Have you ever wondered where famous fashion designers buy their high-end fabrics? Obviously, you will never see a famous fashion designer in your local fabric store. Designers who deal in high-end fashion and designer clothing will purchase their high fashion fabrics from an agent, manufacturer, or a wholesaler. Before working on a new collection the designer will first choose the fabric for that collection. How he goes about choosing that fabric is an interesting story.
The fashion industry is constantly changing and this year’s fashion design will be out of date within a year. Therefore, a fabric manufacturer will need to create a collection of fabrics a year in advance of when a designer will need those fabrics. This makes the fashion designers job a little bit more interesting because in reality these designers are only able to work with the fabrics that the manufacturer has decided upon the year before. This means that the style of fashion that you see every year will come from the creativity of the designers but the fabric choices will come from the creativity of the manufacturer.
There are very few fashion designers who create their own fabrics. There are however a few larger companies such as Adidas or Nike who do create their own fabrics. A well-known designer will have the option to request a specific color, dye, or special print. He will not, in most cases however, find a manufacturer will create a specific fabric specially woven for him.
Designers will choose various fabrics at a nearby fabric trade show. These fabric trade show’s normally take place just before the fashion week begins. This means that the designers are choosing fabric for their next collection during the week of showing their current collection. Each of the larger fabric manufacturers and suppliers will have a custom-built display and booth so that various designers can look through their collections.
The collection consist of large fabric swatches of different colors, dyes and prints. Once the designer has chosen the various fabrics that he wants then he can make a sample order. Going to any of these type of fabric trade shows is chaotic. Some designers avoid this chaos and prefer to work with a particular fabric manufacturer each year. They will instead have the agent or representative of the manufacturer visit them in their design office.
The representative will bring along various samples of their collection and the designer and his design team will choose the ones that they are interested in. The representative will then have the manufacturer send out fabric from the samples that chosen. The samples, or hangers, will allow the designer to narrow down which fabric they want to choose.
Once they have made their choices, the designer will then order the fabric and create a collection of garments. The garments will be displayed on their catwalk to potential buyers. The buyers will then purchase whatever garments they desire for their own boutiques. This is just a small example of what goes on behind the high fashion fabrics scenes when you buy a designer item of clothing.
Leave a Reply