Fashion creative directors and art directors get to put their creativity and skills to use for fashion magazines, clothing brands, and other fashion markets. Taking on this responsibility involves having a strong creative vision, an ability to come up with new ideas, solid communication skills, and leadership skills. Art Directors (& Creative directors) in fashion also need to build technical skills to bring their ideas to life artistically with software and other tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, many like me started out as a BA Hons Graphic Designer with Photography and Illustration skills.
The ability to look at the whole picture - the logo design - layout as well as the media story telling is important - some of you reading this are gaining experience of this through putting together your 3 stage presentations to sell your idea with me on my CSM short course Art Direction for Fashion. Production is part of an Art Directors responsibility or at least a good knowledge of the processes so that the right creative decisions can be made. It is a complex area involving contracts and legal usage rights issues, I offer follow up mentoring in this to students should they require it as a separate course of study.
Above are a few small examples of my early work in fashion branding and publication design. This was a spring board to my role at M&S where I became Senior art director / graphic designer for the Fashion Communication division.
Art Directors and creative directors in fashion that have established a name for themselves in the industry are far and few as their role is one that requires wearing many hat wearing as they work their way up the career ladder from assisting to managing big projects like me - like any industry there are some that stand out more than others - here are a few I rate.
From graphic designer to logo designer for Alexander Wang and Jason Wu, Patrick Li has come a long way since his beginnings as a UC Berkeley Architecture student. He was originally hired as an editorial assistant but gradually moved his way into the art department at Interview. Li then proceeded to have a career of creating modern brand aesthetics for many famous fashion magazines and brands.
In 1934 Alexey Brodovitch was engaged to be the Art Director for Harpers bazaar
As an art director, Alexey Brodovitch did page layout but also commissioned photographers and illustrators. His layouts were different from what had gone before. He took inspiration from the artists he had met in Paris. Some fashion stories seemed surreal, and some highly geometric and Modernist. He made stories from his photo shoots, sometimes showing a dress in a sequence of poses as if they were stills from a film.
Hedi Slimaine
Had an interesting route to becoming an art director/creative director in Fashion.
He considered finding a career in the Fashion industry as too competitive; instead, he studied Political Science and pursued a career in Journalism. At 11, he discovered photography, received his first camera and learned black and white darkroom printing. He studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre and completed a tailor apprenticeship at a men's designer house. He is now Creative Director of Celine.
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