Fashion Design Drawing

FASHION TECHNIQUE

Technique in fashion drawing is more important than in any other form of commercial art. It is the principal thing which makes fashion work differ entirely from any other style of drawing, and which sets the fashion artist apart from her brother brush. For this reason the fashion artist is seldom anything but a fashion artist. Clearly, a proper understanding of the peculiar technique of the craft is the first thing the fashion aspirant must acquire. But it must not be imagined that the rules of fashion technique are as the laws of the Medes and Persians. On the contrary, they are almost as much subject to change and modification, in their details at least, as fashion itself. And the successful fashion artist must keep herself informed of the tendencies and trend of technique just as much as she does of the changing modes and fashions which it is her job to delineate.

WHAT TECHNIQUE IS

The student naturally will have already learnt to draw with some degree of proficiency: in all probability well enough to have earned the title of artist. Nevertheless, a student's execution of a fashion drawing would differ vastly from that of a practised fashion artist. As a test, let the student prepare a drawing of a woman in evening dress, not from some other drawing, but from life. Then compare the work with, say, a Vogue drawing. Note the points of difference, and try to understand just why the drawings differ.

Now compare both drawings with a commercial fashion drawing, for example a Debenham drawing in the newspaper. Again there will be a difference, but in another way.

Now what distinguishes the student's work from both the other two is technique; that is to say, the manner of execution,

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rather than the quality. Both the other sketches will exhibit the special technique of fashion drawing, though each in a different way. The student's, on the other hand, although quite good as a straightforward drawing, possibly lifelike in its fidelity, will, in all probability, be entirely lacking in that essential. Consequently, as

a fashion drawing it fails.

In her innocence the student may consider her work the better, and the fashion drawings untrue and exaggerated, which is true in a sense. For the student will have drawn exactly what she sees, whereas the fashion artists have drawn something more. But then the untrained artist only sees what is on the surface; and if one took her sketch to any advertising manager he would most likely say, and rightly so, that he could never hope to sell anything from it.

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