In my sophomore year of high school, I made a decision that pretty much changed my life. The decision seemed pretty simple at the time: Take a fashion design class. I wasn’t very artistic, but I liked fashion, and this was the closest I could get to learning more about it at the time.
I’m going to be honest with you, I was pretty good, but definitely not the best. I didn’t see a future in fashion design for myself. I took three years of fashion design in high school, but when I went to college I decided to major in journalism and give fashion a break.
That wasn’t easy for me, though. Fashion is something I’ve always been passionate about. Almost as passionate as I am about writing. My problem was that once I started taking the fashion design class, I started seeing fashion in the same light as my academics. After all, it was one of my favorite classes in high school. Because of this, I started to intertwine both fashion and writing into my career goals.
As you can tell by this blog, I made the decision to start writing about fashion. But the fashion design class I took did more than just lead me to fashion writing. You would think that to write about fashion I wouldn’t need to know how to design, right? Well, I don’t exactly need to, but it seriously helped a lot.
This fashion design class taught me most of what I need to know about fashion. I learned about textures, colors, sewing and what a croquis is. If you don’t know what a croquis is, well, you still have a lot to learn about fashion.
But don’t worry, I’ll tell you. A croquis is the sketch of a figure in a certain pose that is created as a base for your design.
Project using a pattern:
Project using a texture:
Once I started making designs on croquis, I gained a whole new perspective on fashion. For starters, I learned how important it is to consider all the different angles of clothing. I also began to recognize different types of clothing and distinguish how textures mix and match on clothing. These are all factors that improved my judgement for analyzing fashion designs and matching my own outfits.
I always love looking back at the designs I made in high school. Even though I wasn’t the most artistic person, it definitely makes me feel proud to have created them.
I’m genuinely sad that I didn’t continue taking fashion design classes in college. Being a journalism major, with minors in graphic design and marketing, I don’t have room in my schedule for those classes. But don’t worry, I still take art classes for my graphic design minor, and I still learn about colors and textures… just not exactly for fashion.
Here and Haute 