Vanessa Camelia – Delivery Day Summary

Summary Getting It Right First Time

 

Guest Speaker – Vanessa Camelia

 

 

 

Topics

 

1) Design and Creativity

 

I have attended a range of Fashion-Enter’s Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) projects at a wide cross section of audiences ranging from secondary schools to students at HE and FE institutions.

 

I under took three main areas of discussions one being Design and Creativity.

 

My back ground is in Fashion Design.  I stated with a (BTEC National Diploma in Fashion Design and Technology) at the London College of Fashion and then fast tracked straight to degree level at the University College for the Creative Arts Rochester. I graduated with a 2.1 in Fashion Design.

 

My time spent at LCF gave me my first insight into the world of fashion and enabled me to develop my skills in pattern cutting, grading, and design.  It was not until I went to University that I fully became aware of the vast amount of skills that is needed to succeed in the fashion design industry. 

 

I learnt the importance of having a business background as well as a very strong creative side.  It was during my three year degree that I developed my skills in design and become accustomed to working with C.A.D. I found that my skills mainly lied within designing collections and not so much making them as I discovered that pattern cutting is predominantly maths based and this is not my strong point! I also discovered that I was very interested in the world of trend prediction and found it a to be an area that suited my skills. After graduating I went to work for various designers still not fully aware that this is what I actually wanted to do. 

 

I went on to work with well known designers such as Maria Grachvogel, Shelley Fox and Shelia Maloney as well as working for a high street company – Urban Girls and Gotham Angels that supplied design to TOPSHOP, Miss Selfridge, Etam and Warehouse.

 

After finally realising that both these areas were not areas that I wished to peruse, I continued my journey and found to my joy that there was a job that brought together my impeccable organisational skills, creative skills, management skills, development skills and interpersonal skills.  I enjoy working and developing FC and FE, travelling, working with so many different people in the industry, it’s the perfect job.

 

 

 

 

 

2) Fashion-Enter and FashionCapital

 

My main role and objective was to bring Fashion-Enter and FashionCapital to the student’s attention both a school and college levels.

 

FashionCapital is a free resource for the industry and contains thousands of articles all of which are specifically aimed at the designer or student.  With that in mind FashionCapital has been specifically designed for this purpose.

 

I spoke primarily about the importance of having a greater awareness that there are many different areas of the fashion industry to work in and that to limit yourself to a ‘designer role’ is quite limiting to securing a job within the industry.

 

I spoke about the importance of networking and introduced them to the forums on FashionCapital this is an excellent way to network with other industry bodies and we have seen that many relationships have been built up through the forums.  I asked if all the students would write a profile about themselves which we then uploaded onto fashioncapital. I also spoke about the importance of P.R. and promotion.

 

My main duty has been to work closely alongside Jenny Holloway to help create a finished product.  Whilst we undertook a six week programme at Park Langley School for Boys we worked through the designing of a garment right through to the finished product.  I felt that it was crucial for students to get an understanding of how the industry works – whilst colleges teach what is needed to ‘become’ a designer they are not necessarily able to give a through overview of the industry and actually there is a gap in the curriculum.  I found it extremely rewarding to see that these students from the schools were genuinely interested and those that weren’t were opened up to the possibility of working within the industry as they simply had no clue that their were so many options available to them.

 

Trend Prediction:

 

My main objective was to speak on Trend Prediction which is an area that many students are unaware of simply because it is a difficult side to the industry to break into.   Trend Prediction is a vital part of the design concept.  The industry is a multi million pound business and we at Fashion-Enter have researched an array of trend organisation that charge huge amounts of money  to view the latest trends, so we decided that we would set up two dedicated sections on both sites.  We have received multiple compliments from our users and readers informing us of their importance within the design role.

 

 

 

Vanessa Camelia.