Fashion Marketing: You’ll learn how to promote a brand and/or business, including creating and running advertising campaigns, managing social media accounts, understanding what affects the supply and demand of a product, analyzing market trends to predict future popular styles, and overseeing the development of products accordingly.

Retailing: This covers merchandise buying, product pricing, and all the ins and outs of running a retail store, including layout and design, customer experience, and product placement. Some courses will also cover online retailing. 

Finance in Fashion: You’ll learn how to develop a financial strategy for a company, price products in a way that will both appeal to the customer and drive revenue, keep financial records, and troubleshoot financial problems. 

Textiles: You’ll learn about the different types of textiles, textile production processes, what customers are looking for in a textile, and what textiles are trending and why. 

History of Fashion: This course will cover how fashion has evolved over time and how it both reflects and influences culture.

Clothing Construction: You’ll learn how to follow and create patterns, how to work with different textiles, and how to assess and alter the fit of apparel. 

Drawing: You’ll learn 2D drawing skills that can be used to design products. 

Fashion Photography: This course will teach you photography skills, lighting techniques, and photo editing, along with how to choose a model, photograph a model, and run a fashion shoot. 

Fashion Styling: You’ll learn how to create an image that coincides with a brand and organize and run a photoshoot that supports that image. This content could then be used in magazines, ad campaigns, or on websites. 

Fashion Journalism: This covers basic writing skills, which are then applied to writing specifically about fashion. You’ll learn how to report on fashion events, document trends, and write style critiques.

Clothing Collection: The name of this course will be different from program to program, but the gist of the course will be the same; it’s a class that helps you develop a personal design philosophy and begin work on a portfolio. If you’re going into fashion design, that might mean that you build a collection of patterns and clothing. If you’re going into fashion marketing, you might design logos and plan out a business strategy.

If you’re interested in a career in fashion but you attend or are planning on attending a university that doesn’t offer fashion-related degrees, you can still use your college coursework to prepare you for the fashion industry. Some courses you can take that, though not necessarily fashion-specific, might help you get your foot in the door of your first fashion job are as follows:

College degrees in fashion span several different specialties. Some schools offer degrees in fashion as a whole, others in more specialized fields like fashion journalism or fashion marketing, and others in even more specialized fields like knitwear or fashion photography. The courses you’ll take while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in fashion will vary by program, but we’ve compiled a general list of courses you can expect to be required to take. Note that because there are so many different schools and so many different types of fashion degrees, this is a generalized list; course titles and course descriptions may vary.

Where you’re working has a big impact on how much you make for a couple of reasons. First, because the cost of living varies so greatly from city to city, and even more when comparing cities to suburban or rural areas, the amount you can expect to get paid one place might be completely different from what you’ll be paid for doing the same job somewhere else. Secondly, locations with proximity to resources and industry hotspots means that major fashion hubs attract a more advanced set of designers and offers a more lucrative job market than other places in the United States. So while the 2020 median pay for all fashion designers was just over $75,000/year, those who live in New York City, a fashion hub, can expect to make more than designers living in Salt Lake City or Tampa.

This may seem obvious, but the longer you spend as a fashion designer, the more money you’ll make. If you’re coming straight from your undergrad, you’ll probably start out as an intern or design assistant—jobs that, as of 2021, make about $44,000/year. After a few years you can move up to mid-level fashion design jobs, and earn a little under $70,000/year on average. Once you’ve been working in fashion design for about 7 years, you can usually qualify for senior designer jobs, which pay approximately $87,000/year. Keep in mind, though, that longevity isn’t the only factor that determines your salary—as stated earlier, your location, skills, and education can change this number significantly in either direction.

It holds true in almost every field that the more education you have, the more money you’ll earn. The fashion industry is no exception; while it might be tempting to try to get a fashion job right out of high school, or right after an associate’s degree, your earning potential will be a lot lower than if you get a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Of course it would be best to choose a major that will help you accomplish your fashion career goals, but if you decide late in the game that you want to go into fashion it’ll still be helpful for you to have a bachelor’s or master’s degree of any kind.

Perhaps the most important indicator of how much you’ll earn as a fashion designer is how good you are at your job. Even if you have a master’s degree, even if you’ve been working in the fashion industry for eleven years, and even if you’re working in New York City, you’ll never achieve peak success if you’re not a skilled, creative, reliable employee. Developing the right skills and working hard will set you apart from other designers and line you up for more promotions. Being an excellent designer will give you a higher earning potential than anything else.


Finding out how much you can expect to be paid as a fashion designer isn’t quite as easy as googling “How much does a fashion designer make?” There are a number of factors to consider, including your location, longevity in the industry, level of education, and skill level.

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