Paper pattern pieces, fabric shears and a curved ruler laid out on the floor.

WHAT FASHION SCHOOL TAUGHT ME ABOUT CONSTRUCTION

Before I went back to proper training, my sewing ran mostly on instinct. I knew how to put a garment together and make it wearable — but a lot of it was habit. I did things a certain way because that's how I'd always done them, not because I'd thought about it.

FASHION SCHOOL CHANGED THAT

The biggest thing was learning to slow down and work in order. Construction isn't a pile of separate steps — it's a sequence, where what you do first changes what you can do next. Do things in the wrong order and you pay for it later. And pressing, it turns out, happens the whole way through, not just at the end when everything's already sewn up.

It also made me see a garment from the inside out. The seams, the finishes, the bits nobody sees — they matter just as much as the outside. Little things I'd have happily ignored before suddenly bugged me, not because I'd got fussy, but because I finally understood what they actually did to the finished thing.

There was a lot of repetition, too — same as I'd found with traditional kimono making and French couture jacket construction. You do a technique over and over until your hands just know it. Slow and annoying at first, second nature by the end — and once it's second nature, you've got the headspace to actually think about fit and proportion instead of fighting the basics.

What caught me off guard was how much it changed the way I think. Finishing a garment stopped being the point. How I got there — carefully, in the right order, no shortcuts — became the point. That's how I work on everything now, whether it's something new or an alteration.

Fashion school didn't just make my work better. It changed what I think "well made" even means.

CONTINUE THE SERIES

This is the third in a six-part series on returning to formal fashion education:

  1. Why I Went Back to Fashion School
  2. Inside the Fashion Institute of Florida
  3. What Fashion School Taught Me About Construction (you are here)
  4. Learning Pattern Making Changed The Way I See Clothes
  5. From the Classroom to the Runway NYFW 2024
  6. My 2nd Season at New York Fashion Week
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