Job Description

Women’s Fashion Design Team Intern

A design intern for a women’s fashion team is an ambiguous term. Would you have any idea what all goes into designing the shirt you are wearing right now? I am here to tell you a little about what goes into designing and creating that shirt. When people think of fashion, they think of the magnificent finished product. They pay little attention to the boring, mundane tasks involved in creating the item. Let’s just say, this was my first and last fashion design internship.

A designer designs any article of clothing that you wear. A design intern for a fashion company is the right-hand man to the fashion designers. They help follow the article of clothing from start to finish, much like a mother watching their child grow up. The intern will aid in assignments from creating original designs to fill market needs, cutting patterns, constructing samples of finished garments, examining garments, and modifying the garments until they are pristine final products. Their main responsibility is to help the designers create a product that consumers want.   

The three main descriptions identifying what a design intern does include:

• Assistant
• Professional Assembler
• Product Coordinator

Each of these three descriptions ties in together to create the final product. I will explain how using specific examples from my past internship.

Assistant

As I mentioned before, a design intern doubles as the designer's right-hand man. Anything the designer needs done, they will pawn off on you. The responsibilities include:

• Administrative tasks

• Staple papers
• Fetch coffee
• Open/Send mail

For this specific company, no task was off limits. The design team I interned for would make me complete dull tasks for hours on end. These tasks included stapling packets of paper, opening mail or copying sketches. One specific day of work, I opened boxes of returned clothes from 9 AM to 5 PM. This was the full workday. There was so much mail that day that I only got a fifteen-minute lunch break. This was not uncommon.

Professional Assembler

Professional assembler is a term I have coined from experiences from various fashion internships. The designer is assembling the product from start to finish. This entails coming up with a vision and putting together all the aspects to make the vision into a tangible product. These tasks include:

• Research market trends
• Assemble vision boards
• Construct fabric booklet

The first part of coming up with a vision is researching market trends. I would sit at a computer and look at over fifty websites in a day, to see what kind of products were trending. I would then have to go back to the websites and print the pictures to create a market trend packet. Finally, I would present my boss with the packet.

Another aspect of the professional assembler includes constructing vision boards. This sounds fun, except there was no creative freedom involved. My employers would send me emails with pictures and color swatches. I would then have to print the images, cut them out, and glue them on the boards as they desired. Many times, they wouldn’t give me a lunch break, because the vision boards were time sensitive. Along with the vision board, came the fabric booklets. This involves sitting at a desk and cutting over one hundred squares of different types of fabrics. Cutting fabric is a lot harder than it seems, and it took me two months into the internship to figure out the best way.

Product Coordinator

The final duty of a design intern includes product coordinator. Their responsibilities include:

• Organize fashion lines
• Double check garments
• Box up finished lines

The monotonous, mindless chores did not end after creating the garment design. Once I helped finalize and produce the products, I organized them into the proper line. These lines were according to the season. For example, the company I worked for was simultaneously working on three separate collections at a time. I would have to study each of the three collection packets and separate the clothing accordingly. At the same time, I was separating the collections; I would double check the garments for quality control. If I encountered a damaged product, I would notify my supervisor. Many times, my supervisor would take out her anger and frustration on me if a garment was faulty. I would replace the defective product with a new one from production. After finishing the lines, I would have to box them up to the appropriate receiver.  

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