The products created by fashion designers can be presented to the public in various ways. While consumers can encounter fashionable clothes and accessories in person, such as in a store or on a runway, they are often introduced to them through advertisements in magazines, on billboards or on websites. Usually, it is a graphic designer who, in coordination with a photographer and the fashion designer, is responsible for creating these advertisements.
Fashion cannot be defined simply as the creation of fashionable clothes or accessories themselves. A critical component of fashion is the way in which these objects are presented to the public. This includes who wears the clothes (many designers hire beautiful models to wear their designs) and how they are presented in an ad campaign. In this sense, any graphic designer involved in fashion marketing, in which he controls much of a particular campaign's "look," is himself involved in fashion design.
Beside both being concerned with communication, graphic and fashion designers share many of the same work habits. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, both graphic designers and fashion designers often prepare sketches or layouts of their ideas for a project and present them to clients for feedback. Both professions will work with creative or art directors. Both professions must be particularly canny about communication and the effects of particular kinds of signs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, many fashion designers, like graphic designers, do not create physical objects. Many fashion designers create their designs on a computer. Like graphic designers, this allows them to quickly tweak aspects of their creations, such as their color, layout and shape, translating only some of them to a physical form.
With the rise of the Internet, the line between fashion designers and graphic designers will likely become thinner and thinner. As more people spend more time online, the fashion industry has increasingly developed more of a web-based presence, hiring graphic and web designers to provide them a virtual image in keeping with their brand. And, as online avatars become more common, the fashion industry's offerings have, in some cases, become virtual.
Graphic and fashion designers often receive a similar education, one that may include courses in aesthetics, semiotics, and art history, as well as training in the same skills, such as sketching and computer rendering. Many design schools, such as Parsons in New York, offer degrees in both fashion design and graphic design.