Fashion designer CV 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 CV. To do this, your CV should show off your fashion skills, clothing line knowledge, creativity and qualifications.

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

• Personal summary or career objective
• 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.

Header

Your CV header section is the first part of your CV 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.

Professional summary or career objective

Including a professional summary or a career objective with your CV is an opportunity to summarise and spotlight your valuable qualities. But which one – a professional summary or a career objective – is right for you?

Both a professional summary and career objective should be structured as a two- to three-sentence summary, from 30-60 words, located at the top of your CV. They should be a brief overview and highlight of your skills and work experience that grabs the attention of your reader. Consider including 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 or other related experience.

For entry-level positions, consider creating a career objective rather than a professional summary. A career objective should be structured as described above, but also includes your goals and what you’re wanting to accomplish with your CV. Include any General Certificate of Education GCSEs or degree certificates.

Skills

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

Functional CVs are an example of skills-based CVs, whereas chronological CVs focus on the experience. Combination CVs 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 CV 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.

Education

The education section is an important part of a professional CV 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 CV:

Do:

• Use fashion designer CV templates to help structure your CV.
• 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 CV as a qualified job candidate.
• Forget to use a CV builder to simplify and expedite your CV process.

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