Designing your own clothes can be really fun. It’s great to see your ideas come to life. But sometimes things don’t go as planned. Maybe your pattern maker misunderstood your sketch, or the factory made something different than what you wanted. Being a designer can be tough! But it doesn’t have to be so hard if you understand how clothes are made and how to communicate your ideas clearly, even if you’re just working with your mom to make your designs.
When you study Fashion Design, you learn how to communicate your ideas and how to make your designs a reality. This means knowing how to talk about your ideas, but also knowing how clothes are made, which stitches to use, and how different fabrics work. Let’s start with the basics.
Fashion Sketching and Flat Sketching
Fashion sketching is a way to show how your clothes will look and feel. It’s different from fashion illustration, which is more about creating a mood or feeling. A fashion sketch shows your team what your clothes will look like, what fabric they’re made from, and how the fabric will move. To do this well, you need to learn how to draw people and clothes, and you need to know about different fabrics and how they drape. It’s also helpful to look at lots of different clothes to learn about different types of collars, sleeves, cuffs, and shapes.
Flat sketching is another way to draw your designs. It shows your clothes laid out flat on a table. You draw them to show how they should look on a person, and you include all the seams and stitches. This sketch helps the pattern maker create the pattern and the seamstress sew the clothes. To do this well, you need to understand how clothes are made and what the different seams are.
Garment Construction
Sewing is a big part of making clothes! Garment construction is how we put all the pieces together. In factories, they often start sewing from the neck down. This means they sew the shoulders, then the collar, then the sleeves, and finally the skirt or pants. Understanding how the different pieces fit together can help you see how clothes become three-dimensional. Learning to use a sewing machine and knowing different stitches is also important. You’ve got this!
Pattern Making
Patterns are like blueprints for your designs. They tell the pattern maker how your clothes should fit and how they should be made. If you have good sketches, know your fabrics, and understand how clothes are made, your pattern maker can create a pattern that matches your vision. They’ll be confident that they’re making exactly what you want.
Designing a Cohesive Collection
It’s important to create a collection of clothes that go together. Knowing who your customers are and what they want is key to a successful business. Sometimes, you need to design a whole wardrobe of clothes that match. In Fashion College, you might design a few dresses and some tops, bottoms, and sweaters that go together. This gives customers more choices. But you don’t always have to do that. You could also design just sweatshirts, or bibs, or even dog dresses. The most important thing is to know your customers really well.
