Fashion Designer Resume Examples to Help You Build Yours

Becoming a fashion designer isn’t easy and takes a lot of skill and creativity to be considered for a designer role. If you’re looking for a fashion designer role, you can rise above the competition by creating the perfect resume. To do this, your resume should show off your fashion skills, clothing line knowledge, creativity and qualifications.

The structure of your fashion designer resume largely depends on how much experience you have, your qualifications and whether you’re applying for a senior or entry-level role. Usually, your resume will contain sections dedicated to these subjects:

• Personal summary 
• Skills 
• Work experience 
• Education

Depending on whether the job description and posting state that you need specialist experience, qualifications or skills, you may have sections that differ in length and importance. 

 

 

Your resume header section is the first part of your resume and contains your key contact information. In this section, you should include:

• Your name 
• Location 
• Phone number 
• Email address

You should also include links to professional networking sites like LinkedIn. This is a great way to show off how many industry contacts you have. Fashion designers may also have vast portfolios of original designs. You can include a link to any websites you have that showcase this to illustrate your creative and unique designs.

 

 

Your resume summary is a brief section that summarizes the rest of your resume content. You can use this section to introduce your skills and experience to the employer, explaining why you’re the ideal candidate for the role. You should include information that is eye-catching as this can encourage a hiring manager to keep reading and invite you to an interview. You should consider your most impressive qualities such as specialist certifications and sustainability certifications such as Global Organic Textile Standard. You can also include brief explanations of any experience in fashion shows, product lines, technical design and more!

 

 

The skills section of your resume is a chance to show the hiring manager or recruiter that you have the necessary capability to be a successful fashion designer and fulfill the job description. Depending on your resume format, your skills section may be the most important part. 

 

Functional resumes are an example of skills-based resumes, whereas chronological resumes focus on the experience. Combination resumes are great for candidates with lots of work experience and relevant skills.

 

Your skills section should contain a good mix of both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are learnable skills specific to a fashion designer role, and soft skills are personality traits that are transferable to many different industries.  If you’re struggling to think of the right terms to sum up your skills, you can use these bullet points to inspire your fashion designer skills section: 

• Skilled in both men’s and women’s fashion 
• Adobe illustrator 
• Adobe photoshop 
• Knowledge of contemporary fashion trends 
• Collaborating with a design team 
• Pattern making 
• Product development 
• Technical skills 
• Fashion merchandising 
• Experience in New York Fashion Week 
• Communication skills 
• Sourcing 
• Graphic design 
• Creativity 

Work history

 

Fashion design is extremely competitive, and candidates will usually need lots of industry experience before they’re noticed for their designs. Therefore, the work experience section of your resume is very important for showing the hiring manager or recruiter that you know the fashion industry inside and out. 

 

You can list your previous experience in reverse chronological order, starting from the most recent example. If you have many years of experience, try and stick to the last 10-15 years of examples. This ensures you only provide the hiring manager with the relevant information. 

 

You can list your role in the design process in brief bullet points below each job title. In this section, you should also include the employer’s details like company name, location and the dates you started and finished each job.

 

 

The education section is an important part of a professional resume as you might need a bachelor’s degree in fashion design. Candidates can also have degrees in art, graphic design and other creative subjects.

 

You should list your degree title, university and the year you graduated. You can also include your college GPA in this section if you graduated with a 3.3 or higher within the past year. 

 

Consider including a link to any items you designed as part of your coursework if they’re displayed online. This can show hiring managers how your education has contributed to your knowledge of fashion design.

Here are some dos and don’ts for a fashion designer resume: 

 

Do: 

• Use fashion designer resume templates to help structure your resume. 
• Include your experience working at fashion shows to build confidence in the hiring manager. 
• Include information about any internships at fashion houses you have completed. 

Don’t: 

• Include your high school GPA if you’ve graduated over 1 year ago.
• Forget to feature job description keywords in your professional summary so the  Applicant Tracking System (ATS) scans your resume as a qualified job candidate.
• Forget to use a resume builder to simplify and expedite your resume process.