FLORENCE -- With his horn-rimmed glasses and flamboyant scarf, Alberto Isoppi looks every inch the fashion student chasing his creative muse. But rather than sketching clothes or pinning fabrics, the 30-year-old Italian is sitting in a marketing class learning about branding and demographics.

"It is important to be a good designer but you need to be a good marketing manager as well," Mr. Isoppi says. "Tom Ford or John Galliano are almost better marketing people than designers."

In the newly consolidated, intensely competitive and technology-driven luxury goods sector of today, couturiers must be more than artistes. Many now work at international conglomerates rather than the small studios or family firms that once dominated the industry. Others find jobs with retail companies that care more about what sells than what's new. Most fashion-school graduates need to handle computers as aptly as thread and needle. And nearly all are expected to have some business expertise, not just a creative bent.

"Design students need to learn the specific skills required for their jobs, but they also need to have a larger sense of the industry," says Antonella Padova, human resources director at Italian leather goods company Tod's SpA. "In the past, the industry was not so global, not so complex and not so professionally managed. Now they need more information."

Fashion schools are adapting to changing needs of the marketplace. New York's Fashion Institute of Technology is revamping its entire curriculum, adding at least 10 classes on business, technology and manufacturing to its undergraduate program next year. In Florence, the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing, where Mr. Isoppi studies, has added three business-oriented master's programs, including one in fashion merchandising and management. At Munich's German Master School of Fashion, a former Microsoft executive is teaching marketing classes. Parsons School of Design, New York, has doubled the number of hours devoted to business in its program.

Computer and marketing classes now are part of the curriculum for aspiring designers at the Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing, Florence.

Francesca Sterlacci, dean of FIT's fashion-design department, says the school recently did a study of alumni and industry employers to learn more about their changing needs. "The overwhelming response was that they wanted more business awareness among our students," she says.

As fashion schools take on more business, business schools are incorporating fashion. Luxury-goods titan LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA finances a luxury-goods chair at the French business school Essec and runs executive-training programs at London Business School. Fashion houses, meanwhile, are increasingly looking for recruits with both style and business sense. Knitwear brand Pringle of Scotland, a unit of Hong Kong garment manufacturers S.C. Fang & Sons, chose a nearly unknown British designer for its relaunch because he had learned fashion at the Italian fashion house Romeo Gigli, a unit of IT Holding SpA of Italy, and gained commercial knowledge at U.S. catalog giant J. Crew Group.

"Fashion companies are asking us to project an industry atmosphere in the school so when former students arrive, they hit the ground running," says Philip Taylor, director general at Italy's Polimoda.

A big contributor to the changing fashion curricula is technology. Many garments are now made in the Far East or in Central America. Designers must communicate their ideas by computer and make technical sketches understood by factory workers halfway around the world. New York's FIT teaches these skills in a new undergraduate course called Product Data Management. In other computer classes now offered in most schools, students learn how to write presentations, create advertising pages, design textiles and manipulate photographs.

"They use this program a lot in the industry, and knowing how to do a presentation might make getting a job easier," says Chin-Feng Yeh, a 22-year-old FIT student from Arizona, sitting in a computer class one recent morning.

A few fashion schools refuse to jump on the business bandwagon. Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, the London school that graduated young designers Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, says students in its three-year undergraduate program have too much designing to learn to take business classes as well. Across town, the School of Fashion and Textiles at the Royal College of Art encourages commercial and entrepreneurial thinking only informally as part of student projects. But it is currently conducting a survey asking students whether they would like more business education.

Many students say no thanks, preferring to stick with their artistic impulses. Polimoda found no takers for an undergraduate course teaching how to use the Web to sell and market fashion. No one signed up, either, for a master's degree in Buying Management.

And not every fashion house believes that formal business training is necessary. "A good designer is inherently commercial," says Concetta Lanciaux, who advises LVMH Chairman and Chief Executive Bernard Arnault and represents the group's businesses in Italy. "He speaks a universal language. A good designer wants to be in communication with his audience."