Fashion Job Categories — Page 5

Page 5 covers the maternity, menswear, missy, neckwear and outerwear buyers, and a design group built around the commercial creative roles: Fashion Graphic Designer, Fashion Illustrator, Fashion Merchandiser, Fashion Website Designer and Footwear Designer. There is no marketing or planning group on this page; instead the miscellaneous group is given over to two back-office disciplines in depth — licensing (assistant, coordinator, director and manager) and inventory and loss prevention.

Production on this page works with fabric and fit: fabric printers, specialists and technicians, the Fit Model whose try-ons settle how a garment actually wears, grading, global sourcing and the Import Production Manager. Sales includes the Sales Forecaster alongside kidswear, licensed apparel and major accounts roles, and transportation is the warehouse team itself — assistant, management, purchasing, supervisor and worker.

Licensing, Fit and the Warehouse

Licensing earns its run of entries on this page because so much fashion is made under license: a brand’s name on clothing produced by another company has to be coordinated, directed and managed, and the four grades listed here — assistant through director — map that career ladder. Loss Prevention, its neighbor in the miscellaneous group, protects the stock those licenses produce, working with the inventory control roles listed beside it.

The Fit Model is the page’s most misunderstood role: fit models are not runway models but the people whose consistent measurements a brand uses to check that patterns grade and hang correctly, and the description is worth reading together with the Grading / Grader entry below it. The warehouse roles in the transportation group then close the loop, storing and picking the finished, fitted product.