Fashion Designer Education



Fashion designer school is for people that have a passion or extreme interest in all things fashion. While putting together great outfits for friends has always been something you’ve liked to do on the side, you can do it for a living. Creating clothing and accessory designs just comes naturally to some people, and when you attend classes to really refine your skills you’ll be impressed not only with how much you can learn, but how much you can be paid to do the things that you love to do! While designing clothes and even putting together patterns and outfits for yourself and your friends may be a great hobby, it can be an even better job if you go to school and learn how to do it all the right way so that you can come across creative and professional to prospective clients.

Fashion designers will be taught to sketch their ideas, draw and cut patterns, create simple garments, fit and modify finished garments, arrange showings for press as well as buyers, compare merchandise to that of competitors, learn how to keep current, and how to visit textile showrooms when they attend fashion design school. These skills will all contribute to helping someone with a passion for fashion develop their skill and utilize it in the real world.

Most fashion designers are self-employed and simply design for individual clients. Designers become popular by setting themselves apart by being professional, reliable, and using different colors, shapes, and materials that will allow them to stand out among their competition. A great way to learn how to create your own methods of creating great clothing, accessories, or jewelry is to become a designer’s assistant. Helping a designer will not only allow those that are learning to see what goes into the business, but will also help them define a sense of self and a true sense of what they want to do in the fashion business.

Some fashion designers work for larger firms and this may be a great way to get a fashion designer education when you get out of fashion designer school, as well. These firms or corporations typically have a head designer, which is responsible for most of the creative aspects and supervision of the design room staff. Assistant designers are often hired by firms and often make the first patterns and help the head designer oversee creative and personnel issues. There are also specialty designers that may be hired by corporations that will work with other designers to help create limited or special lines of clothing. Special designers will often have a specific article of clothing or accessory that they work with and often they design for a specific market or country and can play a vital role in a large design company. There are also theatrical costume designers that create costumes or articles of clothing and accessories for plays, movies, or other theatrical productions and these designers may work on contract. Of course, all of these jobs can be done independent of a firm, but some individuals find these jobs easier to get through a firm first, for a more consistent income.

The work environment for every designer varies, as some work in very professional settings while others work in very cramped and rushed environments. If you work for yourself you can really set the standard for yourself so that you do not have to work in unfavorable situations. If you are looking at working for a firm, be sure to ask hard questions about the work environment and schedule. Just because you just graduated from fashion designer school doesn’t mean that you should be subjected to less than comfortable working conditions! Freelance fashion designer work can also be done outside of your own job so that you can slowly create your own client base away from your corporate job.

There is a lot of money to be made by fashion designers once they have graduated and obtained some experience. Many designers make more than $20 an hour and the average salary for a designer is more than $57,000 a year! Of course, education, experience, licensing and a grasp of trends and professionalism are what get you to such a salary, but after attending fashion designer school you can achieve all of these things. Remember that you may not start out at the top, but when you get there all the little jobs you have worked will seem more than worth it so get your fashion designer education now.

Fashion Styles – When Trends Just Come and Go



Fashion style is one of the many things that changes in just a short period of time. One moment people are going crazy over colored skinny jeans, tomorrow they will be craving for designer rolling briefcases and apparel. The thing there is, people may change their preferences on certain pieces of fashion, but definitely, all of them will always go back to the basic.

Fashion is a never-ending cycle. What is in now may come from long time ago, just making their appearance visible once again. If you can remember it right, super-skinny jeans are people’s favorites like twenty years ago. But before that, bell-bottoms dominated the market. Compare everything to the present situation. The craze for skinny jeans is back, but actually, four years ago, every single kid on the block has a pair of bell-bottom jeans. And If truth be told, the same cycle will be repeated for the next years to come.

Let us go to the cycle of bags. During the 90′s, girls are going gaga over shoulder bags to use when shopping. They come in different colors, accompanied with very long bag straps that can go all the way to your legs. These changed when teenagers as well as young professionals are starting to sport the new star-hand bags and purses. It stayed for quite sometime making the handbag designers filthy rich because some of these can be quite expensive to put it mildly. Years after the fad, shoulder bags are slowly dominating the scene once again.

Even men, who are generally not fond of these apparels, are going the trend as well. From the hand-held briefcases and file organizers, rolling briefcases can also be seen around. Briefcases for men are designed especially for the male population so they can have a trend of their own without having to go with the women’s choices. It will only take a not so long time before the original fad would have to go back.

Shoes are undergoing some rapid changes as well. Some may be patterned to the old school shoes, yet some are evolving into different pieces. With heels that can go as high as 4 inches and even beyond (with the help of platforms), even women who lacks height can solve that issue.

Apparels are also taking a few flashbacks. The past years may be filled with mostly blacks and whites and other non-loud colors, but the past few years, apparels are all about colors going from green, to purple, to hot pink or fuchsia, sunshine yellows, reds among others-the trademark of the year 1990′s.

Fashion styles are never stagnant. In just a couple of years or less, the trend that you thought would last for a very long time will just disappear right before your eyes and will be overthrown by the new kid on the block. It is only a matter of how long will it survive the dynamic surroundings of the fashion world, and will it even leave a mark in the scene, or will it be just another fashion faux pas.

Fashion Designer – Do You Have What it Takes to Get Into Fashion?



For an artist, the world of fashion can seem more like a business than a world of creative fashion design. Aspiring fashion designers need to understand that this is all necessary. Business is the life blood of fashion and the fashion itself is only the soul. Fashion simply wouldn’t be able to see mass production if it were any other way. So you may be a ‘creative’ but as a fashion designer you must develop a passion for not only design but manufacturing challenges, the excitement of marketing and overcoming competition.

In the professional world of fashion, you’ll spend less than 10 percent of your time designing your collections and the rest of the time working out money management issues, and executing marketing strategies. These are the only things that will give life to your creative work and allow you to survive as a fashion designer so your garment designs will hit the store shelves and not just remain the beautiful figments of your creative imagination.

You want to become well acquainted with the business aspect of fashion. Don’t even think of starting out on you own. Work for any designer, design house or clothing manufacturer first so you can become well versed in how the fashion industry works on a daily basis and carefully climb up the ladder from there. Study how other fashion designers made their way to the top. Most of the biggest name designers worked under other designers for years before they started their own labels. They often worked for more than one fashion designer or fashion house. Having different positions and seeing different ways of how business was handled, they gained hands on knowledge, experience, confidence and acquired indispensable assets of credibility and reputation at the same time.

So if you’re getting into fashion design you’ve got to plan on being a lifer if you’re going to one day own your own line. Here is a list of characteristics you need to either have already or acquire as you go along in order to become a successful fashion designer:

- A hard edge against negative feedback and rejection.

- You need a very competitive spirit.

- You need the ability to be organized and be able to function under extreme stress of dealing with difficult people, multiple deadlines and responsibilities.

- You need to love or learn to love the marketing, negotiating and networking game in the world of fashion.

- And you need the willingness to keep your mind open to learning new things as a fashion designer.