One of the best ways to create your own unique style for a life-changing event is to design your own dress. This may seem scary to anyone who did not attend a fashion design school, but you can find all kinds of resources online to help! If you want to design your own dress online for free for a wedding, prom, or formal occasion, check out this guide to all the best resources!
The best way to design your own dress online for free for a wedding, prom, or formal event is to use fashion design software, a fashion app, or a custom design offer from a dress-making company. Fashion software such as Tailornova or Inkscape offers free options for creating digital dress designs. Apps like Corel Draw offer a virtual way to create dresses.
In this article, you will learn about the top software, apps, and custom design programs online. In addition, you will find quick tips on the basic steps of dress design. Finally, you will discover helpful information on how much this process costs.
How to Design a Dress Online
You can design a dress online in three ways, including using authentic fashion design software, a fashion app, or a custom-dress web store.
By far, the easiest method of the three is to find a good online store that offers comprehensive customization options. A unique option is to master fashion design software and create your garment from the ground up. The most accessible option is using an app on your phone or device.
You will find the top free options for each of these three online design methods listed in the sections below. But before you decide which method to use, you may want to consider a few other factors.
First, you can find and use free clothing design tools pretty easily. However, you will still have to pay to have the dress made. This cost will vary a lot depending on the complexity of your gown and the type of fabric you request. The big benefit to this more costly approach is that you know you will end up with a professional-looking gown.
Alternatively, you may want to use a fashion program to create a sewing pattern out of your design. Some real graphic design programs offer this function. In this case, you still have to buy fabric, but you will not have to pay a professional to sew the dress for you!
The downside to using true fashion software is that you may encounter a steep learning curve. For example, some programs assume that you have a solid graphic design background and already know how to use vector design principles.
Finally, you can also find a handful of decent fashion apps you can easily access on your phone. Unfortunately, these often do not get as complex or in-depth as real fashion software. But you may like this option if you want to dabble your toes in the shallow end of the pool, as it were, instead of learning a lot of graphic design.
The good news is that whatever method you choose, technology has advanced so much that you create authentic, vivid representations of your unique dress creation in many different ways online.
Design Your Own Dress Online for Free
Here you will find the top three options to design your dress for free using each of the methods described earlier in this article. A few of the options offer a free trial but will at least let you design one dress! Others offer completely open-source code that remains free or free design but payment for the actual dress.
Customizable Dresses Online
By far, the most user-friendly, easy-to-use method for designing a dress online for free is to use a customizable option through an online store. The customization tools can vary in complexity and ability depending on the seller. But you can count on a user-friendly interface even if the way the site works varies from store to store.
The upside to this method is that you can learn it in just a few minutes and quickly create your own unique gown. The downside is that you will then need to pay the online store to make the garment for you, based on your customizations.
Dig For Victory
Dig for Victory does not have an incredibly intuitive website, but it does offer more professional-level formal gown options, such as mixing and matching the type of bodice and skirt you want on your dress. To create a gown through this online store, you select a bodice, sleeve, skirt style, and type of fabric, among other things. Then you submit your request and wait to receive a quote about how much the dress will cost.
This more high-end version of a customizable dress gives you a lot of flexibility regarding how much of the style you can control. That said, you do not get to see a visualization of your dress through the online store.
This is more of a wedding gown or formal evening gown type of customization, allowing you to select formal styles and elaborate fabrics.
Sumissura
Sumissura is a custom clothing company based out of Shanghai. The online store offers a limited selection of style options you can mix and match to create an all-purpose or a ceremonial dress. Some options include selecting your preferred color, type of fabric, and style of skirt and bodice.
The style options do not have a huge variety; for example, you can select only five different bodice types for a formal gown. That said, the website does offer a very nice 3D visualization of your gown as you create or alter the style. You can also input your specific measurements to receive a gown tailored just for you.
Bags of Love
Bags of Love offers fun, casual dresses you can customize to suit your mood. One of the coolest features offered through this shop is the option to add text or graphics to some of the dress templates.
The biggest drawback to this online store is the pricing, with even a simple t-shirt dress ranging in price from $55 and $85! You also have to select from generic sizing instead of getting a made-to-measure dress from this shop. The only other potential issue is that you will not find formal or wedding dresses to customize through this shop.
CowCow
CowCow offers a fairly standard customizable dress design program. To make your own dress through this store, you first select from over 50 basic dress styles, such as a sarong wrap or a chiffon maxi dress. You can read the full product details and pricing at this point, including what kind of material the dress is made out of.
Next, you can select from various options, including color, print pattern if you want that, and any decorative elements like buttons or bows.
You do have to create an account to get started, but you do not have to pay anything unless you decide to purchase. Also, this website focuses on informal girl’s and women’s dresses, not wedding dresses or prom gowns.
Free Online Clothes Designing Software
The most rewarding but difficult online dress design option is to use free online clothes designing software. This software may seem confusing if you do not have any experience with graphic design. In fact, professional designers use these tools!
That said, you can easily find Youtube tutorials or seek out the help page on these websites. With a little effort, you can learn not only how to make your gorgeous gown for a special occasion but how to create your own unique clothing style!
Tailornova
Tailornova is one of the most popular 3D fashion design tools out there. This cool program lets you play with premade templates, input your own sketches, or mix and match 3D designs. In addition, you can create made-to-measure designs just for you by creating a 3D figure based on your personal shape and size, too.
Plus, it can turn a finished virtual image of your gown into flat sewing patterns, as well! If you plan to sew yourself, you may want to strongly consider Tailornova because it has the option to translate your 3D gown into a sewing pattern.
The only downside to this professional-grade tool is that the website does not always offer a free trial period. They offer a free demo periodically, though, so keep an eye out! You have the pricing option to pay per design instead of purchasing a monthly subscription.
Inkscape
Many fashion design students and artists of all sorts use Inkscape as a free, open-source design program with thousands of different uses. Your imagination is the only limit as you create a wedding dress or evening gown in this web-based program!
That said, you can teach yourself how to make sewing patterns in this program or find plenty of helpful videos online, but the website does not come with a built-in tool for this process. You will probably find it easier to use this program to create the concept of your gown that you could then ask a professional o sew for you.
Dress Designing Apps
You can find many different kinds of apps to inspire your dress design. These range from inspirational apps such as Vogue Runway to customizable clothing stores via the app, like eshakti. You can also find many, many different kinds of artistic apps you can use to sketch or layer your dress if you prefer a more artistic approach.
eShakti
eShakti is a customized clothing store for women with an online store and an app version that you can download for free. Through this app, you can select from various style options to get a dress made to your specifications. You can browse a very diverse range of dress styles or customize every element of each design by changing the type of sleeves, neckline, skirt, and so on before you place an order.
This store also offers unique touches, such as decorative face masks that coordinate with your custom dress!
Unfortunately, the dresses do come in premade sizes rather than allowing you to input custom measurements. On the bright side, though, you can find everything from casual maxi dresses to formal wedding gowns through this store!
Coreldraw
CorelDraw is an advanced graphic design program used by many professional fashion experts. In recent years, the company also launched an app loaded with many design features such as vector design and 3D options. You can think of it as quite similar to the Adobe Illustrator design suite.
If you want to design your dress from scratch, you may want to consider a professional-grade app like this one. On the other hand, the app comes along with the full CorelDraw suite. You can access a pretty excellent free trial of the CorelDraw suite, but after that, you do have to pay a monthly subscription to continue using the app.
Vogue Runway
This free app gives you access to hundreds of thousands of runway dresses from years past. You can scroll through the many gorgeous images to find inspiration for your own dress!
You can create mood boards and save close-ups of intricate decorative details to your board to create a collage of ideas, as well.
This app does not give you tools to create your own dress, but it gives you a board idea of all the different kinds of dresses and designs!
Design Your Own Wedding Dress Online
A wedding dress is one of the most important dresses you will ever wear, and it becomes even more special if you customize or create your own gown for this monumental occasion! While plenty of wedding stores offer minor alterations, you can find a few online stores that offer customizable designs you can mix and match to create just the right dress for you.
Blue Thread
BlueThread offers customized wedding dresses as well as a cool 3D visualization of your custom dress as you create it. You can select from various neckline, bodice, and skirt styles and pair the type of fabric you want with each portion of the dress. In addition, the store offers a browsable collection of dresses to help inspire your design choices, too!
After creating your design, the website walks you through how to take your own measurements. BlueThread does partner with some brick-and-mortar bridal stores, so in some cases, you can go to an expert for measuring if you prefer that. You then submit payment and wait for your dress to arrive!
Wedding Dress Creator
Wedding Dress Creator is a free online mix-and-match to help you put together your favorite dress design elements. You will end up with a virtual image of a dress rather than a usable sewing pattern. But you can use this as a great starting point to help you finalize your favorite style!
Though the graphics look outdated, this is one of the most comprehensive style selectors you will find anywhere. For instance, you can choose from a whopping 88 different neckline types! You can also search for dresses based on your skin tone or pair your dress with various accessories.
Design Your Own Prom Dress
If you want to design your own prom dress to make a memorable evening even more special, you can find a variety of online stores that cater to teen girl styles, too! Many of the dress design options offered earlier in this article could also work for designing your own prom dress. But these websites specialize in prom dresses specifically!
LoliPromDress
Loli offers a fairly unique service for prom dress design: the website encourages you to upload your vision of the dress. You can use a sketch, a graphic, or a photo of what you want your dress to look like. All you have to do is upload your dress inspiration and wait for 12 hours to hear back!
Loli’s seamstresses will reach out to you to get your measurements and let you know if they can create your dream dress. Then, of course, you will have to submit payment for the dress itself!
LUNSS
Lunss couture dress store offers a huge selection of prom and wedding dresses that you can custom to your style. This is not a cheap online store, as the customized dresses can easily cost several hundred or even a thousand dollars! However, you get comprehensive services, including a consultation with a specialist to make sure your prom dress comes out just right.
TO design a dress through this online store, you select a dress template and then use the right-hand menu to customize various portions of the dress or select your preferred color.
Basic Steps of Dress Design
The basic steps of dress design remain the same whether you use a pencil and paper, a website, or an app. You can learn fashion design at home if you master these fundamentals!
Of course, sometimes it’s a lot easier to use an online store that offers customization options, such as the options provided in this article. But it’s a good idea to know what goes into a dress design anyway!
- The first step of any dress design is to find inspiration. You might like to use Pinterest or take your own photos and paste them into a physical scrapbook. Either way, you need a general mood or theme to get you started.
- Next, you want an idea of the general shape of the dress. You can sketch by hand or choose from a template in an online store. This is where you nail down things like the silhouette of the dress.
- You will want to brainstorm things like color, texture, and decoration. Lots of artists use a mood board for this. You can also use Pinterest or Instagram as a mood board if you find that easier.
- For some of you, you may want to stop here and take your ideas to a professional designer. For others, you will now want to get out your real design tool to create the virtual or physical representation of the dress. This is where you create sketches or a 3D design using one of the tools described earlier.
- Finally, the dress design gets real in technical sketches or by processing the virtual design into 2D sewing patterns.
What is the Best Program to Design Your Own Clothing for Free?
The best program to design your own clothing for free is the one that gives you custom clothes that fit your budget and match your personal style. The website you choose should ultimately depend on whether or not you want to take on the graphic design yourself or if you prefer to modify the templates offered by many made-to-measure online clothing stores.
Graphic design tools like CorelDraw or Inkscape give you a huge range of tools to build your dress from the ground up. Fun apps like Vogue Runway provide inspiration for your gown. Unique online stores like Loli offer to design a dress based on your sketches, photos, and mood boards.
Have you ever ordered a custom dress or had a dress made to your own design? Did you like it? Leave a comment below to let us know!