What Qualifications Do I Need To Be A Fashion Designer?

Glamour!                                                          Fame!                                                 Fortune!

The buzz words that attract an unspecified number of students to Fashion Design Courses. While true to a large extent, Fashion Designing also involves a long hour of hard work, painstaking research in consumer tastes, culture, and trends to not only come up with the appropriate concepts in clothing and accessories but also to find the right material, fabric, colours and pattern for presenting the collection.

This doesn’t end here since Fashion Designing even entails, final production, selling and even fact-finding in case the collection doesn’t generate the requisite profits.

Who should pursue Fashion Design Course?

In order to pursue Fashion Design Course, the student must display the following skills:

• Good Drawing & Visualization Skills
• Innovative Thinking
• Detailed Observation Skills
• Competitive
• Passionate about designing
• Good Communication Skills
• Leaderships skills

Duties of Fashion Designers

Fashion designers have the following duties:

• Study and analyze fashion trends
• Conceptualize a theme for a collection
• Anticipate designs that will appeal to the targeted customer
• Create sketches to showcase concepts
• Generate designs using computer-aided design (CAD) programs
• Visiting trade shows and manufacturers to identify and select the apt samples of fabric/material, colours, patterns, embellishments for the collection as well as accessories
• Create prototypes
• Work with other designers, team members, and different departments to finalize the production of the collection
• Showcase the collection in fashion and/or trade shows and help in obtaining the orders
• Market designs to clothing retailers as well as to consumers
• Maintain relationships with vendors, buyers, suppliers, and models

Fashion Design Courses:

While there are a plethora of colleges offering Fashion Design courses, in order to design your own growth stories, you should deliberate on the following:

• The course must offer an in-depth understanding of the responsibilities of a designer.
• College must encourage innovations among students by training them as per updated trends-use of environment-friendly materials and people-centric design concepts
• College must offer competencies in a range of value-added transferable skills and multi-disciplinary specialization to help students with flexible career opportunities.
• College must promote experiential learning by complementing classroom learning with industry projects
• To impart knowledge and global perspective on lifestyle, fashion and luxury business, a college must ensure regular sessions with industry experts
• College must ensure Nationally and internationally recognized Professional Certification
• College must have well-placed alumni to help the students in getting internships and relevant exposure besides helping students build a portfolio.
• Comprehensive placement programs is a must
• College must have a good studio that offers competencies in the use of the latest technologies and software
• College must help students develop capabilities to gauge the market trends, understand socio-cultural settings, and read their customer’s taste
• College must offer additional career support courses like PG courses in fashion designing or textile management or fashion communication etc. to help students gain an advantage vis-a-vis students of other colleges