How Does Geometry Inspire Fashion Design?

If you saw the words Fashion and Geometry together in a sentence, would you think that they have anything in common? Math and Geometry have earned a widespread misconception that they are not used in creative fields. The truth is that there is a lot of beauty in the math behind many artistic fields of occupation. Anything from dance, music, architecture, and yes, fashion design requires mathematical principles.

Fashion uses shapes, angles and lines to create interesting silhouettes and prints – that’s geometry. Geometry is so fundamental to fashion design that we don’t even realize we’re using it! Without it, we couldn’t create all the beautiful shapes and fashion newness that we see every season on the runway or be able to create well fitting garments.

You probably would never think that you would need to learn geometry to become a fashion designer, but it’s not as crazy a concept as it might sound. These two disciplines interact more frequently than you would think. In fact, the clothing you are wearing right now definitely had geometric principles used in creating it.

Geometry is used in the following ways when it comes to fashion:

• Creating clothing patterns

• Designing prints

• Fitting garments

• Mapping a two-dimensional pattern to fit a three-dimensional body.

• Fashion illustration basics of using a croqui

Geometry can help to change 2 dimensional ideas into 3 dimensional realities. As a Latina fashion business owner and designer, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your design vision come to life, be produced and distributed to stores and warehouses across the country, ready for  fashionistas to purchase!

In this Part 1 of a 4 part Geometry series, I’ll specifically talk about geometric print design, how it’s shown up in our culture, and how I utilize it today in my business. We’ll cover the following:

• Some of the most iconic geo prints that we can’t live without

• Some of the most popular times in American fashion culture when geometric prints were on fire.

• How I use geometric prints in my fashion business today

• Taking the print design through to final production

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