Fashion designers are often hunting for inspiration, or simply looking for better ways to make their design process more efficient and faster.
The challenge with an industry like fashion designing is that tastes, trends, market statistics, and technology is changing at a very fast pace. Designers and fashion students often need to rely on the latest software to make their design process more effective.
All kinds of people involved in fashion designing – hobby designers, professionals and even students – use apps to stay at the top of their fashion game.
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Here are the top 10 apps that are a must-have for fashion designers to make their job easier, fun and exciting!
--> Also read: 10 Must-Know Fashion Industry Terms For Every Fashion Design Student
1. Vogue Runway
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This fashion design app was created by the leading fashion publication Vogue.
It is absolutely free of cost and gives fashion designers an opportunity to take inspiration from famous designers’ collections from all over the world. The app also streams online fashion shows that are often not available on other streaming platforms.
Fun fact: Vogue Runway also acts as a literal archive of decades of fashion collections over 100 seasons, consisting of 12,000 fashion shows and 1 million runway looks.
2. Pret-A-Template
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Pret-A-Template is the ultimate tool for fashion sketching. It provides an immersive sketching experience to every fashion designer.
With a range of templates as choices, you can select skin, hair, body, clothes, shoes, bags, makeup, colour pallet etc. in order to create your best designs.
Fun Fact: The idea for Pret-A-Template was born in a classroom, for showing steps in fashion illustration to large groups of students. It later evolved into the fashion tool app it is today.
3. CLO-3D
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This cloth design app helps any designer visualize any design and pattern in 3D so that it helps them make final decisions.
It starts with selecting a 3D body-avatar or dress form, which are available in a variety of shapes and sizes. Then you can either import your own patterns or draw them directly in CLO. Finally, you get to select fabric, pair each seam of the garment and see it all come together in 3D. You can then fine-tune your designs and change the pattern in real time.
There are Udemy courses dedicated to teaching how to use the app like Clo3D for Beginners.
Fun Fact: CLO 3D is a great way to sustainable fashion because you save on errors done on real fabric and paper.
4. Adobe Illustrator
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Adobe Illustrator is a game-changing cloth design app that enables fashion and technical designers to create a wide range of printed and digital images.
The app has an easy-to-use interface and supports in-panel editing. Users can import photos and trace the objects in them. It is a scalable app that works flawlessly on any platform.
Fun Fact: You can learn to work with Adobe Illustrator online via platforms like Domestika withintroductory courses like Introduction to Adobe Illustrator for Fashion Design. Skill Share also has an exciting course called Adobe Illustrator for Fashion (CAD II).
--> Also read: The Secret of Successful Job Opportunities In Fashion Design
5. Shopify
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“If you can dream it, you can sell it with Shopify” and that’s exactly what this e-commerce app enables designers to do.
You can set up your own online store on Shopify and sell your products easily with a few taps and clicks. You can do payment, order confirmations, marketing, shipping and everything related to retail business on Shopify.
Fashion Nova, Roden Gray, Taylor Stitch, Peter Manning NYC are some of the top brands that made it big on this app.
Fun Fact: With zero coding expertise, designer start-up owners can create an online store, or even sell in person, manage inventory, track payments and orders using Shopify.
6. Pinterest
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Fashion Designers can organise their content on Pinterest to attract the attention of users who love viewing styles on the app. The best part is users can save content for later, giving your designs the exposure it needs, and even potential customers.
By putting together outfit inspiration ideas, and appealing to a wide section of audience from different ethnicities and body types, fashion designers can make good use of Pinterest to drive traffic to their online business.
Fun Fact: Customers are more likely to make buying decisions when they land on clothing websites through Pinterest than other platforms.
7. WGSN
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Which designer wants to spend time and effort designing a new product only to find out the style is no longer trending in the market? WGSN prevents this crucial mistake by allowing fashion designers to understand which designs and styles are driving hot sales.
Backed by data science and complex qualitative and quantitative methodology, designers can access accurate forecasts about sales and buyer insights and design clothes accordingly.
Fun Fact: 6500+ clients including startups and Fortune 500 companies depend on the forecasts of WGSN to make their product decisions.
--> Also read: Top 10 Successful Fashion Designers in India
8. Repsketch
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This app is for the designers who experience block or simply do not have the time to start technical sketches and fashion illustrations from scratch.
You can customize and re-purpose existing illustrations into superior vector sketches on Repsketch. You can make your own changes to existing designs and add that unique twist to make your designs stand out from the rest.
Fun fact: The app has a wide selection of sketches made by the community of top technical fashion designers that is shareable and free to export in web-friendly formats.
9. Meetup
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Meetup is just a platform that allows people to connect over common interests or simply make new connections.
But it is also popular among fashion designers where Fashion Design Meetup groups happen all around the world. Designers can simply check out the nearest Meetup in their locality, which is usually a great place to make connections, discuss collaborations, designs, business ideas etc.
Fun fact: Meetup is also being used increasingly by designers to have virtual meetups with potential consumers and understand what they want me directly by interacting with them.
10. Valentina
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Valentina is an open-source software, free for use by designers who want to work with parametric patterns.
What you can’t achieve in sketches via CAD systems, you can do with Valentina. Based on mathematical formulae, you can make affordable designs, styles and patterns. You don’t even have to use a virtual pen or paper!
Fun fact: The idea for Valentina was inspired by the founder’s mother who was a cutter by profession. The app and the entire project were named after her.
--> Also read: A Complete Guide To Fashion Designing Career
Learn Fashion Design – Professionally
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Now that you know about apps and online platforms that enable you to overcome blocks in fashion designing, or simply help you with your amazing sketches, you can bonus it with a fashion design course that will prepare you for the fashion industry.
One of the best institutes for Skill Development Training in India, Aditya Centre of Excellence (ACE) offers affordable, quality education and training in various Fashion Design Courses.
It has mainly 3 courses: Fashion Design Intensive, Apparel Merchandising and Embroidery and Fashion Craft which trains students extensively for various job roles like
- Fashion Designer
- Apparel Merchandiser
- Hand Embroider
ACE offers carefully curated training programmes based on the current demands of the industries and market trends. The courses are NSDC (National Skill Development Corporation) qualified. It is the best option for fashion designing courses after 12th.
Courses are offered in hybrid mode i.e., both online and offline. So, students have an opportunity to interact with instructors as well as clear doubts and queries. This helps them have the best of both online learning and offline instruction.
