Week 7: The Textbook

Welcome back to my blog! Throughout my senior project, as part of my courses, I have read through many research papers and a singular textbook. However, I recently came to the realization that I don’t know how clothing is designed beyond a designer drawing a picture, having a pattern maker create a pattern for it, getting a prototype made, and having factories recreate it. Thus, based on my on-site advisor’s recommendation, I decided to read The Business of Fashion: Designing, Manufacturing, and Marketing by Leslie Davis Burns and Kathy K. Mullet. She told me that this one was a foundational book read by many fashion majors, so it seemed like a great place to start. I decided to look at chapters nine and ten which go through fashion design and the preproduction process.

I have learned a couple of things. First of all, I have been using the term “collection” incorrectly. Collections generally refer to groups of clothes that are featured in luxury brands’ runway shows. What I really meant when I used the word “line.” Also, the suit sets that I am keeping each season are called “carryovers.” More importantly, beyond the terminology, I learned about Zero-waste design, which is a philosophy that prioritizes minimizing textile waste. I want to adopt that philosophy for my brand.

As fun as reading these chapters was, it was a wake-up call. For each line, companies come up with a design brief that considers the line’s objectives, the target customer, the inspiration, and the design requirements. The design requirements include the manufacturing requirements and the costing requirements, which I am not sure if I will even be able to figure out. I won’t say that I have everything other than the design requirements figured out, but I definitely do have a lot more of the other parts figured out. However, something simple that I hadn’t considered before is having a color palette for my line, so I decided to create it. Here it is:

Through reading the textbook, I finally learned exactly how patterns are made. There are three different methods: drafting (using measurements to develop the pattern, draping (draping cloth on a mannequin to create the pattern), and flat-pattern (adjusting a pre-existing base pattern to create a new style. At least one of these methods is always used in clothing production. Flat-pattern is especially useful for our brand because it will be easier to modify three-piece suits that my brand will sell year-round for the new lines each season. Fashion brands often use pattern design systems, which computerize the process of pattern making in a way that is flat-pattern. Not only are pattern design systems very accurate and efficient, but they also often modify the product specification sheet based on the modifications made to the base garment and create a set of suggested sewing instructions.

Moreover, earlier in my blog, I mentioned that I was planning to sell all my clothes as pre-orders. However, I have now learned that brands often have to wait weeks for their fabrics and other materials to arrive if they choose to work this way. Now, I am questioning the feasibility of pre-orders do not. Would customers be willing to wait weeks for clothes from a new brand with limited credibility due to its lack of previous collections? Now, when people get things in a day or two from Amazon, what would convince prospective customers to buy clothes from my brand? I have yet to find the answers to these questions.

If I thought there was a lot that could go wrong in the clothing production process before, I now feel like there are endless possibilities for mishaps that could ruin the garments before they are ready to be sold. There is a lot of room for error in the dying process. If there isn’t strict color management during the dying process, there may be slight but noticeable variations between clothing items that are supposed to have the same fabric color. Earlier, I mentioned that I would be working on some romantic, drop waist midi dresses with painterly floral prints for a summer line. While reading this book, I learned a little about printing. Well, I learned a little bit about how printed fabrics are manufactured as well. Printing is often done by a large textile converter. Fabric samples from the textile converters, strike offs can have inaccurate registration if the colors that are being used are aligned incorrectly.

As you can probably tell, I have a lot of new information to consider now that my eyes have been opened by the textbook. Thank you for joining me to learn about my progress this week. I look forward to sharing my next post with you soon!

Burns, L. D., & Mullet, K. K. (2019). The business of fashion: Designing, manufacturing, and marketing (6th ed.). Fairchild Books.