Fashion designers are trained under apprenticeships, as many sewing classes lack the detailed instruction for high-quality techniques and skills required for creating high fashion pieces. Find resources willing to pass down age-old designing techniques with advice from a successful fashion designer in this free video on fashion jobs.
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My training to be a fashion designer began with the resources that I had around me. My grandmother is a huge resource because she was raised in an era where it was common practice to make your garments. And when garments aren't being mass produced and they're made individually, there's a lot more detail that goes into it. There are a lot of things that... a lot of corners that are cut out when you're mass producing things for the masses, so a lot of quality craftsmanship and a lot of quality techniques that are what made clothes of previous decades so phenomenal are just not seen anymore. So you're not necessarily taught those certain skills in a sewing class that you may take at a larger retailer. You really have to go to the people that still have that trade close to their heart because they do it on a daily basis. When you pick up a book, or you take a class to make clothes, they'll teach you certain techniques, but they may not be the best techniques. They may just be the best techniques that are easiest to communicate and easiest for people to pick up on, but there may be other techniques that individuals have used or have been taught or have been passed down. Particularly in certain cultures they have certain techniques that are really amazing and you only see them within those cultures. So I've worked with three different seamstresses, all of which have very different styles, and all of them taught me very individual things that I'd never seen in a book or anywhere else, so the training really begins in having the passion to go outside of the norm. Also, I mean, definitely reading in the books and taking in the classes is valuable. But realizing that if you want to be something extraordinary, you've got to step out of the ordinary realm. You have to use every resource that's available to you. So if you want to train to be a fashion designer, you have to put yourself out there.
