From Inspiration Mood to Teamwork
How Inspiration Fuels Teamwork in Fashion Design
Last update: 21/06/2025
When the entire team is infused with the mood of inspiration, magical things happen, and the whole atmosphere is permeated with the same emotion.
Conveying and spreading that mood is the responsibility of the designer, who must use not only communication elements, verbal and visual arguments of the mood, but also, and no less importantly, all the emotional content that connects them with that motivating element that inspires them to create their collection. It’s as if everything spoke the same language, and the entire team connected to the same tune.
Not only is it pleasant to work at that level of connection, but it’s also necessary… why?… It’s likely, for example, that the photography team that will create the advertising images for the collection will make the scene to sell your product. They can do it assertively if they have a clear understanding of the collection’s narrative… the same happens with the pattern-making team, the one that will choose the right textile, the one that creates the packaging and corporate image, the one in charge of the display… in short, as I said from the beginning, the entire team.
Once, it happened to me, while in the research phase of a collection, that I began to transmit to my team the theme that had me absolutely inspired and the data that the research was yielding up to that moment. My surprise was that days later, they delivered articles researched on the internet that were related to the theme, expanded and yielded more data to my research… That happened spontaneously, since knowing my “motiv” they had felt like delving into the theme. It was about how the fashion of the 1920s was lived in Venezuela, the distribution channels used at the time, how textiles were worked and transported, etc. I would work on a broad and contagious theme in prints using original images with digital design retouching and some designed images to complement. It yielded fascinating results that we enjoyed in a collection of t-shirts (when they were ready, the whole team wanted one). Then, we learned there was a fair for emerging designers at the transportation museum in Caracas. It was, without a doubt, the ideal event for the exhibition of the collection, next to the old trains and the railroad, that ran exactly through the main points of distribution of the fashion of the 1920s in Caracas that were included in the prints. It was the exact moment and place, and there we were!
In short, having a straightforward narrative with solid arguments is possible with extensive research. But upon obtaining it, the team is essential to work as a well-oiled machine permeated with the same emotional content; it’s the way the inspiration that has infected you becomes magic, as it is potentiated by scaling to the entire team.
Ileana Hernández
Fashion designer, educator and founder of "Anaely Academia", where she guides entrepreneurs with her DPE methodology—Design, Production & Entrepreneurship—helping them create, produce and launch their own fashion brands.
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