Every fashion designer wants to create beautiful outfits that have the perfect fit, and make customers go ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’. Creating this sort of magic doesn’t just happen, it takes a lot of hard work and quite some steps to achieve.
Nick Verroes of Nikolaki Design, in this video, talks on the 10 fundamental steps to creating an outfit that is nothing short of perfect. Here they are;
10 Fundamental Steps to Creating an outfit
1. Sketch your Design:
For any design you want to create, always begin with doing a few quick sketches. Sketches are like you or work in progress, they help you decide all the features if your garment.
Always begin with a sketch!
It helps you know if to use a short sleeve or a flowing one, an asymmetric hem or not. All the changes you need to make to your outfits happen in the sketch. It isn’t until you have that ‘aha!’ moment that you have found a design to make.
After you have sketched and gotten a fabulous design to suit your fabric, create a fashion illustration with colour so you can use it for your collection board. Your sketch can also be used for your Instagram because it looks great.
2. Draping:
When it comes to draping, if your garment is symmetrical i.e the right side is the same as the left, you should drape only one side so you don’t waste your muslin. Put in al the details on just that one side – the dart, the neckline, the waistline, etc.
Draping makes your creativity come alive.
Draping drawing helps you change your idea to something better because you can see it on a dress form. In draping, however, always use a fabric that is similar to the one you will use for your finished design, for example, if your finished design is a silk duchess fabric, use a muslin fabric to drape the design.
3. Pattern your Design:
Here, you take the pieces of the muslin of your drape and put them into your pattern paper. You can also do some technical drawings in this phase.
4. Cut your Muslin Dress:
Take the paper pattern you have created and cut them into a muslin. Lay your muslin out and lay your paper pattern on it then cut out the design.
5. Sew the First Sample:
Now that you have your design on muslin fabric, it’s time to sew the muslin. This time, you have to sew out the entire outfit unlike in draping where it was only one side you draped. It is in this step that you make corrections.
You fix every error you see from the muslin sample and mark the things you need to fix on it. For example, if the waistline is too low, mark it on the muslin. This will help you fix your fit.
Ideally, this fitting with muslin should be done on a real body, for example, a model, but if you don’t have a model you can do it on your dress form. All the corrections you might need to make to your design is the reason you should use a cheap fabric for your first sample. Just imagine making a major mistake with your real fabric that ruins it.
6. Correct your Pattern:
Now, take all your patterns and fix them. If you reduced the measurement of your shoulder, lowered the neckline, etc, do that in the pattern as well whatever corrections you make to your sample should be reflected on your pattern as well.
7. Sew a Second Sample:
Yes, this step might seem like extra unnecessary work but it is important. This is to make sure your design is right especially if you made a lot of corrections to the first sample.
Do as many samples as you need to get your design right.
If you only made 1 or 2 corrections in your first sample then you can skip this step, if not, see a second, third, fourth, or fifth sample till you get it right.
8. Cut your Dress in the Actual Fabric:
When you have gotten your design right, cut the pieces from your pattern until your real fabric. If you need to do interfacing, fusing, or any other thing, you can do all that in this step.
Once you finish cutting all the pieces in the final fabric for the final outfit then move on.
9. Sew Dress:
If you happen to be your own seamstress/sewer, hand over the sewing of the dress to yourself but if not, hand them over to your seamstress/sewer to create the magic. After that, you can move on to creating future magic with new sketches.
10. The Completed Garment:
Now you have your final outfit. It’s time to put your creation out there for your clients to see and purchase, or it’s time to hand over the bespoke outfit to the client that ordered it.
There you have it, the 10 steps it takes to create an outfit.
