How To Become a Fashion Designer: Welcome to Kofi-artdress. this article will be deeply discuss about starting a business called “Fashion Design”. In fashion design business there are many things that involve which is why we bring to you this mind-blowing article.
How To Become a Fashion Designer
The art of applying design, aesthetics, clothing construction, and elements of natural beauty to clothing and its accessories is known as fashion design. It has changed with time and place and is impacted by culture and other trends.
A fashion designer makes clothes for customers, such as dresses, suits, slacks, and skirts, as well as footwear and handbags. He or she may choose to focus on designing apparel, accessories, or jewelry, or they may choose to work in more than one of these fields.
There are basically ways to start a design career, of which we will list and discuss below:
- Go to school and get a bachelor of fine art at an accredited university, polytechnic or college, put your resume (CV) and portfolio together and look for a job.
- Start your own business
- Become a freelancer and work on a project-by-project basis for a variety of companies.
Now, those last two options you can definitely go to school to get started, but you don’t need to. But you need to educate yourself, and that’s where this article comes in.
We’ve put together a study plan for you, and this plan resembles many American fashion school programs, which is what I’m familiar with and I’m going to includes something school don’t talk about enough in my opinion. And my opinion are based on having graduated from a nationally ranked school, having worked in the industry for many years, and then having taught at another nationally ranked university for over five (5) years.
Basic Skills You Need to Acquired before You Become a Fashion Designer
This article will outline what you need to study, why you should study it, and how much you have to study it. I have not put these topics in order of importance. I have tutorial articles for a lot of these areas of study, but not everything.
Why is Color so Important?
Color is such an important factor in peoples purchasing decisions. There is an entire industry devoted to color service. Given everything else is perfect, if an item of clothing is not the perfect color for you, how often do you wear it? Did you even buy it?
Every single art and design major studies color theory and I love this particular article because it has the theory, but also tons of examples of actual design application in toys, in fashion, in graphics, all kinds of applications.
And fashion schools typically do one or two semester (freshman year), the first year, but then you know, we talk about color stories in design classes, you know every single class. Every single project.
Fabrics
Fabrics is a designer’s true medium. I get so many questions on this “fabrics” you know “Tega, what watercolor should I use? What markers should I use?” And, it’s like, it doesn’t matter for designers because our medium is actually fabric. Pick any, whatever, alcohol-based, professional-grade marker and get to work. And then, go study fabrics.
Fabrics and textile technology is the future of fashion, and we have try to keep up with fabric articles as much as I can. Visit any fabric stores, and you know, check out the fabric. Check out the fiber content and check out what is expensive. Feel things in your hands.
And I know that there are retail prices and wholesale prices which are different, but you know relative to each other, see what’s expensive and see what is cheap and, you know, check out what’s expensive, what feels good in your hand. Look at how things wrinkle, how things fray, how things stretch. Go to clothing stores and feel the fabrics and take note of their fiber content.
Sustainability
Sustainability encompasses eco-friendly materials processes, as well as ethical and fair trade approaches to production and labor. If you think this area of study is optional, you need to wake up. At that very least, there is nothing bad in washing less water, sending less crap to land fills, and treating workers better.
Sustainability is not taught in very many schools, but it should be. That is why KOFI-ARTDRESS.COM brings you this article.
Sustainability can been seen in different ways such as:
- Sustainability in fashion and textile
- Zero-waste or low-waist pattern cutting
Focus more on Sustainability in design, apply it into your fashion, before you do make sure you study them very well, and apply them slowly to your design project. Once you’ve covered the basics in your garment construction studies, start with the basic projects in the zero waste book.
The American fashion podcast is not a Sustainability fashion podcast, but focuses on many related topics in many of the episode.
Drawing and illustration
Drawing consist of three categories:
- Figure drawing
- Drawing clothes on bodies and
- Fashion illustration with markers and watercolors
At this, you need to think about your goals. If you want to start your own business, you don’t need to learn how to draw a ton. You don’t need to be a masterful fashion illustrator to run your own business.
My recommendation is to buy figure templates at any stores and practice the basics of communicating design quickly and efficiently. That’s really what you need. And more importantly, flats. Learn how to draw flats. You can find more of that in the technical design section.
Business owners need to learn how to do flats. If you want to get a job at another company, or start pursing a freelance career, you know set up an online portfolio as a designer to get attention and jobs, you need to learn how to illustrate so you can attract attention.
Beautiful illustration start conversation because we’re we buy into the visually appealing. Even restaurants, like, we eat with our eyes. Everything is about, like the beautiful presentation to start off with.
Technical Design aka Product development
Technical design or product development means drawing flats learning, how to spec out garments and how to create a tech pact off a template.
Flats: flats drawings, they are basically drawing of clothes as they would appear if you laid them on the floor or on the table. For every design project you must do flats of every garments.
I suggest you practice creating tech packs for a few garments for each project. This is how you bring your ideas to life. This is a process you need to learn to make actual garments.
And for those who are freelancers, way more paying Gigs for people who can draw good flats in Adobe illustrator, for people who can create good tech packs, and there are even more gigs for beautiful fashion illustration, actually than straight-up design.
Very few people are looking for help in the actual creature designing process because most people want to do the designing themselves, and they’ll pay for other people to do the things they don’t know how to do or don’t want to do.
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
Learning these programs is a must in the current 21st century fashion industry. Adobe product is the industry standard, just try and learn adobe product design. Procreate is becoming popular as a digital drawing tools, but procreate is compatible with adobe, so that’s fine.
You will need to learn Adobe illustrator to draw a flats, at the very minimum. You need to create your flats illustrator to insert them into your tech packs and into your line sheets. Basic Photoshop skills in these days and age, it’s like, these computer skills that you need for a huge variety of scenarios.
Garments Construction
It means the pattern drafting draping and sewing. This is another area where the level of learning depends on what kind of designer you want to be. We will strongly suggest you learn some pattern draping and sewing basics so you can speak intelligently with your sample-making team and production facilities.
If you start your own line, do you need to learn garments construction? The thing is that the more you know the more control you have over your project, another important aspect of learning construction and quality is to go shopping in person. If you don’t want to learn how to cut patterns or Sew, what you absolutely must do is to visit stores in person –online shopping will not help you.
Go to stores look at the quality of the construction of the clothes, the quality of the fabric, feel them, look at the colors and look at the stitching, look at the insides, how well it’s been lined, what material they use for lining. You know, how good the pockets are, and then look at the price and think about whether you think the price reflect the quality.
Yeah, if you can try things on, if you can’t, maybe take a friend you know, that’s also good, when you’ve working on your design project.
Apparel Manufacturing and Business Practices
Production and distribution you know, if you are going to start your own line, this is so important, everyone want to be a fashion designer and, you know, want to see their own name on that label, but is not all about designing cute things.
So much of it is production, sales, distribution, ordering shipping boxes. All designer should have a cursory understanding of the production and business parts of fashion even if your role isn’t especially in production, but for business owners, this is really, really important.
Fashion and Costume History
Most school requires a few art history courses and most school requires a basics costume history course, and some school even have electives in this area like Hollywood costume history which mostly focuses on countries and cultures outside America which include but not limited to Europe, Africa, Asia, South America etc.
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