Youth Fashion Changes Mean Opportunity for Designers

"I'm very particular," said Maisy Gellert, a third-grade student in New York, to The New York Times. "Sevens are the only jeans I actually wear."
Children are becoming pretty choosy about the clothing designs they will wear. Pink is no longer the only color seen in young girls' wardrobes. The changing face of children's fashion design points toward a maturing of taste -- a getting-older-sooner mentality which, for better or worse, is creating opportunity in fashion design. New York especially is a popular locale for this trend.

Children's Fashion Growing

Some children's fashion design stores and trade shows have grown 10-15% per year consistently for years on end, thanks to this growing trend in children's clothing design. And the fashion merchandising that goes with it is incredible: handbags, jewelry, hair clips, and sunglasses are just a few of the fashion merchandising items that many young children "must have" with their clothing designs.

Becoming a Children's Fashion Designer

The training for children's clothing design and fashion merchandising is the same as the training to become a designer of adult clothing. At fashion design school, students are trained through intensive fashion courses, like these (taken from an actual fashion school catalog):

• Creative Design and Analysis
• Fashion Sketching
• Patternmaking
• Principles of Fashion Marketing

After graduation, you can start designing children's fashions right away, finding a job or interning at a children's fashion house. Or, like many famous designers, you can begin with adult designs, and eventually add children's clothing designs to your fashion lines. Calvin Kline, Donna Karan, and Paul Smith are just a few examples of this successful approach.
Sources
The New York Times
AIU

Joe Cooper is a freelance education and technology writer and edits medical literature. He holds a bachelor's in American Literature from UCLA.