Fashion collection development from A-Z

Paper cuts, magazines torn, pencils, textile cuts, glue and coffee — that’s what you’d ran into, if you happened to visit FDC office during whole July, 2018. 13 Armenian designers went through tough training by Missak HajiAvedikian, designer and fashion mentor from Beirut, Lebanon. Missak also teaches at ESMOD Beirut School of Fashion, founded in cooperation with Ellie Saab. He skimmed the best of his yearlong fashion collection development course into 20 days of intensive training and these were probably the toughest deadlines for developing full collection for AW19/20.

Missak guided designers through all steps of creative process behind fashion collection development, from idea, verifying collection theme with trends, making visual research, collages, mixing it all up and developing a full line up of future collection. After the first days of ideation and creating resource journals all participants presented their collection themes and ideas. Getting comments, critics and new fresh ideas was extremely useful at first stages of work, so designers went on elaborating on their resource journals to apply them to fashion pieces. In a week after the first meeting, Missak already goes through lines of first 650 draft sketches with a red marker. “No! No! Not this one... may be this?!... No!”, putting red crosses marking “not accepted” designs seems to be his favorite part of the training.

However one must admit, it’s all for the sake of getting the best out of designers’ heads. Next round of 30 designs of outfits looks better, though red marks still prevail. Futurism, Syrian girl power, modern Yerevan, mindfullness, Japan & African mix, — these are only minor part of the themes, that inspired fashion designers within this course. The final results were impressive. 13 full fashion collection lineups developed and technical drawings made, and some of these went to production and will be available for public in AW 19/20.