Anyone with fashion design experience, specifically software

Post Reply New Topic

Anyone here in the field/in school or with experiance know anything about the kind of software someone might use to design clothing (shirts specifically). Not talking adobe stuff to do the designs and graphic ts, but the actual clothing itself.

I did some googling and seemed to find 3 pieces of software mentioned often.

C-Design
Fashion Toolbox
Design Fashion Pro

C-Design seemed the most professional, they also don't list a price for their software, just ask for contact info for a salesperson to get ahold of you, meaning it's probably $1,000+. The other 2 are around what would be expected, $2-300.

Anyone have recomendations on software? One more prefered over the other?

Also kind of curious how difficult it is to pick something like that up and learn. A friend is asking me about it. I tend to want to think that there is a reason there are fashion degrees, it takes years and a lot of knowledge on tailoring to design clothes. But could the right software give someone with a good idea, dedication and money help someone out?

I studied fashion in New York at FIT and all our patternmaking was via the flat pattern method (life size paper) or draping. Doing it on paper is not difficult and you'd have to understand all the same principles in order to do it with software. The problem with designing on software (if the person wants to produce patterns) is printing the patterns - it takes a really big printer to do it. I'd imagine that the only use for software would be if you were at a fairly large patternmaking company and needed to turn out many different sizes for each design.

I mean you could conceptualize your ideas in some sort of software, but ultimately it has to be drawn and tweaked on paper as a pattern or in muslin for draping and then manually transferred to paper as a pattern.

It doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe it helps. If it's someone just getting into design, they need to study textile science, history of design, patternmaking and draping. Expensive software I don't think would be a good step. But then I'm making some assumptions.

Doesnt directly answer it but good info!

I think what my friend thinks (and kinda what I thought too) is that there are companies that you could go to with patterns or an idea and they would do the production.
That's where I was thinking a software program would help. Something where it would take a design he did and give the pattern dimensions it would take and put them in a format he could then bring to a production company to produce.

Yeah, if he can draw his ideas correctly and knows how to render different fabrics, any draper or patternmaker could make a pattern from it. He should understand the standards of drawing fashion designs and then, if he feels the need maybe pursue the software route, but honestly, it's a fairly low tech process.