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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. more...

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Fashion designers may work under their own name, or for another designer name or brand. Designer brands which have a 'name' as their brand such as Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren are likely to be designed by a team of individual designers under the direction a designer director.

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 that sewed his label into the garments that he created. While all articles of clothing from any time period are studied by academics as costume design, only clothing created after 1858 could be considered as fashion design.

Types of Fashion

Haute Couture The type of fashion design which predominated until the 1950s was \"made-to-measure\" or haute couture, (French for fine tailoring). A couture garment is made for an individual customer. Look and fit take priority over the cost of materials and the time it takes to make.

Mass Market These days the fashion industry relies more on mass market sales. This caters for a wide range of customers, producing ready-to-wear clothes in large quantities and standard sizes. Cheap materials, creatively used, produce affordable fashion.

Designer Label Designer label clothes are a cross between couture and mass market. They are not made for individual customers, but great care is taken in the choice and cut of the fabric. Clothes are made in small quantities to guarantee exclusivity, so they are rather costly.

Couture beginnings

The first fashion designer who was not merely a dressmaker was Charles Frederick Worth (1826–1895). Before the former draper set up his maison couture (fashion house) in Paris, clothing design and creation was handled by largely anonymous seamstresses, and high fashion descended from styles worn at royal courts. Worth's success was such that he was able to dictate to his customers what they should wear, instead of following their lead as earlier dressmakers had done.

It was during this period that many design houses began to hire artists to sketch or paint designs for garments. The images alone could be presented to clients much more cheaply than by producing an actual sample garment in the workroom. If the client liked the design, she ordered it and the resulting garment made money for the house. Thus, the tradition of designers sketching out garment designs instead of presenting completed garments on models to customers began as an economy.*

Read more at Wikipedia.org