Other things an Assistant Designer might do

In my experience there are always things that you will find in your job that you will not like to do. Like opening your email in the morning and replying to millions of email from people yin production, factory, an design. But that is part of the job, and hopefully when time pass you will eventually have your own assistant who will do that for you. Other duties that you might have as an assistant are:

-Setting up the showroom for presentation to buys.I remember working with this big company that had many licenses and small line and I used to work for one of them. My job as an Assistant Designer was to set up all the garments that were going to be presented to buyers, steam them and make sure we had all the garments from the line. That was a lot of fun to do.

-Assistant are also ask to organized fabric or swatch libraries,organize garment racks, and overall design room. I did that a lot and still do it if ask for it, so don't complain if you have to do it.

-Sometime you might be ask to go to the garment district and get some fabrics, trims or even buy inspirational garments and return them later.

What does an Assistant Designer do?

If you are considering to study fashion design, you are probably asking yourself, Will I be designing, draping or pattern making all day? All these factors depend on what career path in fashion you might want to start on. As I mentioned in one of my previous postings, most of the times students start working for the mass production world. Like Forever21, Gap, Jones Apparel, or probably small companies that have licenses for Wal-Mart and department stores. These are the most likely paths that students take in the beginning. Either starting out in a small company or not you will be most likely doing hte following things:

-helping to make tech packs or spec sheets for pre-production
this entails basically taking a garment and taking the measurements or it, making
sure that you add all the design details into the spec sheet, for instance pocket
measurements, tread color, buttons, type of stitch desired etc. Basically every
single detail that you can see in the garment. For most of the companies, specially
small ones, the assistant designers do the tech packs just for the production of
the production of the first proto sample and after that technical designer take
take care of the rest.

-helping on presentation boards that have to be presented to buyers or head design
team. This entails Internet research on new styles and tear sheets as inspiration
for boards. This task is not done frequently, some companies just do 1 presentation
for season.

-The most important task is sketching flats in illustrator. Normally the head designer has somethign done by hand and as I mentioned before most companies
are using technology now days to make flat sketches that can be easly edited
later on in the computer instead of done by hand. So this task is very important
for any assistant designer.

-Helping editing pictures as mood pages for presentation boards. Basically you have to have at least basic knowledge in Photo shop to be able to manipulate colors in
tear sheets from magazines to be used as inspirations. Sometimes the designer
wants to change an element in the picture to have the colors to changed to the color
ways already selected for the season, just for visual presentation purposes.

- Line sheets are very important. For many companies assistants help doing line sheets
wich are basically all the garments placed in one sheet with all there correspondent
info,as style#, suggested retail price, color, sizes, and prints.

-Sending linesheets and spec updates via email. Any updates that you make in the day
like, updating linesheets, spec sheets, sketches etc. All have to be sent to
correspondent team members at the end of each day. Being accurete and double
checking your work is very very important.

-When changes are to be done to any arriving proto garments, you will be ask to
search for any buttons, etc. and sew them. Take pictures of the garments when
head designer come from shipping for inspiration garments, and maybe later on
having to go and return those garments.

Keep tuned to see more tasks...

Life as an Assistant designer in LA

I moved to LA, about 6 months ago straight from NYC where I had started as an assistant designer in a great well known company. There were many reasons why I moved here, one of them was to explore the Junior market here in LA as a fashion designer. The jobs have been pretty tough out here, since the economy started going down. I have been doing some freelance work in companies like Guess and BCBG, and its been quite a journey.

One thing that I noticed here in LA, was that companies do whant to pay even $35k for an assistant, wich is pretty sad considering that the lifestyle is not much different from NYC when it comes to money.

Apparel companies in LA seem to have a different feel. The enviorment is defenitley more laid back and design-wise is more open and free. Once you go into the fashion world there so many other positions and career-wise you learn of no many oppportunities you can find out there. You just need to be the best!!