WHAT IS A FASHION DESIGNER?

I've had a few people ask me recently about my career as a fashion designer. How i got there? What the industry is like? What do I do?

Having spent the last 17 years as a fashion designer I thought I should share my experience.

So I will start with the question, what is a Fashion designer?

What is a fashion designer? that may sound a bit strange. It's someone that designs fashion, right?

Well kind of yes. I think that the term Apparel Designer is more appropriate for what I do. I design clothing. It's not always fashion. Sometimes I design throw-away fashion clothing and other times I design clothing to suit a purpose.

Within the Fashion Design industry there are many different roles. Depending on the size of the company and the size of the design team you can be a Junior Fashion Designer, Assistant Fashion Designer, Senior Fashion Designer, Design Manager or a Creative Director. Different companies have different names for these roles and some may even have roles in-between, such as Designer II roles.

Within the apparel industry, companies come in all shapes and sizes. On one side you have huge corporations such as Nike, who have designers in a number of major city locations. These design offices mass-design product for different regions and different product categories. Then on the other side you have tiny boutique designers stitching together unique pieces of clothing from their home or studio.

Fashion Designers can work on specific categories of design or across multi-categories. There are so many categories of design. Too many to list but here's a few to give you a taster. You can be a Womenswear Designer, Menswear Designer, Boys Designer, Girls Designer, Baby-wear Designer, Haute Couture Designer, Formalwear Designer, High Street Designer, Sportswear Designer, Corporate-wear Designer, Outdoor-wear Designer, Night-wear Designer, Knit-wear Designer, Denim Designer, Jersey Designer, Shirt Designer...

I have worked for many UK and International brands large and small. These include Puma, Adidas, Umbro, Next, Regatta, Bench, Moss Bros. I've worked as a full-time employee, from an Internship through to Senior Designer. I've worked as a freelance designer. I've worked on fashion clothing, sports clothing, formal clothing. Jersey products, shirting, denim, knitwear. I've worked on Saville Row and I've worked on trading estates. I've worked in London, Milan, Manchester, Brighton and Marsden.

Every role I've had has been different. For some roles I concentrated just on designing, trends and concepts. Some roles were designing and developing products. Some roles involved deigning the clothing and the graphics. Some roles involved spending my time purely managing other designers. I mainly designed using CAD systems, such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Other designers' illustrate everything by hand. I have rarely in my career ever touched a sewing machine or created a pattern myself since leaving college. For other designer's this may be the thing they concentrate on for the majority of their career.

I will try to write some more posts to share my experiences. If you have any more questions you would like me to answer or opinions on this post feel free to let me know.

Photo by Karly Santiago on Unsplash

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