Famous Fashion Print Designers Who Defined Their Eras

A fashion print has to work on a moving body, so the designers who defined their eras tended to think about the garment first and the repeat second. The nine below are listed in the order they changed the look of the decade, with the print decision that mattered most.

Poiret was a Paris couturier who opened the Martine workshop in 1911, where young women drew flowers and patterns freely, without academic rules. Raoul Dufy, a painter, designed textiles for Poiret and then for the Lyon silk firm Bianchini-Férier. Dufy's roses and garden scenes keep the brush: loose outlines, color that slides past the edge of the shape. If you want a print that looks painted, not constructed, this is the source.

Schiaparelli treated print as wit. She worked with the artist Salvador Dalí on a printed lobster dress in 1937 and a "tears" print in 1938 that imitated torn fabric, and she used newspaper-style text prints in the 1930s. The lesson is scale and placement: a lobster is a single large image on a skirt, not a repeat. Conversational prints still work this way.

Pucci began with ski clothes in the late 1940s and became known for swirling, kaleidoscopic prints on lightweight silk jersey, often in vivid, closely valued colors. The jersey draped and packed well, so the prints suited resort and travel wear. Study the way he fills a shape edge to edge with color blocks divided by thin dark lines. His house prints are protected brand property, so learn the structure and draw your own.

An American who built his career in Milan, Scott became known for big, brightly colored floral prints in the 1960s and 1970s, often packed so densely that the background almost vanishes. The flowers are drawn large relative to the body, which is the point.

Birtwell designed prints for the fashion designer Ossie Clark: soft-focus flowers and curling stems printed on crepe and cut into bias dresses. The drawing is light and loose, with lots of open ground, because the cloth moves. Try a hand-drawn line at a scale of roughly 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 cm) for a similar feel.

Laura Ashley started in 1953 printing headscarves and tea towels at home, and the company grew into a name for small-scale, Victorian-inspired florals in the 1970s. Small repeats, muted colors and a cotton ground made it the opposite of Pucci's glamour, and equally recognizable. Our floral patterns category covers this territory.

Rhodes began as a textile designer in the 1960s, and her bold hand-drawn prints led her to make the dresses herself. Her approach reverses the usual order: the fabric is the idea, and the dress exists to show it.

The Greek designer, based in London, built her name around 2010 on digital prints that turned interiors, lamps and ornate objects into trompe l'oeil on dress shapes. Digital printing made engineered placement practical: one pattern piece, one unrepeated picture. It is the clearest modern example of print designed to the pattern piece.

• Draw for the cloth. Pucci's jersey, Birtwell's crepe and Ashley's cotton each demanded a different line weight and scale.
• Choose all-over or placement early. The two need different files and different artwork sizes.
• Test on the body shape. See a pattern on garments before committing, which is where Product Mockups (free) help by putting a pattern on 20 products.

For more of the lineage, read famous textile designers, the fashion print design guide and iconic prints in fashion history. If you want to try a bold statement pattern or an abstract pattern in the spirit of Pucci or Rhodes, you can generate a seamless tile in about 20 seconds with Pattern Weaver.