Fashion is simply wearable art and if fashion design is your calling, you’re ready for a career as a fashion designer. If you’ve been dressing up your dolls as a child and offering unsolicited advice to family and friends on how to dress, it’s time you started looking up catalogues of fashion and design schools and colleges. A design institute gives you that edge to jumpstart your career. You may have been sketching since a very young age and going textile shopping with your favorite relative, but only a fashion designing institute can help you master your skills.

A fashion designer’s life is not just runways and glamour. There’s a lot of hard work involved before the models get on to that stage and showcase your collection. It requires years of study and hands-on experience, which teaches you about textiles, dyeing and printing techniques, different cuts and styling. That’s not all; as a trained fashion designer, you are expected to understand things like running a profitable business, performing under pressure, while keeping clients and staff happy. You’ll also need to have knowledge of fashion history, trends for past and upcoming seasons and learn to tweak these according to your own sense of color and style. This is where a professional fashion designing institute or academy comes in handy.

Fashion design is, strictly, not just about clothes. A fashion academy also helps you figure out your interest in designing shoes, jewellery and a lot more. A design institute lets you create something from start to finish, starting with a sketch and right up to the production stage.

Fashion design is all about teamwork and that’s the first lesson to learn. Initially, you may begin your career as a fashion intern, which allows you to work with an established designer and learn on the job. Soon, you’ll be interacting with buying houses, overseeing the work of craftspersons and sourcing fabrics in tiny lanes and bylanes. It also requires travelling to remote locations within the country to find that one particular craftsperson whose work you like or making it to the runways of Milan or Paris to catch trends as they happen. Working as a fashion designer is an all-consuming passion that requires everything you’ve got.

 Do you really need a fashion design degree? Yes, there are no two ways about that, if you want to be part of the competitive industry. A degree from a fashion design university or academy gives you the technical expertise, including learning about human anatomy, marketing, computer-aid design, clothing technology, besides the basics of draping. These are useful if you want to build your own fashion brand or join a retail brand as a designer.

Before you sign up to a fashion design institute, check how reputed they are, the alumni and what the course teaches you. And, remember to keep sketching, and dreaming!