FIT Appoints Its First Chief Marketing Officer, Tapping WME Fashion's Kimberly Fasting-Berg
The Fashion Institute of Technology has appointed Kimberly Fasting-Berg as its first chief marketing officer, the school announced on 24 August 2026. She begins the role on Monday, reporting directly to FIT president Jason Schupbach and serving on the president's cabinet. WWD
FIT, part of the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of the most recognised fashion and design schools in the United States. Until now it had no CMO. The newly created position will see Fasting-Berg oversee enterprise-wide marketing, branding and communications, with the stated aims of strengthening the school's global reputation, supporting enrolment and student success, and generating new partnerships.
The role is tied to FIT Future/Forward, a strategic initiative launched by Schupbach to position the institution as what the school calls "the premier laboratory for creative and creative business careers for the 21st century." Schupbach assumed the presidency in January, succeeding Dr Joyce F. Brown, who led the institution for nearly three decades. Robin Burns-McNeill chairs the FIT Board of Trustees. According to the school, Fasting-Berg was selected after a nationwide search that drew a highly competitive pool of candidates.
Fasting-Berg arrives with a career that spans the intersection of fashion, media and entertainment. Most recently she served as executive vice president and CMO at WME Fashion, where she led marketing and business strategy for the Fashion Group — a division that includes IMG Models, Art + Commerce, The Wall Group and IMG Fashion Events. Those units collectively touch model representation, styling and the production of runway events — the backstage machinery of the fashion calendar.
Before WME, she was CMO of Kravet, the home furnishings brand, and before that spent more than a decade at Condé Nast. There she held senior marketing roles across some of the publisher's biggest titles: Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and Allure. Her work at Condé Nast extended those magazine brands across digital platforms and major cultural properties, including GQ's Men of the Year, the Met Gala, Vanity Fair's Oscar Party and Vogue's Forces of Fashion. She began her career at Sony, holding marketing and communications roles within its entertainment subsidiaries across the US, Europe, the Middle East and other regions, according to FIT's administration page.
Fasting-Berg is a graduate of SUNY's University at Albany — meaning her move to FIT is, in a sense, a return to the same public university system.
What makes the appointment worth noting is the signal it sends about how fashion schools are positioning themselves. A CMO with a background spanning talent agencies, magazine brands and entertainment conglomerates is not the profile of a traditional academic administrator. It reflects a logic in which a fashion school markets itself less as an educational institution and more as a brand competing for attention, students and partnerships in a global creative economy. Whether that approach pays off will depend on enrolment numbers and partnership deals in the years ahead — the metrics by which a CMO is ultimately judged.
