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For finals week I will give you a glimpse into what a Senior Fashion Design Major does, through finals week.
Depending on the day there are other classes that I take that are not related to fashion. These range from Graphic Design to Photography Classes.
One of the first classes I take in the week with fashion is called CAD. It is a designer tool for Computer Animated Design. In simple terms, it’s a digital form of the process called Pattern Drafting. Through finals week designers create their own outfits or designs, to lead up into a final look. Theses designs are required to be 90% finish by finals week and ready to be graded.
The simple version of the steps to creating a design in CAD is: Create the shape of the clothing piece that you want to use by using lines and ‘points’. These will help shape it into a top, pants, or a skirt. From there you make sure that all the pieces are the same length and the same shape [making sure the curves would fit together. Then you set the file up so you can print it, from a machine that is called the plotter.
After all this, you cut out the pattern to either create a muslin draft or the final piece of clothing.
This is what CAD for fashion design would look like:
This program is also used for other reasons such as Interior Design
The next part of my day would be Fashion History. Which is generally a lecture class about the history of fashion.
After that would be Senior Thesis. This class is about creating patterns by hand [or drape] pieces that will be used in the senior collection. The process is different for everyone in this course but overall designers come out of this class with two whole outfits.
At the end of this course we had to finish creating customer profiles, professional patterns, business cards, a personal [or branding logo], hang tags, two whole looks that are 90% completed, research paper, an artist statement, mood boards, drafts of the looks in muslin fabric, and a reflection paper.
This will prepare the senior students to work on their 8 look collection for the senior show in the next semester.
Images via the Author