Are you someone who is addicted to fashion? Do you believe in setting trends rather than following trends? Do you not only like to dress well but aspire to color the town according to your wish and bring a revolution in how people dress? Fashion designing career could be a great option for you. You will get to create and experiment with different fabrics, styles and designs. With growing experience and enough understandability you can open up your own unique, stylish line of clothing, accessories and footwear. You will be sketching designs of the outfit, choosing patterns, colours and fabrics, and give instructions on how you want the clothing piece to be made or designed.
The main tasks of a fashion designer involve:
- Study fashion trends and bring in designs that would tempt the costumers.
- Design a product line based on a particular theme.
- Use computer aided design programs.
- Visit manufacturers or to direct retailers to get fabric.
- Select fabrics, embellishments, colours, sequence and patterns for each outfit or accessories.
- Work in teams by collaborating by other designer and working on bringing in new designs and concepts.
- Giving ideas to creative directive director or arrange a fashion show and present the ideas and trends they have created.
- Marketing of designs and styles they have created to different manufacturers or directly to customers.
- Think about feasibility of an outfit and its usages.
- Classify their designs in various classes such as formals, casuals, bridals and so on.
- Take hold of production of their designs to make the end product.
Some companies appoint teams of fashion designers with a head to produce their whole line of clothing, accessories, footwear and ornaments. There might be specialization of designers or they might by overseeing the whole line of production.
Fashion designers basically get their ideas from the surroundings, the places they visit, the cultures they are brought up in, trends of previous years and current years. All these things play a very important role in creation of something new by a designer. He has to keep a lot in mind and at the same time allow his mind to explore and think of new ideas that can be implemented to bring a revolution in the fashion industry. Many times their designs are also based on the culture, country or people they are designing for. For example, if they are designing for United Arab Emirates then they have to be conservative in their styling. Bringing new designs even in the same age old fabrics requires extreme thinking abilities and then only something wonderful and unique can be created.
The whole process of designing to finally producing clothing is a long and time taking one. Like if a company releases new designs every fall and spring, then the designers have to plan, think and design months in advance.
Mostly, designers sketch out their ideas on paper before getting into actually trying with the fabric. Now they can also design on computer aided design. This can make their work easier and efficient. They can test various designs of clothing with different colors, patterns and fabrics; this process saves a lot of time and makes the working a lot easier for the designer.
The world of online trade and e-commerce has made it much easier for the designers to get involved with their customers and sell to them their designs directly. They no more have to depend on companies or manufacturers to hire them to sell their designs.
Below are listed some of the popular fields of fashion designing. Other than this too there are many more forms that can be tried out by you.
Clothing designers
They are the ones who design apparels for children, women and men, lingerie, sportswear, party wear, casuals, formals, business formals and maternity wear.
Footwear designer
They create different styles and designs of foot wear including sports shoes, comfort shoes, sandals, boots and many more varieties. They specialize in using light weight soles and materials to make the footwear light and comfortable.
Costume designer
They use unique styles, materials and designs for some abstract performances for movies or shows. They do not make normal or usual clothes.