What you should know to be a fashion designer

Do you dream of working as a fashion designer? But do not know what are the requirements for fashion designers now?
We asked our school teachers, who are fashion designers, to talk about what you need to know and be able to become a fashion designer.

It is clear that anyone who decides to become a fashion designer must love fashion. But what else is required of a person who wants to be a fashion designer?

General requirements for any fashion designer

A clothing designer works in 2 directions:

1. Working for yourself and creating your own clothing brand
2. Working in a design company

Based on the chosen direction, the requirements for your knowledge and skills will differ.

There are general skills that are the same for any direction:

• Creativity
  Designers need to constantly come up with original ways to create the clothes they make in order to stand out from the competition.
• Knowledge of fashion trends
  The ability to anticipate the latest fashion trends will help any designer to maintain their place in the fashion world.
• Artistic ability
  Fashion designers need to be able to make sets of their ideas, which can then be used to create prototypes. Designers need to be able to express their design vision through illustrations.
• Good taste and attention to detail
  Designers need to have a good understanding of small differences in color and other details that can make a design successful.

Further, depending on the chosen direction, the requirements for skills and knowledge will differ.

Option 1: You have decided to open your own clothing brand

In this case, you will work for yourself. You can start by launching small capsule collections and then move on to launching a large fashion brand. What you should know and be able to:

• Good business sense
  A successful fashion designer needs great business skills to stay within their budget and sell their clothes.
• Organization skills
  You will manage a small team - seamstresses, constructor, PR manager. And it is very important that you have good organizational skills. If you've run a team before, or have a large family, this can be useful as an experience for organizing your brand.
• Knowledge of clothing marketing and promotion
  Having created clothes, you will be faced with the fact that these clothes need to be somehow promoted and sold.
  You should know how to shoot a collection, how to organize a fashion show, how to sell things in showrooms, how to promote yourself on Instagram, how to show clothes on press days.
• Do I need to know computer programs?
  No, you don`t. In this case, you can show the designer your idea, drawn on paper.

Option 2: You decided to work as a designer in a company

Many aspiring designers choose this option.
You get a permanent job with a good salary and gain experience. And you can even build a good career in fashion.

What you should know and be able to:

• Excellent fashion sketch drawing skills
  When working as a designer for yourself, you don't have to draw professional sketches.
  When you apply for a company, you will be asked for a portfolio in which you need to show beautiful fashion sketches with your clothing ideas.
  Actually it's not difficult to learn how to draw fashion sketches.
• Knowledge of computer programs
  Big companies work with factories, so just sketching clothes ideas on sheets of paper won't work. It is important to be able to draw technical sketches of clothing in Adobe Illustrator.
  If you also know how to sketch in Photoshop, this will be your advantage in the interview.
  Without knowing the programs, you most likely will not even be invited for an interview.
• Skills of working in team
  In the company, the designer not only comes up with sketches of clothes, but also participates in fitting, production of things, purchasing fabrics and accessories. Therefore, it is important that you know how to work in a team.

Where to learn all this?

You can choose to study in Italy online on our course “Fashion Designer”.
As part of this course, you will receive absolutely all of the above skills and abilities.
Right after studying, you can get a job as a designer.
Read more about the course here