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What does Pablo Picasso have in common with the designer of the clothes you wear, the craftsman who carved your favorite chair, the art director of that movie set you admire, or the visual merchandising director whose department store windows catch your eye. Their commonality, of course, is artistic talent, but the focus of their abilities is as diverse as their education and their career interest. The possibilities of using your artistic talent are endless, and the fashion, interior design fields and visual merchandising fields offer some of the most exciting expressions for your abilities.

Here is a sampling of possibilities open to you in fashion and design.

Fashion and Textile Careers

Fashion Designers: Using illustrations and actual garments, they create the fashions we wear.

Costume Designers: Using fashion design skills, they create apparel for actors and actresses in TV, movies and the theater. With a keen knowledge of fashion history, they are able to create authentic and realistic costumes.

Wardrobe Stylists: Pulling together currently available merchandise, they dress the actors in television and stage productions. A stylist could work on anything from a sitcom such as 'Friends' to a magazine format show like 'Entertainment Tonight', or dress the characters in a TV commercial.

Stylists: Gives personality to an advertisement. Working with the art director and photographer on a photo shoot, they coordinate colors, choose fashions and use props to create atmosphere and attitude. Their work appears in magazines, catalogs and newspapers.

Textile Designers: Creating fabric designs used in apparel and home furnishing, utilizing the knowledge of color, design and computer graphics.

Textile Stylists: Working closely with textile designers, they keep abreast of consumer preferences and trends in color, texture and design.

Screen Printers: Use illustrations, computer generated artwork and photographs for print reproduction. Screen prints are used on textiles for a variety of products, from scarves to T-shirts.

Weavers: Use color and texture to create artistic patterns in woven textiles. Fabrics for apparel and home furnishings, as well as carpets, are often woven textiles.

Patternmakers: Translate the designer's idea into an actual working pattern that will then be graded (made into different sizes) and placed upon fabric to be cut. This is a technical skill that requires an understanding of proportion and mathematics.

Illustrators: With talent in fashion drawing, they can take a designer's rough sketch and turn it into a piece of art. Their work may appear in catalogs, magazines, newspapers, and other types of print media used by manufacturers and retailers.

The Interior Design Field

Residential Interior Designers: Create a residential environment based on a client's lifestyle, taste and budget. Through a variety of drafting and rendering skills they create concepts to present to the client. Using a highly developed sense of color and style, they execute the designers by hiring and overseeing contractors, shopping for furniture and accessories and managing the budget.

Commercial Interior Designers: Enhance a business environment by making it functional and appealing. Often the designer creates the mood for a business. Offices, restaurants, beauty salons and stores all use interior designers.

Space Planners: Through placement of walls and furnishings, they create the 'flow' of a room, drafting floor plans that take into account traffic patterns, accessibility and functionality.

Visual Merchandising

Visual Merchandisers: Generate product interest through the design of visually stimulating displays. They embellish the merchandise with color, lighting and dramatic props to catch the consumer's eye. They are not only artist, but craftspeople, skilled also in carpentry, painting, and electrical wiring used to create the desired effects.

Visual Director: Directs and manages the visual merchandising staff. Responsible for the total image of an environment.

Visual Stylist: Works with visual merchandisers and directors to choose fashions and coordinator colors and accessories to make a fashion statement.

Exhibit Designers: Exhibit designers build custom booths using graphics, color, space, proportion and lighting to show a product to its best advantage, with the possibility of working in many industries, including galleries and museum.

Prop Designers: They create props used in visual merchandising, and are an important part of movie and television sets, and photography backgrounds, etc.

These are just a few ways to enter the creative business world. There are many ways you can prepare for entry into these careers, of which college research is one of the most important. Talk to your guidance counselor, consult your local library, or access a school's web page on the Internet.

Six Good Things about the US to Know!

• Of the fastest-growing companies in the US, nearly a third of them are in California. Yes!
• California leads the US in apparel manufacturing, producing over $13.7 billion in products each year, and exporting more than a billion dollars worth.
• FIDM boasts the nation's largest fashion resource and research center. FIDM also houses one of the nation's finest costume collections dating from the eighteenth century to current couture. A career never had it so good!
• Downtown LA is home to the California Mart the US's lergest fashion and accessory mart, with over 10,000 lines in 1,500 showrooms under one roof.
• LA has surpassed New York City as the #1 retailing and manufacturing center in the US.
• Trillion-dollar California has the 7th largest economy in the world. Entertainment is a $22 billion industry in California that employs 600,000 people. Let's go to the movies!

Author

Vicki Paganini
The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising/FIDM