What fashion designers should know
Fashion was born in the 12th century
Human body can be covered in two ways. In wrap dresses, the simple fabric is wrapped around the body in a state of falling and creates natural folds. This method was one of the first methods of covering the body with textiles. However, body wraps traditionally do not have a fixed shape and lose their shape when they are not in contact with the body. Nowadays, wrap dresses usually have a designed infrastructure that is also applied in sewing.
Pre-Renaissance needlework existed in 12th-century Europe, when the celebration of the natural world in science, philosophy, and art focused attention on the human body. Long wrap shirts were divided into several pieces to fit the body better. These pieces nurtured patterns in the mind that were used to create separate garments to cover the upper and lower body.
The birth of sewing gave birth to fashion.
Five tips for a good preliminary design
The stages of fashion design are complex and like a poem that has phonetic homogeneity, all its components fit together. These steps are not done in the same way for all designers. Despite this, the development of steps towards coherent pre-design can be recognized in the working stages of successful designers.
Client: You need to know who you are designing for.
Weather: Know the season of the year for which a collection is intended.
Concept: Explore and create a "big idea" that inspires the entire collection.
Color: Specify the appropriate range of color.
Fabric: Check and specify the fabrics needed for the clothes of the collection.
The importance of designing clothes outside of the collection is clear only after walking on the fabric.
Know who you are not designing for
A fashion designer must know a lot about his target customers. How old are they? where do they live? Where does their income come from? How much do they earn? Where do they shop? What were they wearing before? What things have not been offered to them yet? With what motivation do they want to buy? These questions help the designer to solve many problems in fashion design.
When it's so hard to know the target customer, it can be useful to identify customers who are completely different from what you're targeting, people for whom it's definitely not designed. This effort involves recognizing the lifestyle needs that belong to another category and always helps the designer to better attract the target customer.
Design from outside to inside, top to bottom and big to small
The elements of an ensemble—jackets, skirts, pants, blouses, embellishments, and more—must come together very carefully. However, it is impossible to think of everything at once and to do all the designs together. How to prioritize?
Design from the outside in: The design of outer garments, including short and long coats, should be done before the garments that lie beneath them and remain partially covered, including vests, blouses, and underwear.
Design from the top down: Clothes that are close to the face are more important than those that cover the lower parts of the body. Priority should be given to them.
Design from big to small: Large garments such as shirts, trousers and long coats should always be designed before shirts (button-down tops), blouses, vests and knit tops.
These three strategies are almost related to budget allocation in fashion. Customers tend to spend more on clothes that are worn over other things, clothes that are closer to the face.
Satin is a texture, not a fabric
Woven fabrics are usually recognizable by their surface, appearance and features, which have countless types, such as:
Serge twill fabric emphasizes the diagonal lines in the appearance of the fabric. Examples of this type include denim , cavalry serge (a strong and flexible fabric), and silk foulard , which is commonly used in military uniforms.
Satin is introduced by its soft and shiny appearance. Including the strong and strong duchess silk fabric , the soft and loose shagmus fabric and the soft silk fabric with low luster called Podosua .
Jaguar is patterns and images that exist in the texture of the fabric with a specific pattern as an imperceptible change from the glossy to the matte spectrum. Such as damask fabric (a wavy fabric with a rich color pattern), brocade fabric (a fabric with a multi-colored pattern) and quilted embossed fabric (similar to cotton embroidery). Jaguars are used in both fashion and home decor.
A pile that has a fur-like or hair-shaped surface is introduced with the name Porez. Velvet (soft and short pile), towel fabric (sponge and ring pile) and match velvet (with a surface with parallel stripes) are examples of this type.
If you don't know how the clothes you designed are produced, you haven't really designed anything
A good designer does not count on a large number of skilled and powerful people to turn his design and idea into an objective and practical reality. On the contrary, the more skilled the designer, the more he is involved in executive work - organizing, sewing, technical work, pattern execution, fabric selection, etc. If not, the control of the design process will be out of the hands of the designer and the designer will be placed at the end of the production chain. In fact, as the concept of design progresses towards being understood, pattern makers, prototypers, models and even vendors will want to change it according to their wishes or needs. Either of these people may mislead the inexperienced designer by saying "what you want is not possible". How will an uninformed designer know that he is wrong?
High fashion designers are protected by French law
Only fashion companies that are judged by the Chamber of Commerce of the Ministry of Industry of Paris and have a certain level of quality; They use the label "high-end fashion designers" or "high-end tailoring".
Each member of the "Clothes Design House" union must:
- Design travel clothes for private customers with one or more suits.
- Have a workshop with at least 15 workers in Paris.
- Twice a year, a collection of at least 35 day or night wear designs will be featured in French publications.
Women's fashion changes every day, but men's fashion changes every few centuries
In the West, before the modern era, men's and women's fashion changed in the same proportion. Once the Enlightenment proclaimed the equality of all men, the need for fashion to mark social rank was something of an ineffectual thing. Furthermore, the standard of army uniforms meant that the men of Zeinpas did not go to war in their own clothes. The military wore uniforms that emphasized comfort. Men's suits emerged as the greatest proponents of social equality in the 19th century, and the practice has changed little since then.
Look for a reason for your work
Even very expensive fashions should be efficient in terms of structure, fit, application and even production method. For this reason, aesthetic moves in design should be seen as opportunities to improve the target. When drawing preliminary lines in the design, consider first and foremost how they will help the garment fit better. Asymmetric and dramatic design allows us to creatively use pockets, buttons, zippers and more. Using colored fabrics together draws attention to the structure of the clothes. A ragged hem can draw attention to certain parts of a person's outfit—shoes, bags, bracelets, and even body curves—by emphasizing the visual power of contrasting lines.
Design is judged by "I like it" alone, and public perception rarely reflects what the designer intended.
If a dress only looks good on a model who is 180 cm tall and weighs 54 kg, the designer has not done a good job.
Customers of a collection may share the same way of life, thinking and shopping, but they are not physically the same. A good collection has a basic design, proper segmentation and a variety of fabrics to suit a wide range of bodies.
Four design ideas
Idea: Being creative means designing something that has never been seen before.
Fact: If something hasn't been seen before, it's probably not because it hasn't been thought of, but because it didn't work at the time.
Idea: Buying ideas is imitating them.
Fact: Idea shopping is a great tool for a designer that expands one's intellectual repertoire of details, final steps, behaviors, and more.
Concept: A successful final design is similar to its initial design.
Fact: A successful design concept moves throughout the design process in a way that meets the needs of the customers.
Assumption: reality is equivalent to a trivial problem.
Reality: While fashion should come from inspiration, emotion or appeal, successful designers design for real people.
There is a fine line between fashion and disguise
Traditionally, fashion emphasizes personality and the inside of a person, while the philosophy of dressing up is to transform a person into someone different from their natural self. When a fashionable dress tries to make further changes; Reviews often dismiss it with the label "pseudo-converted". In recent years, with the influence of postmodernism theory, this hypothesis is very popular that nothing really exists, only an image of reality exists. According to this view, everything is an imitation of reality. Even common clothes. But in this narrow border, clothing and fashion designers must be fully aware of the dangers, objections and embarrassments they may face.
Combining clothes with hair and skin color
For more visual impact, try pairing:
- Darker clothes with light skin and light clothes with darker skin.
- Green-colored clothing with red or reddish-brown hair.
- Red color range clothes with black or blonde hair.
- Yellow colored clothes with black, brown or red hair.
- Blue clothes with all hair colors. However, when dark hair is combined with pale blue color, it will create more beauty and elegance. But blonde hair, by creating a girlish look, will soften the intensity of the dark color.
The giants of the fashion industry use two annual seasonal calendars, and the commoners use a four-season calendar.
Designers present their seasonal collections twice a year during Fashion Week. This is one of the most important events in the fashion industry. Fashion week actually lasts four weeks! during which fashion buyers and reporters from all over the world travel to the cities of New York, London, Milan and Paris, respectively, to see the upcoming season's show in hundreds of fashion showrooms. Then they go to fashion design salons to buy their seasonal collection or take photos for fashion magazines.
Conventional workings of the fashion industry—including mass market, mainstream brands, and lifestyle brands—divide the year into four seasons and twelve months for product offerings. Three months are dedicated to each season and new products arrive in stores every month. Seasons are called first spring, second spring or summer, autumn and holidays. Children's or teen markets also use the term "back to school" to display fall clothes.
Mode is description and interpretation
Fashion is not just about beautiful clothes, but about the associated description and interpretation—about the wearer, what others are wearing, fashions that come and go, the human body, and culture. In general, fashion does not last long and is fleeting because once the description of a fashion is understood by everyone, other conversations pass over it. That's why when a style is revived, there's something different about it. The skirt is folded on the knee. A trumpet skirt is worn with flat shoes instead of high heels, and a thin collared coat is worn with blouses in primary colors instead of a white blouse. The conversation has returned to a familiar topic that at the same time has something new to say.
The description of fashion means that one can be well-dressed without behaving according to fashion, or even dress badly but be fashionable.
Style is something internal
What we know as visual style is the surface communication of what exists in deeper layers. Style is not just how something looks, but how it is. A true fashionista is not someone who has learned how to look, but someone who has their own style. A way that expresses itself with a visual form.
Cabrera, Alfredo, translated by Parand Taheri, 101 things I learned in fashion school, Tehran: Ketab Varash, 2013