Class meets online Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning.

Your course will consist of a pre-assignment, independent coursework and final assignment as well as live online class sessions with your teacher/other au pairs. Students are required to be present during all live online class sessions. However, your independent coursework can be completed at your leisure before the deadline one week after your online class ends. Credit for J-1 visa students is 36 hours. Students earning J-1 visa credit must attend all sessions and complete all homework.

About your instructor: Mikaila Brown is a fashion anthropologist, who has a doctorate in Anthropology and Education from Columbia University and over 10 years of work experience with domestic and international non-profits.

During these years of working as a consultant, she honed the skill of identifying the needs of a particular community and aligning them with the services provided by their local agencies. She applied these same skills when she left the nonprofit sector to pursue a lifelong dream of working in the fashion industry.

After working for designers like Oscar de la Renta, Pamela Roland and Betsey Johnson, she launched a socially conscious fashion line in 2011. Most recently, she has further integrated her anthropological background and fashion experience to create The Common Thread Project, which highlights cultural diversities within the fashion industry by investigating the style trends of local, underrepresented fashion communities. She shares this knowledge with the public by offering cultural shopping tours through AirBnB’s new experiential arm.

She is also currently a senior lecturer in Cornell’s Fiber Science and Apparel Design department.