Fashion illustration is the art of drawing, painting, or sketching fashion concepts, ideas and outfits.
These illustrations can be used to visually communicate a garment or product before it’s produced. Fashion sketching plays a major role in designing to preview and visualise designs before production. These illustrations can also be used for marketing the brand or product line.
Most great creative ideas start with a plan, whether it be an architectural plan for a building or scribbling an idea on a napkin, or a written plan for a piece of written work. For fashion garments, this plan is evident in fashion illustrations. Without this visual plan, nothing really can be made. The illustration forms the foundation on which the entire planning and approach for the design of the piece.
Sketching fashion illustrations is also great for sparking creativity. Through sketching, you can explore multiple options you could take in a particular design concept. When Fashion Boundary Label undertook co-designing their first capsule collection, Pure Mirror, fashion illustration became a huge means of communication between the Fashion Boundary team and Thou Art founder and design director, Jianyu.
The details of each garment were carefully drawn as well as how each piece moved and how it hung on the model. Having each piece of the collection drawn gave the design team an idea on how the collection would look all together. During this process, the team were able to add embellishes here an there to make the collection consistent look incredible as a whole and separately.
The illustrations for the Minimalist Tan Shirt were important as the placement of the shoulder cut-out had to be just perfect, as well as the length of the shoulder strap and the full length of the body of the shirt.
Another example of this was the illustrations for the Staple Grey Pants and the Chic Cropped Blazer. It was important for the team to get the fit and proportions right with where to hem the blazer and the layered look of the pants. These illustrations took some time to perfect before producing the samples.
The fashion illustrations will always represent a milestone for the Fashion Boundary team, an incredible achievement as well as the beginning of a design journey. The Fashion Boundary design team hope that these illustrations give a little insight on the huge process of creating a small capsule collection as you see in Pure Mirror.