Career: Fashion Designers
If you spend endless hours poring through fashion magazines or putting together your own new looks, you may want to consider a career in fashion design. Using their flair for color and style, designers create trendy new fashions as well as practical garments, such as sportswear. Fashion design is also a labor of love, requiring long hours and little chance of superstardom -- but for many, the work itself is the reward.
Fashion designers use flair and know-how to create everything from hospital uniforms to the eye-popping outfits worn by rock stars and models.
“Fashion is architecture.”
Coco Chanel
Are You Ready To...?
- Invent new designs
- Choose fabrics
- Attend fashion shows
- Collaborate with a team
- Keep up with trends
- Work hard to build a career and keep it
It Helps to Be...
Full of drive and ambition: the glamorous allure of the fashion world draws a lot of competition. You’ll also need to have the talent and the artistic vision to back it up.
Make High School Count
- Study art. It will help you develop the eye for color, design, and proportion that you’ll need.
- Sign up for home ec and learn how to sew.
- Sharpen your math skills: measurement and proportion are fundamental to good design.
- Try your hand at costuming by working on the school play.
Did You Know?
- Fashion came into its own when Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1846, making it possible to reproduce garments cheaply and rapidly.
Outlook
Jobs for fashion designers are expected to grow more slowly than the average for all careers through 2016, according to government economists. Clothing manufacturers continue to make clothes overseas -- in countries where workers earn less -- slowing job growth. Work creating clothing for department stores and chain stores should be more plentiful than work creating high-priced luxury items.
Compensation
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an average annual income of $71,400 for fashion designers in 2008.
