What are Fashion Flats?

A 2D or fashion sketch template of your apparel design, as if it is laid out flat. Drawn to show the design details to help understand factories its construction. These are also called as Clothing Templates, Technical Flats, CADS or just Flats. Fashion Flats are normally simplified drawings and created with more straight lines, without the folds or with minimum, to help Pattern Makers to understand and to follow the design lines better.

These Fashion Flats sketches are very important to show the Seams, Stitches, Elements details like, Pockets, Collars, Inside Finishings and also How you want the Trims to be fixed onto a garment or a dress. However, Fashion Flats are not limited to Black and White drawings only, they can be added with a bit of colour too, as long as the information is clear enough.

How to draw Fashion Flats?

Fashion Flats can be drawn by hand using a Black Pointer Pen. The best practice these days is to work with Vector Tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape.

The reason is that you can enlarge the size to any scale, without losing its resolution. You can also add colour and Fabric Textures to it, to see how it looks when its made. You can keep using it for future collections, as longs as the basic shape is what you need.