Fashion entrepreneurs contribute greatly to the local and South African economy. It is, therefore, vital to equip fashion entrepreneurs with necessary knowledge and skills, to ensure the success of their entrepreneurships. Fashion entrepreneurship demands occupation-specific skills. Without these skills, client satisfaction levels can decrease, influencing the success of the entrepreneurship.

This article aims to describe the need existing amongst peri-urban fashion entrepreneurs without formal fashion-related training, with regard to the possession and utilisation of fashion drawing skills. A quantitative approach by means of interviewer-administered questionnaires was employed to explore this need. Non-probability sampling was used to identify 114 respondents.

Whilst training materials can be effective tools for addressing skills training needs, inherently colonised approaches undermine their anticipated benefit and use. Developers of skills training materials are customarily highly trained professionals, academics and practitioners who are often culturally and otherwise separated from the population for which their materials are intended. As a result, they may overestimate their end-users’ abilities to read and understand textual information effectively.