Textile and Fashion Design

The Textile and Fashion Design course caters for the needs of students interested in becoming textile or fashion designers.

The course consists of two major paths in Textile Design and Fashion Design.

Textile Design provides training in conceptual development, creative interpretation and technical production, knowledge relevant and necessary in textile design industry, traditional design and local content will be emphasized.  An industrial attachment and a practical workshop will further provide valuable practical experience to students. Fashion Design equips the students with fashion and textile knowledge, marketing and practical skills. Design concepts and technical skills are inter-dependent and mutually enhancing in the training approaches.

The programme is structured to cover all aspects of fashion design from basic to advanced drafting, draping, construction and designing. Studio projects include functional to experimental clothing designs.

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Fashion design

Fashion design is the art of the application of design and aesthetics or natural beauty to clothing and accessories.

Fashion design is influenced by cultural and social latitudes, and has varied over time and place. Fashion designers work in a number of ways in designing clothing and accessories.

Some work alone or as part of a team. They attempt to satisfy consumer desire for aesthetically designed clothing; and, because of the time required to bring a garment onto the market, must at times anticipate changing consumer tastes. Fashion designers attempt to design clothes which are functional as well as aesthetically pleasing.

They must consider who is likely to wear a garment and the situations in which it will be worn.

They have a wide range and combinations of materials to work with and a wide range of colors, patterns and styles to choose from.

Though most clothing worn for everyday wear falls within a narrow range of conventional styles, unusual garments are usually sought for special occasions, such as evening wear or party dresses.

Some clothes are made specifically for an individual, as in the case of haute couture or bespoke tailoring. Today, most clothing is designed for the mass market, especially casual and every-day wear.

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Designers work in a number of many ways

Fashion designers can work in a number of many ways. Fashion designers may work full-time for one fashion company, known as 'in-house designers' which owns the designs.

They may work alone or as part of a team. Freelance designers work for themselves, selling their designs to fashion houses, directly to shops, or to clothing manufacturers. The garments bear the buyer's label. Some fashion designers set up their own labels, under which their designs are marketed. Some fashion designers are self-employed and design for individual clients. Other high-fashion designers cater to specialty stores or high-fashion department stores. These designers create original garments, as well as those that follow established fashion trends.

Most fashion designers, however, work for apparel manufacturers, creating designs of men’s, women’s, and children’s fashions for the mass market. Large designer brands which have a 'name' as their brand such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Justice, or Juicy are likely to be designed by a team of individual designers under the direction of a designer director.

Fashion designers work in different ways. Some sketch their ideas on paper, while others drape fabric on a dress form. When a designer is completely satisfied with the fit of the toile (or muslin), he or she will consult a professional pattern maker who then makes the finished, working version of the pattern out of card or via a computerized system. The pattern maker's job is very precise and painstaking.

The fit of the finished garment depends on their accuracy. Finally, a sample garment is made up and tested on a model to make sure it is an operational outfit.Myriam Chalek, owner and founder of Creative Business House explains that most of the time fashion designers only have a fashion concept: The technicality and construction is not thought through during the visual conception and sketching process.

Hence the fashion designer needs to meet with a pattern maker and sample maker to figure out if the sketch on paper can be brought to life according its vision.75% of the time fashion designers ignore that designing a garment means conception and production.

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First designer

Fashion design is generally considered to have started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who was the first designer to have his label sewn into the garments that he created.

Before the former draper set up his maison couture (fashion house) in Paris, clothing design and creation was handled by largely anonymous seamstresses, and high fashion descended from that worn at royal courts.

Worth's success was such that he was able to dictate to his customers what they should wear, instead of following their lead as earlier dressmakers had done.

The term couturier was in fact first created in order to describe him. While all articles of clothing from any time period are studied by academics as costume design, only clothing created after 1858 could be considered as fashion design.

It was during this period that many design houses began to hire artists to sketch or paint designs for garments. The images were shown to clients, which was much cheaper than producing an actual sample garment in the workroom.

If the client liked their design, they ordered it and the resulting garment made money for the house.

Thus, the tradition of designers sketching out garment designs instead of presenting completed garments on models to customers began as an economy.

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