meaning.
The curriculum reflects the expansion of designing for the body environment. All the studies in the first year are compulsory and aim at adopting design values and developing a wide range of technical skills for application in advanced studies in the department. These include critique capabilities, assignments and working in a classroom setting. Basic compulsory studies continue in the first semester of the second year, intensifying design and technological knowledge and application. During the second year, students choose to major in one department specialization – clothing, objects, jewelry and accessories. The studies in the specializations from the middle of the second year to the end of the fourth year focus on formulating work methods and a personal design language. They include a selection of specified studio courses parallel with the development of a personal work process. During the third year students are required to complete a personal project in and at the end of their fourth year their final graduation project.
The specializations of the Jewelry and Fashion Department:
Clothing – emphasizes a fresh look at the connection between clothes and culture. The curriculum encourages a focus on relationships between the body and its physical and social environment. Studying sewing technologies, textile processing and material labs, students also partake in lively discussions on issues concerning and contingent to the fashion world. Complex industrial, technological and human processes pave the way of clothes to the consumer. Fashion is seen as a worldwide phenomenon, crossing continents, moving markets, dictating social standards and fighting climates. Clothes are an ‘event in time', preserving fashion concepts and reflecting specific styles, depending on local materials and manufacturing processes while ensuring compatibility to specific ways of life.
Objects –has the potential to engage in discourse between individual craft design and progressive technologic work methods. Aiming to design objects with a physical and emotional interface creating a new and different "user experience". Industry is full of large production series but it seems that cultural discourse cries out for small series, defined and characterized for unique users and customs. This requires a reanalysis of culture through everyday objects dealt traditionally in the department (ceremonious vessels, Judaica, tableware, lamps etc.). This is done while planning and building progressive manufacturing processes, with a 'hands-on work' approach as in traditional Craft technologies, aiming to enlighten the present and the future.
Jewelry and Accessories – based on the field of jewelry as one of the department's pillars, being enriched over the years with the development of specific accessories design such as; shoes, bags, hats and later, more 'intermediate' hybrid accessories providing the need for special concepts, materials and shapes. This specialization upholds an interdisciplinary dialogue concerning the field's history locally and globally, whilst challenging basic concepts such as 'jewelry', 'accessory' and 'function'. Questions are asked about physical appendixes in general; shedding light on jewelry, hats, shoes and bags; that define the individual. The curriculum researches ways that jewelry and accessories are used in contemporary culture in unique and small communities and in local Middle Eastern culture, while dealing with global technological, ecological and social aspects.
All three specializations share a creative, material and theoretical connection which encourage examination of the field borders, challenging students to take new paths of interdisciplinary thinking and initiate a search of theoretical, material and formative 'friction' concerning socio-political, environmental beliefs, gender, power, forms of protest, trends, human and mechanical manufacturing dispositions, products and fashion, high art, the stage, the street and more.