INTRODUCTION
You have come across the word Design and designers very often. You always wanted to know about the design professionals. Dress, therefore, is only one of the forms in which fashion finds expression. There are countless creators of form, or design.
Design is concerned with how needs are identified, related and in some cases stimulated. It affects the ways in which our materials, energy, skills and other resources are employed to satisfy them fully, it calls upon enterprise and enthusiasm, inventiveness and ingenuity, scientific discovery and technical knowledge, power of visualization together with knowledge of human capabilities and aesthetic sensibility
FASHION DESIGN
Fashion design is the applied art dedicated to the design of clothing and lifestyle accessories created within the cultural and social influences of a specific time. Fashion design differs from costume design due to its core product having a built in obsolescence usually of one to two seasons. A season is defined as either autumn/ winter or spring/ summer. Fashion design is generally considered to have started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who was the first person to sew their label into the garments that they created.
AREAS OF FASHION DESIGN
Many professional fashion designers start off by specializing in a particular area of fashion. The smaller and the more specific the market, the more likely a company is to get the right look and feel to their clothes. It is also easier to establish oneself in the fashion industry if a company is known for one type of product, rather than several products.
Once a fashion company becomes established (that is, has regular buyers and is well-known by both the trade and the public), it may decide to expand into a new area. If the firm has made a name for the clothes it already produces, this helps to sell the new line. It is usually safest for a company to expand into an area similar to the one it already knows. For example, a designer of women’s sportswear might expand into men’s sportswear. The chart below shows the areas of many designers choose to specialize in.
ELEMENTS OF DESIGN
In creating a design one of the components which interact is the Art Elements The elements and principles of design are flexible and should be interpreted within the context of current fashion. A design can be defined as an arrangement of lines, shape, colours and texture that create a visual image. The principles of design are the rates that govern how elements are combined. The elements are therefore the raw materials that must be combined successfully.
Every fashion period, a shape emerges slowly or evolved suddenly, whatever it is, every period has a specific shape of garment which once determined can be modified and re-styled fir variation in design without changing the basic shape of the garment, it is either flare or tight, circular or straight, a line or raglan. It has been observed that an easy fitting shape of the garment is easily accepted and largely varies as well as has longevity of stay where as a tight fitting garment is generally short lived since it is suitable to only perfect figure types. It is therefore advisable that the designer chooses an easy silhouette to keep on creating for a longer duration.
