As far as Illustration projects go, i’m personally the least informed when it comes to fashions, so I guess that makes me a fashion victim as they used to say!
Having said that, as a means to portraying characters in graphic fiction for example I always found researching fashions and clothing choices pretty interesting and it’s one of the first things i pore over when i read graphic novels as drawing dynamic clothing is yet another one of the areas which need to be learned and studied when trying to portray real life people in real life situations.
What’s involved
In the past whenever i’ve observed fashion designers creating sketches of clothing / models, i’ve often wondered how they cope with the problems of designing an outfit, illustrating a figure and giving the whole piece a dynamic pose.
Years ago when I was learning life drawing at a night class, the majority of students were doing fashion degrees and they were learning life drawing to improve their skills in that area. Something i noticed with quite a few of the students was how they treated their observations of the model : they were all drawing with very economical use of lines to capture what was there in most cases, sometimes just a series of arcs to describe what was there. Several of the students said that’s often what they needed for the fast turnaround and articulation of fashion ideas, which totally made sense.
What I gleaned from this was that they in fact create their own illustration style alongside the practicality of the necessity of having to work at speed. There are parallels with animators in a sense who use arcs and lines of action to capture or create dynamic poses. Depending on the era, fashion design illustration can be more or less abstract, moving from more finished anatomy to simple gesture lines on which the clothing or outfit rest.
Once you have a system (no two are rarely the same for any artist) for short handing anatomy, this becomes almost second nature so in the case of a fashion designer this can automatically feed into the subject of the garment, showing it off to it’s best extent.
That’s not to diminish the study of anatomy which is mostly a lifelong pursuit of constant practice, but short handing is definitely faster to pick up than trying to remember landmarks in thousands of challenging poses (annoyingly and impossibly, some artists can!)
OCA Illustration 2: Responding to a brief 