Learning Fashion: How to Study Fashion Design
In order to become a fashion designer, you don’t need to inherit a fashion house or sleep in one bed with a famous fashionista. Sometimes you even don’t need a degree in fashion to design great clothes; still, it won’t be a spare quality.
No matter whether you aim at fashion design school, online courses, or self-education, it is necessary to get prepared thoroughly, develop your knowledge and skills in the field, and try hard to progress as a fashion designer. Here are some tips for you to build up your career in fashion design from scratch.
About Fashion Design
Fashion design is about creating and combining clothes and accessories to meet clients’ needs and preferences. From an academic perspective, fashion design is closely connected to history, art, business, technologies, and other disciplines you will need to learn in theory before setting to practice. From the practical point of view, fashion design is mingled with culture and social relations, meaning that designers often dictate the style and help people get dressed in a comfortable yet sophisticated way. All in all, a good fashion designer must excel both in theoretical and practical skills to provide high-quality products and services in the end.
How to Become a Professional
Depending on your own career visions and preferences, you can decide how to study fashion with design schools, online programs, learning from professionals, and so on. Anyway, you have to get prepared well and learn some basics before you go after any of the options. So, look at the steps you should cover on your way to a successful career as a fashion designer:
- Look into a fashion industry – a good specialist knows the background and peculiarities of the field he is working in. So educate yourself on fashion history, discover modern trends, learn about upcoming challenges and existing ideas to cope with them. Gather information about the fashion design industry, its business principles, and its peculiarities. The more you learn and understand in theory, the better you will excel in practice later on.
- Learn the basics – practical skills are of high importance for fashion designers. Often people without special education but those with crafty hands and creative skills get the job faster than well-educated but lacking practical skills. So, it is good if you develop your drawing, sewing, constructing, projecting, and other skills. But remember that you won’t go far without knowledge of color composition, principles, types of fabric, style rules, and so on. This means that combining theory and practical tasks in your preparation will be the best strategy.
- Get creative – apart from learning through books or primitive samples, it is vital to move on to creating your own clothes gradually. You may not succeed with your first piece. But with regular practice, you may even create your own clothing line and add it to your portfolio. This will be a huge plus when applying for a fashion designer position in the near future.
- Gather a portfolio – add all and everything you create to your portfolio. Your sketches, design projects, photos of clothes you either made on your own or combined, references, certificates. Everything will help you to get a place at a fashion design school or company sooner than the absence of such a portfolio. Still, mind that many graduate programs require a research proposal to hand in together with your portfolio. But don’t panic, here you can ask professionals from reliable platforms, such as Pro-papers, to help you get your dream place with no hurdles.
- Pick out a suitable design school – there are plenty of fashion design schools to apply to so that you can get profoundly educated as a fashion designer. Some are part of prominent national universities; others teach students on the basis of fashion houses. There are also high-quality online fashion design courses you can take if you have issues getting to school personally. Remember to pick out the top qualitative and comfortable option but not the cheapest or the most famous one.
- Seek real-world practice – many fashion design schools offer internships at fashion houses. If not, then seek real-world practice yourself while you are still studying. This will help you realize how the fashion design business and its workers function in the real world, build up useful connections, and make crucial career decisions and arrangements for the future.
Once you structurize your study process, it will be easier for you to move from step to step, develop your theoretical knowledge and practical skills gradually, and prepare yourself for a successful career as a fashion designer.
Final Words
Becoming a fashion designer shouldn’t be the result of your whim or force from your parents. This profession, like many others, requires thorough preparation and education before you can set out to create a clothing masterpiece. There is a lot of work to do on your own before you apply to fashion design school or bring your portfolio to a fashion design house. Learn the background and history of the industry, expand your knowledge on field-specific theory, practice your creativity and crafting skills regularly, do the primitive and then more elaborate designing, collect everything in your portfolio, and apply to a fashion design school as a first major step in your fashion designing career.