The essence of designer fashion is creation. All brands that have a strong image worldwide are the result of the vision of its management and creative department. In terms of creation, some brands have at their head a strong, single designer who directs a creative team, while others have a strong team that is constantly innovating, improving and developing new products.

In most cases, fashion houses have strong teams that are coordinated by a fashion designer who takes on the role of the creative director, meaning that he or she is in charge of the so-called key experiential providers. These cover everything from the brand’s products and logo to the ambiance customers find in stores, the selling and the after-selling services.

Designers are intrinsically involved in the label’s vision and values and must find a happy place between their own aesthetic and the heritage and tradition of the brand. Therefore, creating new products is, in the end, a balancing act between tradition (keeping the brand’s core spirit) and modernity (discovering and developing new ways to reflect and influence the times through clothes, accessories, home décor and luggage).

Designers in the fashion field are experts who have complex sources of inspiration and who can translate a creative business vision in products that have both an emotional, aesthetic and cultural value, but also a strong financial, political and social value.

The two categories of fashion designers

Designers have the role to make the brand consistent and there two main types of fashion designers out there: The aristocratic type and the street-wise designer.

The aristocratic type

The aristocratic designer is a very French type, but it is also found in many other countries. Such designers are convinced that they have something to say and to bring to the world, irrelevant of the context of the world itself. Aristocratic designers consider themselves to be creators and don’t want to have many ties to industry elements such as functionality, trends, customers and prices. Designers in this category work only in up-down processes, being driven only by their creative vision and aesthetics. Some aristocratic designers actually take pride in not wanting to deal with the financial aspect of the industry. Many of them consider themselves to be artists: French artists don’t usually want people to know where they have studied or where they have been trained, in order to make it seem that their talents are God-given. This vision comes from the 19^th century, when, for the first time artists would suffer for their art. Before that, it was considered that the artist was influenced by a being higher than himself, and therefore, he did not have to bear the burden of his work, or that creating art was just a skill you would come to be good at through hard work.

The street-wise designer

Street-wise designers are very aware of what their customers want and are always looking for ways to give their customers a better experience and to land new clients. This Anglo-Saxon profile is driven by both a creative and a business vision. Street-wise designers usually have technical know-how and are engaged in the whole production process and are trying to come up with new ways to optimize it. Street-wise designers take pride in their training and consider it to be relevant to their aesthetic and designs. In fact, in London or New York schools of design, aspects like merchandising and marketing are strongly emphasized on.

Fashion designers such as Issey Miyake fall into the first category, while designers such as Michael Kors fall in the second.

Art and economics

In the fashion world, there is an ongoing conversation on whether clothing can be art and whether a happy medium can be found, where a garment is both relevant from an artistic point of view and wearable at the same time.

The strong commercial clothes and accessories have make it hard to attribute artistic value to clothes, which is why the designers who are able to mix powerful artistic communication and to have a business mind are to be praised.

The quotidian and aesthetic characteristics of fashion make it a very complex field, where know-how and a balanced attitude are the key features displayed by winners.

Fraquoh and Franchomme

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