As a continuation of my Parsons x Teen Vogue online class, I began another course today. Titled ‘Understanding Fashion Production’, this course focused on the production cycle. The production cycle begins with thinking of an idea and design and ends with the consumer purchasing and, hopefully, loving the final product. More specifically, the course introduced the five main steps to this overarching production cycle: formulating the business plan, sample creating, factory preparation, working with the factory, and making the sale. Like yesterday’s course, each example included a series of videos and text, as well as a related piece of industry advice. The videos featured Angela Gao, an independent fashion designer and a faculty member at Parsons, and Brandon Maxwell, a fashion designer whose brand has recently been on the rise. At the bottom of my post are some snip-its of the videos I was watching. I found the lessons from today very interesting because many of them introduced things that I had never heard of before. For example, when submitting your sizing to a factory for production, each measurement is allowed to have a certain standard deviation. Because these items are being produced in a factory, mistakes are bound to happen, so the standard deviation allows these types of trivial mistakes to reduce both fabric waste and lost time. Another reason why I found this course so interesting was because it focused on the wide-scale, mass production of garments, an area that I had not known much about before today. Though I plan to continue and complete this course over the summer, next week, I am headed to Louis Cherry Architecture in downtown Raleigh. I cannot wait to see what I’ll learn there!
