There was a time when I sewed some of my own clothes. It worked out well, especially because I could make slacks that reached beyond my ankles – no more high-water pants – and didn’t sag in the middle.
I always had a hard time finding slacks that fit perfectly at a price I was willing to pay.
I taught myself to sew after a college friend failed to finish an outfit for me. Ever the self-reliant person, I decided to teach myself. I spent many hours in fabric shops and knew where every one of them was located in any city where I lived.
Sewing was time-consuming – finding a pattern, choosing the fabric, cutting out the pattern from the tissue-paper sheets, laying the pieces on the fabric, cutting out the fabric and finally sewing the garment. Despite the chore, the end result was a tailor-made piece of clothing that fit me. It was akin to creating a work of art.
So when I came across some advertising posters for Simplicity patterns recently at auction, they took me back to those sewing shops. These were the kind of posters that would be aligned on top of the metal file-cabinet cases stuffed with patterns, tempting you into buying the latest Simplicity or Vogue or Butterick or McCall.
Vintage patterns and other sewing items come up at auction pretty often, but this was the first time I had seen the posters. No date was printed on them, but the clothes looked to be from the 1950s.
At auction, old patterns are snapped up pretty quickly by buyers, indicating that there’s still a steady market for them. As for me, I gave up sewing years ago; I just didn’t have the time or the inclination anymore. I even had to abandon one of the best fabrics shops I had ever come across. It had wonderful fabric – especially the wools – at remarkable prices. The place was more warehouse than shop, and that’s probably why the fabric cost so little.
Like most sewers, I had tons of fabric left over after I dropped out. Sewers always buy more than they need, thus the slogan “The One Who Dies With the Most Fabric Wins.” I finally got rid of all of it, along with the piles of patterns.
Through my sewing, I was following in the footsteps of millions of women who had relied on patterns to clothe their families inexpensively. That culture of sewing dated back to the mid-19th century when Ellen Louise Curtis Demorest of New York made the first tissue-paper patterns.
By the 1860s, Demorest was copying French fashions, and promoting and selling them through her own magazines. Her patterns were also sold by sales agents, mostly women, in shops across the country. Demorest hired both African American and white women to make the patterns, with both working side by side and earning equal pay. She was an abolitionist and women’s right advocate who, according to one account, shushed people away who disagreed with her politics.
Unfortunately, she did not patent her invention, but Ebenezer Butterick did. In 1863, Butterick’s wife Ellen suggested that she needed a pattern to make an outfit for their infant son that was in his size. Butterick experimented and came up with his own tissue-paper pattern. First, they were exclusively for men and boy’s clothes, but three years later, he started making women’s dress patterns.
These two pattern-makers were among a long list of such companies, including Simplicity, which got started in 1927, and McCall, founded in 1870 and whose patterns were marketed through a magazine that later took the name McCall’s.
I wasn’t around when the Simplicity posters came up for auction, and I wasn’t sure how they’d be used. Probably like they were in those fabric shops – as stand-up art placed strategically around the room.
