Course overview
Things that excite a fashion designer:
Gorgeous fabrics, texture, silhouette, designing creations for people inspired by what they need and what they like. Fashion designers are great at imagining, creating and making, combining, mixing and matching. A career in fashion design allows you to be playful, and follow or even create trends.
What is Fashion design?
Fashion designers design far more than just clothing, fashion designers create experiences, they have the skill to make you feel good about yourself and the world around you. A fashion designer creates fashion drawings to conceptualise individual garments and or ranges and accessories, they draft patterns, and construct garments whilst responding to global fashion trends. Fashion design extends into complimentary sectors like media and retail environments. Fashion Designers potential job titles may include: clothing designer, clothing manager, colour consultant, fashion editor or fashion buyer or merchandiser.
- Annual enrolments in March, July and November.
Careers
A fashion designer is focused on meeting strict deadlines, identifying trends and predicting styles that will be in vogue for the upcoming season. If you wish to be a pure fashion designer then you would probably select one main area of fashion to explore, namely; Apparel, Accessory Design or Shoe Design. Apparel designers are concerned with clothing and costumes. and consider the audience for which they are designing. Apparel Design can therefore be categorized as – Haute couture, prêt-a-porter and mass market. Haute Couture is high end fashion focusing on the Invidia needs of each customer; Prêt-a-porter is created for the mass market. Designers produce ready-to-wear clothing, intended to be worn without significant alteration because clothing made to standard sizes fits most people. They use standard patterns, factory equipment, and faster construction techniques to keep costs low, compared to a custom-sewn version of the same item.
Mass Market is the most lucrative area within the fashion industry. It caters for the general population Garments are manufactured in large quantities and made available for the open market. These apparels are generally available in standard sizes with multiple copies of the same design. Accessory design is concerned with jewelry and handbags and Shoe Design with the vast types of shoes available. Both Accessory and Shoe Design are considered in the Haute Couture, Pret-a-porter and Mass Market lines. There are many areas of interest supporting the fashion design industry that one can specialize including; fashion buying, planning, media development, copywriting, photography and videography.