Fashion Design Manual
Reference Education Textbook Fashion Design Business & Economics Professional Development Australian Fashion
Pamela Stecker’s Fashion Design Manual (2003, hard-cover) is the single-volume studio companion most Australian fashion students still reach for first. Written by a RMIT lecturer who shaped the country’s premier design course, the 294-page reference distils pattern-making, range-planning, cost-sheets, specification drawings and portfolio presentation into one heavily illustrated workflow. Because it was created for tertiary classrooms rather than the coffee-table, every spread is step-by-step: flat sketches sit beside finished garments, measurement tables align with mini-briefs, and check-boxes teach fledgling labels how to meet offshore factory standards. The result is a book that turns raw creative impulse into commercially viable product—exactly the skill employers quiz for in interviews.
Collectors prize the original 2003 hard-cover for its rarity outside Australia; most copies never left university libraries, so a clean, smoke-free ex-private copy is genuinely scarce online. Inside, more than 600 of Stecker’s own line drawings and colour flats show how to render lace, top-stitching and stretch finishes—details that free YouTube tutorials still skip over. Chapters on fibre science, sustainable sourcing and range budgeting make the manual surprisingly current; brands revisiting near-shoring and small-batch production use her costing matrices to price garments sewn in Melbourne or Sydney at a profit.
For young adults eyeing fashion school, adults switching careers, or home-sewers who want to sell on Etsy, this is the one book that bridges “I can sew” and “I can run a label.” It weighs less than a laptop, lies flat on a cutting table, and—because it was printed on matte art paper—has aged gracefully with no greasy fingerprints or loose signatures. A very-good copy now commands three times its campus bookshop price, yet still costs far less than a single university unit. Snapping it up means owning the same curriculum that launched Dion Lee, Alice McCall and half of Australia’s contemporary womenswear—without paying international tuition.
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