“We find the white dress at the beginning and end of every century emblematic of the rise of democracy, going back to a classical theme. I love the white dress, in the sense that it’s fresh, it’s new, and it can say a great deal about revival,” Patrick Michael Hugues states.
“Our particular white dress is made of two components—one from the late 1970s and the other from the early 1980s. It’s the stretch lace bodysuit made by American designer Giorgio Di Sant’Angelo. Di Sant’ Angelo began his career as a Lucite jewelry designer until 1968 when the legendary Diana Vreeland discovered his talent. From there, it took off,” Hugues explains.
Hugues continues, “We have a skirt in white cotton muslin made by Geoffrey Beene from his designer clothing line Beene Bag. The white muslin skirt takes us to the beginnings of the white dress and white clothing at the beginning and end of every century. It has a classical mix. It has purity.”
“There are a couple of wonderful details when taking a closer look at our Beene skirt. One of them is a cartridge pleating, which we can trace its origin to the 18th century,” Hugues claims and continues, “the hem has a wonderful trapunto stitch hemline which gives a sense of wadded weight to our muslin skirt.”
Hugues explains further. “The wadded hemline is another fashion we can trace back to the early 19th century, something that we can trace back to the early 19th century. It has a sense of romance. It’s almost the end of the white dress, taking us into the age of romance. The age of romance, of course, referring to the time of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Emma, all of those things.”
“While I was making up a story for our white dress, which has a bit of a Gibson Girl look to it, I realized the collar is a high neck with a sense of romance,” Hugues explains. “We place on it, Tibetan beads, glass beads, ceramic beads, a wonderful sort of silver brooch with turquoise stones. and of course, a huge sort of dramatic Marc Jacobs collection sort of raccoon or fox hood to complete the look.”
Hugues claims, “Mixed with this, of course, is also a piece of surplus clothing, or Army and Navy clothing. We find a tremendous amount of Army and Navy clothing after World War II. I believe this is something that the troops will leave behind in Europe, and something that America will export to Europe.”
“This is a time where we’ll see a strong presence of American clothing in Europe. So, this green Army jacket has another level to this wonderful sort of American narrative. When we think about sorts of the white dress, about new dressing—we have a number of narratives to refer to,” Hugues concludes.

“Claire McCardell is one of those names that’s synonymous with American sportswear. She is somebody who redefined the sportswear market by adding things such as play suits and swimwear,” Patrick Michael Hughes explains. “She followed her customers from the late 1930s, to war bride, to movement to the suburbs, and into the early to mid-1950s.”

When we take a look at our Claire McCardell shirtwaist dress, we find a number of historical elements. The first of which is the shirtwaist. The shirtwaist is something that is synonymous with American fashion. It’s something that American women at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century are absolutely going to fall in love with. It’s the look of the Gibson Girl, which is really an exciting moment in history and for women. The Gibson Girl is a woman who is going to ride bicycles, operate typewriters, and have dreams of voting.

By the time we take a look at this shirtwaist dress from around 1942-1943, we have a simple cotton dress in war-time kind of proportions. It’s very paired down and very clean with just a tiny little bit of something to keep it fresh and new. The collar is able to be tied into a bow tie.

What’s also fun about this are the prints. This is a whimsical shamrock. Morality prints during World War II are very exciting to take a look at. Who are they fighting for? Why are we fighting? Keeping your morale going and looking pretty while the men are fighting abroad. This is also part of the World War II message and something that McCardell will plug into.

“If you take a closer look at the McCardell shirtwaist dress, you’ll find an interesting enclosure. McCardell was known for interesting enclosures like brass hooks, brass studs, and all kinds of things that are different than just plain buttons. When we started styling and having fun with our timeless shirtwaist dress, we put a Beastie Boys t-shirt underneath it. We tied it with a Double RL Ralph Lauren flannel shirt. We’re mixing an American message, and she’s ready for grunge. Grunge is making a comeback. Grunge never really went away,” Says Hughes.

It’s something that is also tremendously romantic. When we think about grunge, and we think about grunge dressing and the story or the narratives of a songwriter or a poet, and tragic endings. We have a really fun sort of look here.

Sample creation is essential to making fashion products that sell. According to Angela Gao, no design process is complete without time spent creating and refining these mockups.

“When I’m designing, I like to have a mood board right where I work. If I find appealing images for a new collection, I pin them up along with fabrics I’d like to use.”

Next, Gao refines the creative inspirations she’s collected. “I sort the fabric I’ve gathered. Then, I develop sketches representing flat joins of what I’d like to produce.”

Sample making comes next. Many designers produce samples in factories or designated sample rooms, but smaller designers may prefer in-house production.

“I usually produce the initial mockups and send them directly to my factories,” continues Gao. “Then the factories send me the completed samples.”

Sample-making ensures that everything fits before it goes into production or gets sold to stores. Gao says the extra effort helps her create quality products for her target consumers through a “fit modeling” process.

“Working with fit models is important, but it differs from runway shows,” Gao explains. “Runways are glamorous, so everything is slim, skinny, and tall. When you’re selling to a customer or buyer, however, your work must fit real people. Fit models have the perfect sizing that matches typical clientele. The fitting process lets the designer fix aspects that they dislike and adjust poorly fitting elements. For example, if an armhole looked too big, the designer would pin it up and resize it at this stage.”

Gao also says that fit modeling is just the first step – It’s important to recheck the work afterward. “After you finish fitting a garment, you can send the sample back to the factory. When the factory returns an adjusted prototype sample, you’ll check it against a fit model again.”

Sample making also facilitates business opportunities known as sample sales. “A sample sale is a retail channel for designers to sell samples,” says Gao. “Companies can generate some extra profit by selling samples that would go unused. The only downside of this practice is that samples aren’t perfect. Sometimes, they might lack buttons, closures, zippers, or other features. They also can have fit issues. Nonetheless, sample sales offer great deals.”

“Every season as a team we collectively go through all of the runway shows from New York, London, Milan, and Paris, and pull through actual looks that we think will work for future stories at Teen Vogue,” Says Sarah Brody. “Once we’ve identified the trend for the season, we go through all of our market images, which are the photos that we’ve taken at all the appointments that we’ve gone to so far, and we pull out the lower end market and the more affordable pieces that we think that our readers want to see on the page that still relates to the bigger trends that we’ve seen this season.”

“After that, we compile a book that we present to Amy, our editor in chief and our creative director at Marie. We go over every single trend, what styles we think might like that trend, what photographer would work well with it, and we send them out to all the stylists and photographers that we work with regularly. They send back their feedback and some inspiration images that they would want to incorporate for a future shoot for the magazine.”

“As shoots are confirmed, we work with stylists to call in the best pieces that we think will work for the story that they’re doing. Whether that’s a sweater from Guess or a pair of jeans from AG, we’re always looking for the best pieces in the market because it’s our job as editors to not have everything here.”

“Once everything is here and laid out, it’s organized on racks and tables. We then, as a team, edit through to what we think are the best of the best pieces that we want to show the stylists and show Amy in the run through. For those of you that don’t know what a run through is, it’s like a dress rehearsal before a show,” Explains Brody.

“We go through everything. Amy picks out her favorite pieces as the stylists goes through the looks that they’ve created. We talk over the shoot before it actually happens.”

“My favorite part of my job is meeting with new designers and figuring out how I can incorporate them into the book. After all, the Teen Vogue tagline is ‘fashion starts here’. A special experience for me was our main cover story with Kylie Jenner where our sales brand and Maxwell asked the fashion team if we knew of any designers that sent a muslin dress down the runway, and no one really did.”

“I thought of a friend that was just starting out on his own, and I asked him if he would make a dress. Brandon, myself, and my friend Max designed the entire thing from scratch. I was super excited when it ended up being shot. Here’s the image of Kylie and her friends wearing it. That was just one of the many, many memories I have of working here at Teen Vogue.”

In the fashion business, “collection” basically means articles of clothing or different items in the clothing line that make up a new collection. What’s the difference between “collection” and “line”? A line is simply a specific organized group of garments that has a centralized concept. It’s a little bit similar to collection. For a designer, you many have different lines working under your label, meaning you have a contemporary line, a high-end line, and a low-end, mass-market line. These lines sell to different clients with different price points.

For a contemporary collection, designers may produce anything from 15 pieces to 30 pieces or 30 styles. For a larger designer corporation or designer label, they may produce as many as 70 to 100 styles per season. We dress differently in the four different seasons of the year. Some designers like to combine the seasons together to create a spring/summer and fall/winter collection every year. For larger mass-market stores, such as Gap, they will produce spring 1, spring 2, spring 3, summer 1, summer 2, summer 3, and so on.

Designers use their fashion education and take a look at what is necessary for their customers in each distinct season. A jacket for a cold wintry day, or a blazer for a nice spring afternoon with some breeze. Creating a complete seasonal look is key. Another important aspect of designing a fashion collection is you want to have a centralized theme. If you’re using all earthy tones, then use only warm, natural tones. If you want to do a neon pop color collection, then you might choose hot pinks, hot reds, and hot blues. Therefore, your fabrications and colors should be pretty much uniform and fit the overall theme.

Because production is a vital part of the industry, it’s essential to understand the production process and all it entails. The clothes we wear and essentially everything we own is produced somewhere else. All products are sourced, manufactured and distributed.

To work in the clothing industry, you must have a reasonable grasp of what is really involved in the production process-supply chain, the environmental issues, labor issues, quality issues, etc.

It’s important to know and truly understand the customer, including their demands and expectations. You’ll also need to know your price point and how that translates into the various fabric and textile options you offer your customer. You’ll need to know where you’re sourcing materials from and how the products will be manufactured.

Having a good relationship with your manufacturers is critical. There’s a certain degree of trust involved. You’re relying on the manufacturer to execute and deliver your design from across the world. There’s naturally going to be some concerns at first. Will the design be what you requested? Will it work? Will the fabrics used meet the quality and durability standards you demand?

If you don’t get this right, customers won’t come back. If they’re disappointed by the quality, or they’re disappointed by the way the fabric feels, or they think the brand doesn’t embody their values in terms of environmental issues or labor issues, you’re going to have a hard time establishing an on-going relationship with the customers, which is key.

Consumers are holding brands and their designers accountable for understanding environmental issues and sustainability. In the fashion industry, you’re expected to understand the environmental consequences of choosing one fabric over another, the effects of the manufacturing and dyeing process, whether it contributes to water pollution, and more.

You’ll need to know the labor involved in manufacturing, as labor issues can impact the brand identity and the way customers perceive your brand. Customers must feel comfortable with the production process and the values the brand embodies in terms of labor, because as stated before– satisfied, repeat customers are a must for success in this industry.

These are all things that will ultimately impact your brand. In the age of the internet, transparency is everything. There’s little room for error. Thanks to social media, word spreads fast. Customers are quick to “cancel” brands if they’re not producing quality products that align with their values, pose a threat to the environment or misuse laborers. Being ignorant of it, pleading ignorance after the fact, or saying it wasn’t your fault, doesn’t cut it nowadays. Designers and everyone involved in the design industry should ensure they have a really good understanding of all the aforementioned production issues in order to make wise choices.

You have to understand what your choices represent and take responsibility for those choices. On one end, you have to know your customer. You need to know what they can afford, what they want, what they expect and hopefully exceed their expectations. On the other end, at the back end, production sets your price points and also connects to marketing, thus production embodies your brand and your brand’s values.

Understanding fashion media and how media represents the work that you do as a fashion designer, or how you participate in the styling and marketing of fashion, is really at the heart of the whole industry. People only know about your work through media. They don’t understand your brand from direct experience. They only understand it through a magazine, blog, video, or on a runway. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people will be experiencing your brand through some form of media.

Understanding how your fashion business or design work is being represented in this two-dimensional form – whether it’s on a screen or page, can help you determine what works for your particular brand. The attitude and demographic of the publication should be the right fit visually and language-wise for your brand for it to make the most impact. Getting the right visual language for your design, your brand, and putting it into the right media context that represents your audience, customer base, and approach is crucial to your success.

This can mean many different things depending on where you’re starting as a designer and the design attitude is of the brand. It may be a lot of images are basically very indexable. Many fashion education websites that are merchandising clothes directly will be very descriptive. In other contexts, in more cutting-edge magazines, they might be representing the fashion where the clothes aren’t the main focus. The point is the whole attitude, mindset, demographic, or community with similar values to your brand. The clothing fits into that, but it’s not necessarily the only driving force.

Online fashion education can help you pinpoint which media outlets are a fit for your overall brand audience and aesthetic. Understanding the media context and how it works with your brand is vital to sharing your work with your desired audience.

 “Design is at the heart of everything that drives the fashion industry. Without design, we don’t have a profession. We don’t have an industry. It’s fundamental. It’s core to everything that happens,” Explains Tim Marshall.

But there are many people that work in the fashion industry who are not designers. They participate in all sorts of different ways through marketing, styling, editing, and so on. You may want to be participating in the fashion industry from one of these other positions. Wherever you are, you absolutely have to understand design because it’s absolutely fundamental to everything that happens in the industry. If you don’t have that understanding of design, you’re going to struggle to be convincing to the community you’re a part of.

Design itself is a process by which the things, the artifacts, the clothing, the objects in the world are created. Where they come from, how they’re generated, what their point of view is, what their attitude is. It’s encapsulated in the actual design process. The design process is what brings together all of the elements of what is it made from? What does it look like? How is it manufactured? What price point is that aiming at? What customer or client will it be appealing to?

“To be a designer takes a unique blend. It’s something that we like to profess at Parsons is this unique blend of having a great deal of confidence about your identity, your visual style, your visual language, and your design process alongside a certain humility because a humility is not just about you as a designer,” Marshall says. “You have to understand your customers or your potential customers. You have to understand their lifestyles, their values, their attitudes, and what they’re aspiring to.”

That also takes a certain kind of displacement of yourself. You have to understand more about society. The way people are living, the way their lives are evolving, and their very complex ways to make sure your designs actually connect and resonate with that audience and customer base. Without that, it’s simply your own self-expression, which doesn’t necessarily find an audience. That may be interesting for you, but it will not be successful.

If you’re in any other part of the industry, you’re not going to be a designer, but you have to understand that point about design. Whatever role you’re playing in the industry, you have to also make sure that design essence, that fundamental point of view that the designer is expressing, is then connecting through to the customers and clients in every other dimension. Through its communication, through its marketing, through its styling, and so on and so forth, and the economics and marketing aspects of it as well. It all has to come together and integrate into a whole package of different elements that then makes it a highly successful brand or highly successful design.

Marketing is an organic process in many ways. It exists at all points of the process of fashion. It’s in the ways you understand both your audience and your customer base in the process of designing. Marketing is also the way your customer base knows about you, ultimately, once your work is out there in the world.

If integrated marketing doesn’t happen, then you’re talking to yourself. There’s really no way knowing whether your work and your fashion designs are going to resonate because people simply don’t know about your brand. You need a fashion education and an understanding of the different market channels, how they work, how traditional marketing techniques work, as well as how emerging social media works in today’s changing market.

Social media marketing is now dominating the fashion industry. Online fashion education can help you understand how social media works, the attitudes of various generations and demographics to marketing. It will also help you determine whether certain forms of marketing may turn off potential customers, whether they want be involved in the formation of marketing, and the storytelling that wraps into marketing.

Through integrated marketing of traditional and newly emerging methods, you can also gain great intelligence about this very community you’re wanting your fashion design and your brand to be a part of. Your brand is both working off of that community and also contributing to it. This is what people expect and want from marketing now – to have a two-way dialogue and participate in its development.

Today, consumers want to know the brand intimately and the way in which it’s marketed to better understand the brand. They want to know the brand does care about the lifestyle and aesthetic they’re portraying. This is vital. If the marketing doesn’t embody and represent these values with its customer base, people move on quickly.

[Please embed: https://pixabay.com/photos/rolls-of-fabric-factory-material-1767504/]

“When we’re referring to the production process, it means that you create specifications and tech packs,” explains Angela Gao. “They send it to the factories, and then they’ll follow the instructions to produce the samples in bulk.”

The tech pack, Angela explains, provides precision. “In a standard tech pack, on the left-hand side, you have something that’s called specs, or specification. And on the right, you have an image of the garment.”

The specs include the style numbers, brand, label, and fabrications you want to use. They also include points of measurement.

These specs will help you produce a sample size. Let’s say, for example, that your specs are for a medium. You can set an Excel formula to fill in the measurements for an extra small, extra large, and more. “Usually in this industry, a small size is two inches smaller than a medium size, and so on,” Angela explains.

Angela also points out that your specs should have a standard deviation. “That’s because even though we’re using machinery to stitch these garments, there are still human errors,” Angela says.

The factory can have a deviation of half and inch, a quarter of an inch, or an eighth of an inch in specific areas. However, Angela adds that you probably shouldn’t include standard deviations in a high-end collection, as these garments are made to measure.

After you’ve sent the tech packs and received your samples, the next step is preparing the garments for sale. That process involves a line sheet.

“You could think of a line sheet as a mini Excel spreadsheet,” says Angela. “You can have images of your garment at the top and detailed information, such as pricing, on the bottom. At the top, you can also have your company name, the season, and delivery dates.”

Depending on how many pieces you have in the collection, you might have as many as 10 to 20 pages of line sheets. From there, you can take the line sheet and prepare yourself for trade shows.