If you’ve ever loved fashion and wanted to make a career out of it, the first thing that would have come to your mind would have been “becoming a fashion designer”.
Well, if you still wonder what is fashion designing and how many types of fashion designers exist, I will be taking you through the above mentioning the career opportunities and job roles in addition.
The key role of a fashion designer is to conceptualize garments and make designs around current trends for the world to see and wear.
I’m sure as a design enthusiast, you have heard about names like Coco Chanel, Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, and Calvin Klein who’re known for being the top fashion designers in the world.
Different types of Fashion Designers & Earnings in 2023
Here is the list of different types of Fashion Designers who work in different categories in the fashion industry:
- Haute Couture Designers
- Pret-a-porter Designers
- Mass Market Designers
- Sportwear Designers
- Evening Wear Designers
- Fashion accessory Designers
- Footwear Designers
- Kidswear Designers
- Swimwear Designers
- Lingerie & Loungewear Designers
- Sustainable Fashion Designers
- Limited Edition
1. Haute Couture Designers
Haute Couture Designers mostly make customized exclusive designs for comparatively wealthier clients according to their events. Most of the time, they have a limited clientele to cater to but are trained into making classic royal designs, hence dealing with high-profile clients. They almost work as a personal designer and a stylist altogether for their clients.
2. Pret-a-porter Designers
Pret-a-porter Designers, also known as “Ready to wear” designers, mostly target apparel designs for a larger audience than Haute Couture. While they do get innovative cuts and silhouettes and create a presentation for the wearer, the garments are designed in a way where all the customer requirements are being catered to without doing any alterations. They have more customers than Haute Couture designers, much fewer than the mass market.
3. Mass Market Designers
Mass Market designers create designs for the mass, mostly sold in retail stores where there is much less exclusivity, outfits that are purposely made for daily wear. They have various size ranges from small to extra-large of the same designs, to cater to more buyers.
4. Sportwear Designer
Sportswear designers specialize in sportswear and athleisure wear, the difference is the major of the fabrics, innovations, and performance textiles they use in sportswear, are based on sweat resistance, high intensity, workout outfits, shoes, etc.
5. Evening Wear Designers
Evening Wear designers cater to design party outfits, ball gowns, and tuxedos while they’re distinguished by men’s and women’s collections. Customers especially wear these outfits for specific events and parties and sometimes get custom-made too.
6. Fashion Accessory Designers
Fashion accessories mostly refer to jewelry. Also known as Jewelry designers, they design neckpieces, bracelets, rings, and earrings to name a few of the types. They work under bigger Jewelry designer labels or mass brands that specialize in Jewelry design. It can be one of the toughest jobs as a designer as it’s a mixture of technical knowledge and gemology.
7. Footwear Designers
Footwear Designers/ Shoe fashion designers as the name suggest design footwears that are also classified into different shoe types like formals, casuals, party, and athleisure wear (commonly called sportswear). They collaborate with apparel designers with their collections that set symmetric to the outfits, customers can buy.
8. Kidswear Designers
Kidswear designers specialize in garments, accessories, and shoe collections for kids of all ages. When comes to making garments for children also requires specific performance textiles based on texture and softness. As kids’ clothes are of different sizes, most of these items’ designs also come with lists of materials, fabrics, or other design choices designers can’t use hence need technical knowledge on that.
9. Swimwear Designers
Swimwear designers specialize in designing bikinis, monokinis, swimsuits, swimming costumes, bathing costumes, swimming suits, swimmers, swimming togs, bathers, and cossies, to name a few elements. The fabrics are specially sourced to make them relevant for water activities, diving, and surfing, sun-orientated activities, and underwater sports.
10. Lingerie & Loungewear Designers
Lingerie designers have one of the toughest jobs on the table. They design a variety of garments, from panties, thongs, and pajamas to bras, corsets, and nighties — both naughty and nice with every trend and market research being done, just as the apparel designers do. A lingerie designer’s job is to balance “comfortable” and “practical” with “flattering” and “sexy”. How cool is that?
11. Sustainable Fashion Designers
There are a variety of brands that focus on sustainability. Hence sustainable fashion designers make stylish apparel from eco-friendly, ethically sourced materials to create a collection in an attempt to raise awareness about the environment.
12. Limited Edition
Many mass audience brands come up with a limited edition garment collection that is comparatively exclusive to the rest of the collection by teaming up with known designers to bring their design aesthetics to their customers, hence can be counted under apparel/fashion designers too.
What Do Fashion Designers Do?
They make sketches, and illustrations, and work on fabrics, prints, textures, and embellishments while also developing new textures and appliques.
The core responsibility of a fashion designer is to design garment collections keeping in mind upcoming and future trends.
Fashion designers work in different branches of apparel including menswear, womenswear, kids, lingerie, and loungewear while also including footwear and accessories.
How Does a Designer Get Paid?
Generally, a fashion designer starts a package of Rs 15,000 to Rs. 35,000 per month, depending on the brand and the opportunity in India while in the US, an average salary of a fashion designer is $74,410 per year or $6,200 per month.
As a Fashion Design student, you might come across one of the topics that talk about different types of Fashion Design. As this falls under one of the cores of fashion design studies, let’s dive into understanding what these types are!
What Is Fashion Design?
Fashion Design is the art of developing and designing clothes. These are the creative professional domains that reflect, art, culture, technology, and creativity. A Fashion Design course includes history or art and culture, the business aspect, and the future technology that will drive fashion forward.
These garments range from creating different pieces, the weightage adds more towards artistic and trendy, keeping functionality in mind.
If you aspire to become a fashion designer, you must have already heard about famous fashion designers like Coco Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Michael Kors, Versace, Manish Malhotra, and Ritu Kumar, who are the best in this field to get inspired by.
In addition, it also involves study about the garment design industry, exploring different tools, and creating portfolios to work with great brands. Some of the core basics fashion design offers as a course are:
- Sketching
- Designing
- Pattern Making
- garment construction
- Software illustrations
- Color and fabrics.
- Tools and machines.
5 Types of Fashion Design
Before we dive into other details about fashion Design, let’s learn about the major 5 types of Fashion Design Categories, every design enthusiast must know:
- Haute Couture Fashion
- Luxury Fashion
- Fast Fashion
- Economy Fashion
- Ready-to-Wear Fashion
1. Haute Couture Fashion
Haute Couture Fashion also called High Fashion, lands highest on the hierarchy of Fashion design categories. Designed for a limited audience, couture fashion involves custom-fitted fashion and accessories.
These fashion outfits are mostly seen are designed by the leading fashion houses, designed from start to finish, based on the highest quality, considering the amount of time used to create their fashion garments that look like art, they are expensive as well.
Some of the leading fashion couture designer brands are:
- Dior
- Chanel
- Givenchy
- Balenciaga
- Balmain
- Fendi
- Valentino
2. Luxury Fashion
Less than high fashion which is available for a larger market, luxury fashion caters to a bit trendier collection for the high-end mass. Luxury fashion bridges the gap between high-end couture and premium brands.
Another thing that differentiates them from high-street fashion is that they’re not solely handmade and are comparatively produced in larger quantities, hence, less exclusive and less expensive.
These are some of the Luxury Fashion Brands you must know:
- Chanel
- Gucci
- Prada
- Rolex
- Prada
- Tiffany
- Armani
3. Fast Fashion
You are most likely to have heard about Fast Fashion. Designed for the majority of mass, fast fashion brings trendy and low-price fashion that is affordable for all. Although the debate between choosing fast fashion and sustainable fashion continues, most people prefer Fast Fashion on daily basis.
These are the companies that are inspired by couture and luxury fashion and replicate them for the mass majority in less than 6 months and bring them to the market. Comparatively fashion brands have more collections all year than luxury ones.
As fast fashion promotes throwaway fashion, you can check sustainable fashion which is environmentally friendly with similar affordability.
These are some of the fast fashion brands:
- Zara
- TopShop
- Urban Outfitters
- GAP
- H&M
- Fashion Nova
- Uniqlo
4. Economy Fashion
Economy Fashion targets even lower value than fast fashion in the context of quality and price. You’ll not find many brands in them as they’re the bulk producers of garments that are trending around the world. You can identify them as the local shops around you.
These garments and accessories are inexpensively bought by maximum people, are of lesser good quality, and have a shorter life span.
5. Ready-to-Wear Fashion
Different that Haute Couture, Ready-to-Wear fashion also called prêt-à-porter, is more accessible garments as compared to high fashion, and is produced for mass fashion with a comparatively lesser quality but targeted to mass users.
These can be directly inspired by haute couture or runway trends, and have a shorter turnaround time than Haute fashion.
These are some of the Ready-to-wear Fashion brands to learn about:
- Ralph Lauren
- Calvin Klien
- Burberry
- Global Desi
- Aarka
- Mango
- Asos
If You are planning to become a fashion Designer here’s a step-by-step complete guide to becoming a fashion designer.
These were the top 5 Fashion Design categories that add as a basis for fashion design. It’s one of the most applied courses as more and more students want to get into the fashion industry.
Tips to Succeed As a Fashion Designer
Wondering how would you be successful as a designer? As creative fields are getting more competitive day by day, here are the top 5 steps to succeed as a designer:
1. Get Education
2. Get an Internship
3. Create an Impressive Portfolio
4. Decide between a job or a business
5. Understand the business
1. Get Education
Getting the right education is one of the foremost priorities you must consider. A reputed fashion college not only provides the best education but also gives you enough exposure to explore.
They help you work on your core skills, the thought process, deep thinking skills, and philosophy and researching skills.
Related: Best Fashion Colleges around the World
2. Get an Internship
An internship gives you an insight into what the fashion business looks like and gives you enough time to brush up on your skills to be finally prepared for what comes next.
There are various companies that provide fashion internships to help students get hired.
Technical knowledge of software, rendering, sketching, and sewing helps you provide a better quality of content that you need to brush up your skills on while interning.
There are a lot of fashion apps that help you to build skills like styling etc.
3. Create an Impressive Portfolio
A portfolio consists of all the best work you’ve done so far, hence a fashion design portfolio should be as impressive as it should be as it will help you get the best jobs later.
Wondering how to master the perfect portfolio?
Here’s how you can make your fashion portfolio on point!
4. Decide between a job or a business
After you’ve done your education and your internship, it’s finally the time when you need to decide on what you want to do afterward.
As a fashion designer, you can either start your business or get employed in fashion brands.
Most of the time, a fashion designer works full-time. Either he/she works independently as a brand or works under a brand to design their clothes.
5. Understand the business
Understanding how the fashion industry works is the key aspect of being a fashion designer. Coming up with a collection, manufacturing, marketing, and sales comes as a part of your duty if you choose to be a businessperson.
Fashion Designers are one of the rising domains in the fashion industry.
With the increasing influence of local upcoming designers, it has become much easier to grow as a business person hence a lot of creative designers these days prefer to be sole business owners.
