Designing the Future : Trade-Tech supplies the local fashion houses with grads who learned fast that there aren’t any shortcuts to top.
It’s a school. It’s a sweatshop. It’s a fashion atelier. It’s the fashion design school at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, and it’s also, as almost everyone associated with it eventually sighs, “the best-kept secret in town.”
For the young, the poor and the talented, it may be the only option. They can acquire technical skills to turn their creative visions into clothes, and they can get this training at public school prices.
They may not fully appreciate the opportunity, of course, until years later. “I was forced to go there because I was working and not making much money, and I couldn’t afford the fancier schools,” says graduate Lisa Millward, head designer for La Belle Fashions. “But I was really lucky. Everything I learned, I learned at Trade-Tech.”
The school is part of the statewide community college system, although the word trade is a clue that it’s not typically collegiate. Forget liberal arts: The emphasis here is on learning that leads to livelihood. “It’s like an apprenticeship,” says designer Carole Little, another Trade-Tech graduate, “like working in the trade, with somebody watching you.”
Like a lot of community college students, many here are already working. To accommodate them, Trade-Tech’s basic “technical skills” classes, four hours long, start at 7 a.m., and “if you didn’t get there at 7,” Millward says, “they locked the doors.”
Inside, it’s serious business. Design students turn out finished clothes--and lots of them--with scarcely a minute between rounds. “There’s not very much talking in class,” says Connie James, 22, a second-year student.
But there are rewards. The young, the poor or the talented have at one time or another included not just Little (St. Tropez West) and Millward but also Robin Piccone (Body Glove), Carl Jones (Cross Colours), Tadashi Shoji (Tadashi Inc.), Sue Wong (Young Edwardian) and Dorothy Sholen (Platinum).
They went to Trade-Tech for the same reasons as today’s students. “The training,” Tadashi says, “is excellent.” And the price is right.
It’s not L.A.’s only school for fashion design. There are others with more cachet, shorter classes and less sweatshop ambience. But unlike Trade-Tech, they don’t offer California residents an associate of arts degree for $320 a year (two years, 64 units, $10 a unit). Those who don’t want the academic degree can get a certificate in fashion design (44 units) for less. Few schools can even match the new non- resident fees of $123 a unit.
Indeed, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Trade-Tech’s nearby and nearest competitor, won’t even reveal its tuition fees until the “application interview.” Small wonder: Its associate degree in fashion design runs $11,000 a year, not counting another $1,500 for books, supplies and lab fees--way beyond the means of the young and poor who happen to be talented.
For that, one gets carpeting and paneling and the sense of being in a posh ad agency. With Trade-Tech, one gets colorless concrete-block buildings, well-graffitied, in an industrial area of town, hard by the Blue Line trolley.
Building D, which fashion design shares with fashion merchandising, cosmetology and “art trades”--commercial art, photography, sign graphics--is strictly functional. There are small unadorned classrooms used by design and merchandising classes and huge unadorned workrooms used by design classes, where 20 or more people are cutting patterns at big waist-high tables or draping dress forms or working at sewing machines.
These workroom courses are the backbone of the design curriculum, to the surprise of many aspiring Coco Chanels and Donna Karans. “They say, ‘I don’t want to sew, I want to be a designer,’ ” says Cynthia Morley-Mower, the fashion department’s operations manager. “They don’t realize it’s not all theory and getting ideas and hearing designers talk. They need the technical skills.”
Many came with almost none. Some drew a lot. Some sewed a little. Some just liked clothes. “I couldn’t even thread a needle,” says second-year student Ana Guillen, 27, “but since I was 9, I was always making clothes for my dolls.”
Students get the skills--and quickly. Each semester in design includes two back-to-back 9 1/2-week courses--the four-hour-a-day kind. These include sewing, sketching, draping, pattern-making and advanced design. The finale is a “Gold Thimble” class, in which students get six weeks to design and produce a mini-line of apparel.
They sometimes sit in real classrooms, if only briefly. Lecture courses are offered in such subjects as costume history, textiles, children’s wear.
The immersion in technical skills is critical, making art inextricable from execution--a principle driven home with their very first sketches. A sketch may be beautiful, the garment appealing, says Vincent Marich, a veteran designer who teaches basic sewing, “but how do you get into it? Where’s the opening?”
In most courses, students produce finished garments--all kinds of clothing, all kinds of styles and materials. “We’ve worked with knits, chiffons, everything,” says second-year student Evelyn Reyes, 23. “You learn how to handle any fabric.”
By the time they reach advanced design in the second year, students must be able to take a “far-out sketch,” says teacher Joyce Gale, make their own pattern, then the garment itself. “Design isn’t just a two-dimensional sketch; it has to be interpreted into the pattern.
“Then it has to have hanger appeal, the right fabric and color for the season, and has to meet a certain price range,” she continues. “It’s not just Cinderella going to the ball: The bottom line is people are in business to make money.”
There’s even some training in that bottom line. One marathon assignment shows “what it might be like to work for seven very different companies,” designing and making patterns for seven different garments. Instructions detail the kind of garment--sun dress, junior dress, sweat suit--season, fabric and final price. And the instructions come with a warning: “If you were really working for each of these companies, you’d have to come up with many more designs of the same type and do this five times a year.”
Imagination isn’t ignored. Some exercises encourage free play. In one class, each student is given a perfume ad and told to design a garment inspired by the graphics, the colors, even the bottle shape. In another, they’re given a few yards of fabric and a bag of stuff--feathers, rings, bottle caps--from which to design and make a blouse.
“Twelve years ago, we had the reputation of being only technicians,” concedes Trade-Tech’s dean of academic affairs, Sharon L. Tate, a former designer. But Tate “started luring designers” to the faculty when she came as associate dean in 1980, and she and her colleagues try to promote design awareness and design ambitions. They hold shows, urge students to enter design contests, arrange what Tate calls “bare bones” trips to international design centers (for example, a two-week, $1,600 trip to Paris and London this summer, led by a faculty member).
Not all graduates will become designers, of course, and even those who do aren’t “going to be designers on their first job,” Tate says. But they will be working, “and there’s a place for all of them.”
“We hire them in all areas,” says Betty Jo Viramontes, vice president of production development at Cherokee. “They usually come in wanting to be designers, but we talk them into being sample-cutters or pattern-makers. You get your foot in the door in a big company and see where it takes you--production pattern-maker, maybe designer.”
Many try to start as assistant designers--an entry-level position that’s a cross between gofer and jack-of-all-trades. But, says second-year student Diana Diaz, as a Trade-Tech graduate, you have more than one option. “These people teach everything, and teach you a lot more (than other schools), so you can be more than an assistant designer.”
Some companies hire design graduates only as assistant designers. “When hiring anything but assistants, I only care where they’ve been the last two years,” says Francine Browner (Francine Browner Inc.). “I don’t care what design school they graduated from. I need people with (work) experience.”
The industry and its job possibilities are always in the background. Trade-Tech’s 550 or so daytime students--350 in design, 200 in merchandising--are generally young and generally full-time students. But there are another 450 enrolled in evening and Saturday classes; half of them are 35 or older and probably working full time, many in the garment industry, but “looking to upgrade their job situation,” Tate says. “They may operate a sewing machine but want to become pattern-makers.”
As a group, even the young are unusually focused. At least one-third of the design students have part-time jobs in the industry by their second year, for the money and the experience. The others have clear plans, most often to become pattern-makers or designers. Of those hoping to be designers, quite a few plan to own their own businesses.
Diaz, 21, who learned about Trade-Tech at a high school career day, wants to be a designer of evening wear or sportswear but will look for a starting job as an assistant designer. Evelyn Reyes, who wants to be a designer or pattern-maker, expects to sew at home while looking for work. And Connie James, who is interested in costume design and “avant-garde” fashion, expects to get a job, any job (“I want to try everything”) after school, but is also figuring what it would cost to own a store.
This is no place for dilettantes. The less dedicated stick out, and those who come to classes unprepared may get a good dressing-down: “Don’t you want to get a job?” a teacher berated one student, who came all dressed up but didn’t buckle down. “Aren’t you planning to work?”
Few students come through this immersion with the lingering idea that they might have skipped the technical classes, that designers don’t really need them because they can hire people to sew, drape and make patterns.
“You’re the one,” says designer Millward, “who has to create the fit and the shape and the style and the balance. Just because you sketch beautifully doesn’t mean your pattern-maker is going to get it.”
Even with a pattern-maker who does get it, the designer with good technical skills remains in control. “If you can do it yourself,” Carole Little says, “you’re far ahead. Instead of being at the mercy of the people below you, you show them how to do it.”
Sounds like the gospel according to Trade-Tech.
