Day to day in fashion

Immediately after our collection is finalized for the season (although it’s never REALLY finalized until bulk production…) the first thing we do is request photo samples from our vendors.  We take time to go through the collections and decide what garments we want to photograph for our catalog (most of our catalog is just CAD spreads, and there are only about 6-10 model photos).

We will often request twice as many garments as we need to photograph, sometimes more, as often items come in looking really crummy, don’t arrive in time, or they get dropped/changed between the time we request them and their arrival.  Our lead time for photo samples ranges between 6-8 weeks, but no matter how much time we give we are ALWAYS following up with vendors on a daily basis as the photo shoot approaches to review status and push them to make sure their arrival is timely.

Since fabric isn’t made, dyed, printed, knitted, etc quite yet, vendors will use whatever “available” (this is a term we throw around a lot and refers to fabrics – or other items-  that they have immediate access to in their factories or in the market that they can access for small quantity use) fabrics they can find that is as close as possible to what the actual garment will be.  Patterns, prints, plaids and such will be digitally printed and can come out looking amazing or can come out looking horrendous, thus why we request more samples than needed.

In some cases, we wind up making photo samples in our office.  The shirt below did not get done in time for our upcoming shoot, so we found a solid white tee that was close to the one we are running, printed the design on heat seal transfer paper, and are hand stitching the embellishments and design details.  Yeah, I know, it’s seems a little crazy and maybe even ghetto, but let me tell you – it’s better than no sample, and believe me you would be surprised at how well it photographs!

Prepping for Photo Shoot - hand making a photo sample is not an uncommon occurence...

One season we even had to sew a few skorts from scratch…the vendor was able to digitally print the fabric, but was not going to be able to get them cut and sewn in time, so they sent us the fabric and our technical designer whipped up some skorts…not ideal but you do what needs to be done!

It’s days like yesterday that I love the fact that I work in the fashion industry, and I just know this is the job I’m meant to do!  A week ago we were talking about how tie dye is all the rage in fashion lately and has been all over the runway.  Since my team is all crafty and creative folks, we thought “I can do that.”  Some blank white canvasses and a few boxes of RIT dye later, we had some masterpieces! The party was a blast too, but next time instead of doing it in the middle of the day as a long lunch activity, we would have cut our day short and done a tie dye happy hour party!  Here are my personal favorites:

Tie Dye & Batik Scarf done by dripping candle wax onto white fabric before dying in purple and then scrunching up and splattering with black dye.

Tie Dye Scarf, done by simply tying rubber bands around white slub jersey and dying with 2 colors

Tye Die Tank, done by scrunching up a white tank and applying a small amount of black dye to exposed areas. When washing out, the solid white portions turned grey. An inexpensive fashionable grunge look!

Just this season we got set up with software called WFX (World Fashion Exchange).  It is a PLM (product lifestyle management) software system and is SO amazing…the screenshots below don’t do it justice.  This system is how we manage all of the tech packs for garments, approvals, sample ordering, reporting, and much more.  We used to manage everything in a billion Excel spreadsheets, and it was a mess – when something changed, it had to be updated in 5 different spreadsheets.  It was a mess and a lot of work.  This database like set up saves a lot of time and work while also tracking things more efficiently.  Here is a quick rundown on a tech pack:

WFX Tech Pack Home Page

Click on the image to get a legible view, but here’s a quick rundown on the capabilities of the software.  Circled on the left are the details for the tech pack – you can add more but the basics are colorways, care, image and annotation (allowing you to upload CADs to call out details in garments/patterns), file upload/download, specs.  Circled along the top are various tabs that allow you to track the status of the garment, a log that tracks everything modified on the tech pack, a messaging center where you can communicate w/ your vendors on that specific style, BOM (bill of materials) that allows you to add all of the “materials” required to make your garment (buttons, zippers, hang tags, poly bags, fabrics, etc), and costing where your vendors can input pricing and it will auto calculate all of your margins frombased off of your sell price.  Wow, as I write about this I realize that this is only the smallest fraction of what the software does.  More details will have to come later or this will wind up being one lengthy post…

I’ve always been a firm believer that shoes say a lot about people.  Don’t get me wrong, I have my favorite comfortable but boring kicks that I put on, and if you were to judge me based on those you might think I was a pretty boring person.  But most of the time, my feet are parallel to my personality – fun, unique and eclectic.  My coworkers are no exception, and last week it was a great day when we realized that 3 out of 4 of us (and the 4th person is a male, so it’s fair his shoes didn’t match ours – he does however have some very unique soles) we wearing leopard shoes!  It of course called for a photo:

It wasn't planned, I swear!

…seeing your design on TV!  It’s not terribly glamorous, but let me tell you that it feels great to see your designs out in the real world, and TV is even better!  Here’s professional golfer Kevin Na wearing a fantastic polo I designed.  This garment is actually one of my personal favorites from the Fall 2010 collection!  Woot!

Kevin Na at the Arnold Palmer Invitational 2010 (photo credit Getty Images from abcnews.com)

Kevin Na at the Arnold Palmer Invitational 2010 (photo credit David Cannon / Getty Images North America)

Although I’m not nor have ever been trained as a techincal designer, I do think all the steps and processes that are followed to make sure a garment fits right are interesting.  My knowledge of this portion of the design process is somewhat limited and I’d like to expand it (although it’s hard to find time in my work day to learn new things) but I will share a little bit about what I do know.

Depending on the silhouette of a garment and/or our past experience with a factory, we will request various numbers of “protos” which will be fit and measured.  A new silhouette will without a doubt require at least a 1st proto, just as a new factory will have to submit at minimum 1st protos for all garment silhouettes they are working on.  When the garment comes in, it is first measured at the defined Points of Measure (POM) and the data is put into a spreadsheet that will automatically calculate if the measurements are out of tolerance.

Points of Measure - each has a code and a description, plus a set measurement with an allowed amount of tolerance from the Spec.

Depending on where the measurement is, the tolerance will vary.  The opening in an armhole will have a smaller amount of tolerance than the opening at the bottom of the garment.  When too many measurements are “out of tolerance”, we will request a 2nd proto and in some cases we will even request a 3rd proto.

In addition to measuring, we also fit many of the new silhouettes to ensure the pattern doesn’t just measure right but fits well on a human body.  We have both a male and female fit model so we are always fitting to the same figure.  Here you can see comments that were made for the fit on a sweater and how those comments are conveyed to the factory:

This photo shows (although hard to see) that there is an excess of fabric in the back neck. Remember, a photo can be worth 1000 words especially when communicating with people whose 1st language is not English.

This week we had a great trainer visit us from NedGraphics, the company that produces the fashion design softare we use.  We were well overdue for a software upgrade, and our upgrade included 2 days of training.  Woot!  It was an amazing 2 days of education and we learned all about the new tools that the software has to offer (some of them were actually just new to us…).  I will share with you here one new tool we learned as well as a few of the basics of one of the many programs we use.

Storyboard & Cataloging
This program is used to both “fill” garments with patterns as much as it is used to put together presentations.  I will show you here how we use it to “fill” a garment.

Storyboard & Cataloging: Filling a Garment

I’ve circled a few things that I will review briefly.  Garments are brought in filled with color based on where we need to put different patterns or where those patterns need to go in different directions.  I show a few steps of “filling” a garment from the original multicolored shirt, to defining what direction the pattern needs to go (straight up and down in the body, and at a slight angle in the sleeves – defined by the arrows that are circled), and to the final “filled” shirt.  Garments are brought in from your “article library” and patterns from the “fabric” library.  Everything can be scaled and manipulated based on the size and needs of your garment.

The new tool that we learned in S&C has by far been my favorite and without a doubt the one over which we oohed and awed over.  That would be the 3d mapping capacity of the program!  We don’t have the software to create the images to be mapped, but we have a library of basic items that we can fill using our patterns.  See below:

3D Mapping in Storyboard and Cataloging

The item (ie tie) is pulled in from the 3D Book, then your pattern is pulled from your fabric book.  It’s was my first experience with 3d mapping like this and I’ll be honest, it was a little bit like magic.

Last week I posted about the Art Pimp / spray paint stencil jacket that I made for my friend Mr. Eric Matelski. This past weekend it was worn as he accepted his Mastermind Award from The Westword. He, along with myself, was very pleased with the outcome!

Playing Vanna White with the Art Pimp suit

It holds up to 36 business cards

Right now as we are deep in the design phase, I spend a lot of time using softward called Ned Graphics.  It’s a suite of fashion design software not unlike Adobe.  There are 6 different programs that we use:

Color Reduction and Cleaning
Design and Repeat
Easy Coloring
Easy Weave
Easy Knit
Storyboard and Cataloging

The easiest to explain and learn is by far easy coloring.  While it is a quite simple tool, it is also very powerful.  Here’s your quick demo.

Easy Coloring by Ned Graphics

You can see I’ve circled 4 colors on the right – this pallet that is within the circle represents the current colorway that is being shown in the pattern to the left.  You can quickly create an infinite number of different colorways to see what colors look best in your pattern and in what positions.  What if I flip the red and the white?  Well, I will just create another colorway and see how it looks.  Here below you can see what the same pattern looks like with a different colorway selected:

Easy Coloring by Ned Graphics

We have previously matched all of the colors for each of our collections (called color standards) to our printer, so when we print the patterns, the colors quite close to how they will look once made from actual fabric.

Easy Coloring is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Ned Graphics suite, and what I’ve shown you here is a mere sliver of of that tip.  This software package is quite powerful and you will learn more of what it can do in future posts.

I was recently commissioned to create a jacket for a good friend of mine who has coined himself as an “art pimp” – he helps promote artists, curates and is also an artist himself – check him out at www.artpimponline.com.   In addition to a fashionable jacket, he wanted it to be functional.  Now you’re idea of functional and his idea may be two different things, but what he wanted for function was the ability to hold multiple business cards inside the jacket so he could “pimp” out all of the artists he represents.  The concept was similar to how shady men in NY hustle gold watches in their jackets.

To start, I wanted to get his logo on the jacket – I did so in a quite labor intensive but effective way.  I printed his logo on full label sheets and proceeded to cut it out like a stencil.

Here is the stencil "stuck" and then taped onto the jacket.

The next step was to fully cover the jacket (spray paint will mist the entire thing if this is not done) with whatever material you have – could be old sheets, newspaper, I happened to have sheets of stryofoam nearby so I just grabbed those.

The entire jacket is covered and I have sprayed the stencil area, doing enough passes to get a solid "print"

And there you have it, wait for the paint to dry and peel off to reveal your masterpiece.  Yes, your stencil is done – one time use only for this type of project.  I realize you could screen print it (not as accesible for everyone) which would be best if you needed to make more.  You’re also thinking “why not make the stencil on cardstock or something reusable?” – well folks, I tried this and you just can’t get the fine detailing – the paint “creeps” under all of the edges.  The sticky label works best for great detailing.

Post stencil removal

For the final touch, I wanted to add “paint splatters” since my friend is a painter.  I sprayed a bunch of the spray paint into an old cottage cheese container, took an old paint brush and then (for lack of a better word) beat it against my hand where the metal part meets the bristles.  This “shook” drops of paint off and splattered them onto the jacket.

Paint splatters on the jacket

Art Pimp Jacket with Paint Splatters

Art Pimp Stencil

For the “pimp” aspect of the jacket, I sewed 2 rows of velcro strips into each side of the jacket.  I took plastic trading card sleeves and attached sticky velcro to the top of those to make them removeable from the jacket for washing or they can be easily replaced once worn out.  The Art Pimp now has the capacity to carry up to 36 different business cards for all of his artists.  Brilliant!

Jacket is ready for "pimping"