Fashion Job Categories — Page 7

Page 7 is the swimwear buying page: Shoe Buyer and Sleepwear Buyer lead into Swimwear Buyer in its general, children’s, men’s and women’s forms. Design matches it with the body-conscious end of the studio — Intimate Apparel Designer, Knit Fabric Designer and Knitwear Designer — plus illustrators, import merchandising and junior graphic design.

The miscellaneous group covers product and project management, research and development, the Retail Manager and RFID, the radio-frequency identification technology used to track garments. Production is the pattern room and the print works: Pattern Engineer, Pattern Maker, pressers, textile printers and the general Product Development and Production roles. Sales finishes with menswear, plus size and women’s wear selling and the two showroom sales roles, where collections are sold to retail buyers face to face.

Patterns, Prints and the Showroom

Pattern work anchors this page’s production group, and it is worth reading the two entries together: the Pattern Maker drafts and adjusts the patterns a garment is cut from, while the Pattern Engineer applies that craft to production systems, tolerances and grading at scale. Textile printing sits beside them because print placement is decided in the same rooms — a printed garment is a pattern problem as much as an artwork problem.

Showroom sales, at the foot of the page, is where those patterns become orders. Showroom staff present a season’s collection to visiting retail buyers, take orders against delivery dates, and feed buyer reactions back to design and merchandising — which is why the product management roles in this page’s miscellaneous group are natural companions to the sales descriptions.