Simple Fashion Design

by Candice Mancini
Fashion Design School Review Columnist

Whether you’re in fashion design school, plan to be, or are a recent grad you need to find your fashion design focus. Clothing or accessories? Men, women, or children? If women’s clothing design is it you’ll have a wide but competitive market. Many designers have differentiated themselves and achieved success by putting their personal stamp on simple designs.

Clothing Design Success

At twenty-four years old and barely out of fashion design school, Iranian-born clothing designer Nima Taherzadeh landed his women’s line at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. How did he do it?

Taherzadeh owes his success mostly to his incredible fashion design talent which he perfected in fashion design school. His ability to make simple lines beautiful and distinctive has also helped. As he put it in a Fashion Wire Daily interview, his clothing designs are “Effortless, simple, functional, wearable and modern.”

While more audacious styles can have their run (think 80s brightly-colored leg warmers) it seems that simple, classic designs have more staying power.

The Spectrum of Simple in Clothing Design

Nima is hardly the first to make it big as a ‘simple’ fashion designer. Simple - ranging from elegant to edgy and from high-priced to bargain - has enjoyed much success. In 2003 Isaac Mizrahi’s line fearlessly danced its way onto Target’s racks. The clothing design here was simple but hip, or as Mizrahi himself put it, “Holly Golightly in a cornfield.”

And before Mizrahi took his simply hip line to Target, fashion heavyweights Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, J. Crew, and Gap made their names with clean and classic design.

Whether you go for simple or elaborate designs a good fashion design school can help you perfect your own version of the clothing style you choose.

Sources:

Fashion Design Schools - 7 Tips to Find the Best
Nima’s Debut Collection Takes Saks By Storm
Isaac hits the Target: Isaac Mizrahi brings his couture panache to a new line of women’s clothing for the hippest of discount retailers

About the Author Candice Mancini is a writer and teacher with an unusual fashion sense that drives her to create her own clothing as well as recreate perfectly-good ready-made clothing. She has an M.A. in Education and a B.A. in English and history.

Posted on May 20, 2007 at 03:23 PM