Different Roles Of A Fashion Professional

Fashion that seems to be a day to day thing is no more a cake walk! It’s a vogue for not only people at large, but aspiring young professionals too. Anyone who wants to pursue a career in fashion designing should have a clear knowledge of latest trends, latest happenings and a perspective to give innovative ideas.

Most of the fashion designing colleges prepare their students to meet these challenges in the industry. There are various roles for which the students are prepared when they opt for this career:-

Fashion Designer: As a fashion designer you design outfits for a segment of people. For every outfit one has to define its customer, for e.g. –

– is this design suitable for girls or boys?

– the age group for this outfit

– the class of the people as per their disposable income, culture, tradition, region

– which season outfit is it? (Summer, winters etc.)

– fabrics to be used

– color combinations

Having all these factors in mind, one comes out with a unique design for their customers.

Merchandiser– If as a fashion professional you have a knack of being a marketer too, then being a merchandiser in a garment house or an export house is a suitable profile. A merchandiser deals with various garment houses or export houses and becomes a channel in between the designer and the retailer. In some cases, the merchandiser performs the role of retailer to the local customers and supplier material and takes orders from the foreign clients as per their demands.

Fashion consultant: In this kind of profile one associates with various big brand houses or retail chains and gives them consultation for the following:-

– how to make or maintain their brand image

– what should be their target market

– What kind of materials or designs should they buy from the designers?

– who are the fashion designers that can fulfil the needs of the brand or the store

– also, directly dealing with the customers to give them a solution as per their fashion needs from the bouquet of the brand’s collections

Individual designer with own brand name: For a career in fashion designing, this type of profile is generally a dream profile. Designers may prefer to work on a small scale but they tend to design and sell their own creations without any other inter mediator. They make a brand name and do its marketing.

Fashion writer: If one has a full-fledged knowledge of ‘all about fashion’, then there is an option for making such a career in fashion designing that one doesn’t have to necessarily be a designer. Or, being a designer too one can always become a fashion writer. People want to learn about new fashion and new trends and the best preferred sources to reach such segment of people is by becoming a fashion writer for magazines or newspaper columns.

Production manager, Quality controller, fabric manager:

• In a good fashion designing college, these profiles of fashion professionals must be clearly explained.
• Production manager must be responsible for ensuring timely production of the given orders.
• Quality controller will determine the best quality fabric to be used and a best class outcome from the factory.
• Fabric manager can be understood as someone who checks the supply and demand of various quality fabrics and its logistics.

Thus, a career in fashion designing is not merely designing, it’s more of an industrial job!