Featured Schools

by Lynsey Hemstreet
Fashion Design Schools Colleges Columnist

Modern fashion is increasingly based on classic techniques and designs with a new-century twist. Silkscreen, one of the most popular and enduring techniques for designing on fabric, is taught in fashion college, and its impact on fashion cannot be overstated.

Many casual dressers consider the T-shirt a daily wardrobe staple. Celebrities have popularized strange and catchy T-shirt phrases like "Free Winona," "Jesus is my Homeboy," and other snarky remarks committed to cotton-poly blend fame forever. With the T-shirt becoming a ubiquitous item of fashion, more and more fashion design students are making it their canvas of choice.

History of Screen Printing

Silk screening was developed as an extension of a Japanese practice of using stencils to print on fabric. These days, it can be used to create large prints and works of art, on T-shirts or large bolts of fabric. This simple method allows you to produce a great number of items with low effort and relatively low cost.

Fashion College Programs

Fashion design programs teach you some part of screen printing, because it is an essential skill that can result in the same image being printed over and over again. Screen printing can be used on different media like textiles, paper, and plastic, giving fashion designers a way to reproduce images from purses to shirts to plastic jewelry. Screen printing can also be used with photo emulsion, which gives good quality to the image in question. This is a skill that is often covered in computer-aided design courses, which are essential in fashion design curricula.

The screen print makes a statement, no matter the material. As a young fashion designer, silk screening can be one of the best tools for getting your name (and your designs) up on the runway.

About the Author

Lynsey Hemstreet is a freelance writer and hairstylist. She has a BA in Journalism from San Francisco State University.

Source(s)

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics