Impact of digital medium on creative expression of ready to wear fashion and apparel designers

Abstract

Traditionally, fashion and apparel designers have been working hands-on with the hand-drawn sketches, paper patterns, fabric drapes, fittings on body-forms to come up with their final designs, and eventually the garment prototype or sample. However, in this digital age of multimedia unification and mass production, designers are often faced with the challenge of how to best express their thoughts or ideas during the design process, and which medium to choose digital mediums that use computers, manual mediums for getting things done by hand, or the mix of digital and manual mediums. The aim of this research was to study and document the design process being followed by designers in the ready-to-wear fashion and apparel industry, the mediums these designers use during this process, why and how these mediums impact them. This study was conducted in two phases. The first was an exploratory research and the second was a descriptive research. This research was delimited to the study of designers working in the ready-to-wear fashion and apparel industry. Mixed methods research design, quantitative followed by qualitative study (quan à QUAL) was used for this research. A combination of purposive convenience sampling and discriminative snowball sampling was used. The first phase was a quantitative study, conducted using questionnaire. The results from the quantitative phase was used to formulate questions for the next phase of qualitative study. In the second phase, interviews and visual data gathered from twenty-two fashion and apparel designers from within India and abroad was used to formulate collective/multiple case studies during the qualitative phase of the research. The designers were enquired about their design process, and the impact that digital medium has on the process, also in terms of communication between the designer and the product developer who develops the final product, and in translating a design idea into the final apparel prototype the way it was intended by the designer.