Why Fashion Designers Should Learn to Sew
Why should I learn to sew even if I already have a team that will do it for me?
Last update: 21/06/2025
That is a question several fashion design students have posed to me, and here is my answer: when you don’t know how to sew, you may overlook—say—what darts are for and how the cloth changes once they are closed with a seam. Because you miss that transformation, you can forget to include the darts when you sketch your design.
It can also happen that the person who will sew the garment doesn’t, for instance, know how to insert an invisible zipper, and suddenly, your piece must undergo changes that were never part of your original vision. I have witnessed it countless times: if you cannot sew, you may not grasp how much yardage a skirt or pair of trousers in a given design really needs.
I will always recommend learning the basics, even when you have a talented workroom team ready to bring your concepts to life. Getting started does take effort, discipline, and patience, but—and these are my strongest arguments for learning to sew—few activities can expand the mind and nurture creativity the way sewing does.
Each choice is accompanied by the needle, the thread, the fabric, the trims, and the machine—or machines—involved. Everything converges to breathe life into the project, and missing out on that rich source of information, which is as delightful as it is instructive, restricts creativity and limits your sense of what is feasible. In short, every design acquires more of its own mood when the person who created it also makes at least one prototype—one that can later be faithfully replicated by the wonderful team you are fortunate to have.
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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