Fashion Job Categories — Page 11

Page 11 closes the index with design at its most senior and most specialized. The Designers group is the largest single group in the eleven pages: Senior Merchandiser and Senior Technical Designer, Store Designer and Studio Manager, suit, sweater and swimwear designers in their general, children’s, men’s and women’s forms, Technical Designer, the three textile designers (general, knit and woven), Trend Forecaster, the visual merchandising roles and window design and display, and the Vice President of Merchandising.

Production / Sourcing closes the page — and the index — with its own vice presidents: Operations Manufacturing, Operations Sourcing, Production, Quality Assurance and Sourcing, plus the Washroom Operator and, last in the list, the Production Assistant where the production ladder begins. From here the All Pages list below takes you back to page 1 and the start of every category group.

Senior Craft and the Top of Two Ladders

This page’s design group rewards slow reading, because its titles mark the points where craft becomes direction. A Technical Designer owns fit, specification and construction standards rather than styling; a Trend Forecaster researches and calls the colors, fabrics and silhouettes a season will be built on; textile designers divide by construction — knit and woven cloth are designed differently, on different machinery, for different garments — and visual merchandising and window display translate all of it into what a customer sees in a store.

The production vice presidents at the foot of the page are the top of the ladder whose lower rungs appear on page 8, and the Production Assistant listed last is its first rung. Taken together, pages 8 and 11 bookend a complete production career, just as page 1 and this page bookend the design careers the index describes.