To bring your ideas to fruition you also need business skills, says Olivia Kelly

There was a car ad on TV not so long ago that featured the designer Jean Paul Gautier. In the ad he draws a quick sketch of a dress ads a splash of colour, hands the sketch to some far more lowly person and, quick as you like, there's the dress, exactly as Jean Paul envisaged it, draped on someone leggy and lovely.

Unfortunately, in the real world this is not how fashion design works.

Big ideas are all very well and you may have a notebook bulging with sketches of your own personal vision, but to bring your ideas to fruition you need to learn the technical and the business skills of the fashion industry.

"The practical skills of garment construction will be a big part of any good fashion design course," says Lorraine Egan of Enterprise Ireland.

"You have to learn how to make and cut patterns, the construction (cutting and sewing) of the garment itself. You need an understanding of textiles, fibre content, new developments in microfibres and if you're going to work in industry you have to obtain a knowledge of how the whole mass production process works."

The majority of the fashion industry is concerned with producing affordable practical clothing for the mass market, rather than one-offs or haute couture. Even is your ultimate goal is to produce your own label, very few people get that far without gaining some experience with an established designer.

"Many graduates will start off working within industry as a 'junior' for a designer," Egan says. "They will be very much working as part of a team, the design team, who in turn work with the marketing team and the production team."

Juniors work alongside the senior designers, Egan says, sitting in on design meetings, helping decide on shapes, looking at colours, choosing fabrics before putting the designs into production. With experience, designers can go on to develop their own business, with some setting up design consultancies.

Even at its highest end fashion design is more of a business than an art. Designers must develop business and marketing skills if they are to survive in industry.

"It's not enough to be artistic, you need to be level-headed," Mary Cashman, principal of Mallow College of Design and Tailoring, says. "The business side of things is where most people fail."

Most fashion design courses do involve a business component, however if you chose one that doesn't, a follow-up business course would be advisable.

Two main fashion design courses are available through the CAO, at the NCAD and Limerick IT. There are also a number of private, fee-paying, courses including the Mallow tailoring course and the Grafton Academy of Dress Design. Some private courses concentrate on specialist areas of the industry, such as knitwear, woven textiles or printed textiles.

Some VECs also have PLC courses in aspects of fashion design.