The lack of any bottoms in light neutral tones is a serious gap in my wardrobe, especially in summer when black just won’t cut it. As in, I have a stupid amount of stuff I like but can’t wear because I have no beige pants. Enter EvaDress 3322, a multi-sized modern reissue of a 1940 Simplicity trouser/overall pattern.

Simplicity, you say? I know, I know. Barely two months into my no-Simplicity vow and already I’m backsliding. I tried, really I did. I ordered this sweet Hollywood slacks pattern from the unimpeachable Mom’s Patterns in March and waited weeks for it to arrive, but thanks to the vagaries of the transatlantic postal service, it never showed up. Are Royal Mail in league with the devil? Who knows. The clock was ticking — it was late May and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it English summer was due to arrive any day now. I couldn’t afford to wait for another pattern to ship from the US; I had to put shears to cloth. The Simplicity pattern was in my stash, so back to Simplicity I went.

Just to be on the safe side, I checked the measurements scrupulously to make sure there weren’t any of the wild discrepancies I’ve come to associate with Simplicity patterns and made a rare muslin before cutting into my fabric, a beige cotton/viscose twill I bought from Cloth House in Soho. It needed surprisingly little tweaking, although of course this didn’t stop me from compulsively tinkering with the fit later to the point of courting ruin. However, for my first ever pair of pants, I’m fairly happy with the result. I added big patch pockets and belt loops to soften the spartan look of the original design and give me more wearing options.

Thanks to my project dysmorphia, I could point out a whole host of problems and defects that render these pants torturously unacceptable in my eyes. BUT I WON’T, because when I debuted the pants to the two main men in my life and started to moan about all their flaws (the pants’, not the men’s), they (the men, not the pants) very sensibly told me to STFU, the pants looked great. So instead, I will tell you what I like about them and what I got right and leave my FAILs to the “Lessons Learned” section below.

I love the comfort of these pants. I cannot remember the last time I had a pair of pants that hung from my natural waist rather than from a point below it. Starting from the break at the fullest part of the hip, these pants have a lot of ease. They also have a very low crotch relative to modern pants and jeans — there’s plenty of room in there for a girdle, for instance, or a pair of old-timey French knickers. (Ooh, swishy!) These elements, combined with the drapey fabric I used, make the pants feel flowy, full and unconstricting. They churn fascinatingly along the pavement when I walk and allow a much freer range of motion in hips and legs than I’m used to after years of tight, stretch and low-rise pants. I can high-kick in these if the mood takes me (although probably not while wearing the girdle). Great for lindy hop!

I love their versatility. The high waist makes them ideal for wearing with all my 1940s blouses, and I can pair them with modern tops and sweaters to make them work- and street-appropriate, like so:

Paired with restyled thrifted Brora cashmere sweater, £12 (no coupons!)

I like the fact that I got the topstitching on the patch pockets right. “Simple” tasks like stitching a straight line are usually a minefield for me. I also like the fact that I wore these out of the house for the first time today and two people complimented me without suspecting that I’d made them.

I like the secret banjo I embroidered on the inside waistband (a detail shamelessly cribbed from the blog now known as Adventures in Couture):

I like the fact that these pants have jailbroken about half a dozen items in my wardrobe. After a year and a half of ownership, I can finally wear my vintage 1940s utility shoes!

These shoes are more than 60 years old and still going strong. They may not be dainty or elegant, but they were certainly built to last. Here’s the maker’s mark, complete with the CC41 “cheeses” to indicate that the shoes comply with British utility standards:

Like Tabby, the original owner was smart enough to have a cobbler attach protective half-soles and heels to extend the life of the the shoes themselves:

But back to my pants!

This is the most practical piece of clothing I’ve ever made, and definitely the first I’ve made with the presumption that I’d be wearing it regularly in situations requiring me to look normal and presentable. Ooh, pressure. But it is a challenge in its own way to make something that has to stand up against our RTW-trained aesthetic standards for street and workwear. I can see the appeal. Maybe Self-Stitched September isn’t out of the question after all!

I think I’m starting to understand the Simplicity problem (wacky drafting aside). As its name implies, Simplicity marketed itself in the 1940s and 1950s as the easiest and most accessible pattern company for novice seamstresses — its promotional film Pattern for Smartness, which I’ve featured before, emphasizes how easy Simplicity patterns are to use because the brainiacs at the company have done everything for you.

However, simplifying design and construction that much must involve sacrificing some quality in the finished product. Beautiful garments require finesse on the part of the maker — more finesse than can possibly be included on a single instruction sheet without printing it on monster A0-size paper. Therefore, a lot of vintage Simplicity patterns, because they favor easy-to-explain or apparently easy-to-master techniques, make it easy to sew a finished garment that looks homemade.

However, some of these “simplified” techniques actually involve false economies of effort. It’s easier to illustrate and explain how to make a “simple” straight waistband than a faced contour waistband, but I loathe and dread straight waistbands because they are never simple. The necessity of easing the garment into the waistband, for instance, often isn’t mentioned. You need to account for turn of cloth because it is physically impossible for three layers of fabric cut to the same length (waistband right and wrong sides + interfacing) to curve neatly around the waist without buckling or bulging. The traditional methods given for finishing the waistband (fold both seam allowances under and topstitch or handstitch to secure them) nearly always create too much bulk. And it is often fiendishly difficult to topstitch through multiple layers of fabric without creep, even using a walking foot. And on and on. I’m not sure this deceptive simplicity in patterns is helpful to those just learning to sew.

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m learning to understand Simplicity instead of just, you know, hating it, this will be my last. I really mean it this time!

Lessons learned:

• Apply a twill tape waistband for fitting. Any garment that hangs from the waist needs a stable waistband for accurate fitting. Sandra Betzina’s tip in Power Sewing about using twill tape for this is invaluable — I used a marker to draw the waistband “notches” on the twill tape and basted it just inside the seamline before trying on. This also gave me a better idea how much easing I’d have to do when applying the waistband to the garment (in this case, none).
• A method that looks simple on the instruction sheet may conceal hours of struggle. In this case, “topstitch waistband through all layers”.
• Avoid the Colombo Effect by resisting the temptation to tweak “just one more thing”. In my quest for the rare and novel sensation of snugly fitting trousers, I made one last impulsive fitting adjustment that nearly ruined the whole project. I took too much off the hips, distorting the fit and causing seam slippage, and had to let it out again. In the end it left permanent and visible flaws in the project. Ouch! Leave it alone!
• Use the best interfacing you can find. This may mean importing. You can have any interfacing you want in Britain as long as it’s Vilene (made with real paper!), which means I often come up empty-handed when searching for suitable interfacing for projects. So I didn’t have anything in my stash for interfacing the button and buttonhole plackets on these trousers (not mentioned in the instructions, by the way) and my buttonholes are already distorted. Waaah.
• Hemline brand anorak snaps are total crap. I had three people working on the problem and none of us could get the male half of the snaps to stay in the fabric. Avoid avoid avoid. In the end I used jeans buttons.

Coupons spent: 6 (2 less than a pair of store-bought pants!)

Coupons left: 41

For instance, those peep-toe pinup shoes you love? Sorry, ladies — they were banned by the British government for the duration as being “frivolous and potentially dangerous“. Haircuts seem mostly to have been shorter than what we think of as the “typical” 1940s style –piled up on top, shoulder-length in back — because that was easier to style and care for, especially considering hairpin shortages. And dress styles were much, much simpler due to the UK’s tighter austerity restrictions.

Utility wasn’t just a minor feature of the landscape, either — it accounted for 80% of clothes produced during and after the war. Here are some photos of utility fashions from the Imperial War Museum archives. As you can see, it deserves the name. It’s well-cut and solidly made, but hardly exciting — after all, the point was to reduce demand. Still, why don’t ordinary women get suits this nice these days?

I love these girls. Note barrage balloon (not for show) in the background.

I suspect this is actually a man:

Hmmm. Darling, where is the Sudetenland?

This model looks like she’s afraid of heights.

And this one looks like she’s selling some product that will keep you from living the lonely life of a spinster due to inadequate feminine hygiene.

This dress is as adorable as the model wearing it, who’s the spitting image of Carey Mulligan. Picture from the (practically unsearchable) Hulton Archive. And hey, where did she get her peep-toes?

More great photos of utility fashion, from the 1942 British Vogue, can be found at the Freudian Slips Vintage blog.

• Podcast: “Fashion or Ration”

Fun fact: Hardy Amies (“His only handicap is his precious appearance and manner”) went to the same school as my boyfriend.

During the war, Pathé newsreels and short informational films were shown in cinemas before and between features. I love the arch, sometimes snarky commentary and the models’ rigid carriage and fixed smiles. Here’s an interesting short from 1942 on the new utility hairstyles, suitable for wear during war work or under a military cap. Pay attention to the vintage cutting and styling techniques:

These hairstyles look ridiculously fussy to us now, considering how long they took to set and maintain, but if you think about how much time a modern woman with even a wash-’n-go cut spends washing and drying her hair (daily? every two days?), it probably evens out to much the same amount of time spent by wartime women with liberty cuts who only washed their hair once a week or so. They arguably got more stylish results, but we have less cause to worry about “unwanted guests”. [Warning: head-scratchy horrors below.]

I’m pretty sure UK clothing manufacturers were prohibited from using lace, so the trimming on the bodice is a little surprising. As one commenter pointed out, it could easily have been added by the wearer — lace was unrationed and still available to buy.

What’s also interesting is that, because the fabric isn’t wide enough to allow the slip’s full length to be cut on the bias, the hem has been pieced, which looks pretty startling in a commercially manufactured garment:

And here’s a beautifully cut tweed utility suit by probably-Charles Creed:

The lines are extremely simple, but the designer’s added a bias inset at center back for interest:

It was a stroke of genius getting high-end designers on board for the Utility scheme. As I have found out to my cost, it takes much more skill to make a very simple garment look good than something with a lot of frou-frou. The cut of many utility suits is superb, which goes a long way to make up for their relative severity.

If you don’t live handy to the V&A (or even if you do), I suggest you check out their Fashion in Detail books, which go into considerable detail about these and other garments held at the museum, along with glimpses inside at the garments’ construction. Drool!

Three centuries of frock porn from the V&A trip over at my Flickr set!

Tagged: 1940s, austerity, history, pr0n, underwear, utility ]]> http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/02/06/utility-fashion-at-the-va/feed/ 7 Susannah Utility slip Utility slip, bodice detail Pieced hem http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/21/where-have-all-the-patterns-gone/ http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/01/21/where-have-all-the-patterns-gone/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:14:27 +0000 Susannah http://cargocultcraft.com/?p=992 ]]> Having lurked for several years in the online world of vintage sewing, I’ve noticed something missing. Lots of us enjoy wearing and sewing the fashions of World War 2, but nearly all the vintage patterns circulating for sale on the internet are American, even though British wartime fashion is arguably more interesting to the geek seamstress due to the challenges posed by rationing, material shortages and the sheer number of design restrictions. I adore US fashion from the 1940s, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how British pattern companies, and the British arms of international companies like Vogue and Butterick, rose to the challenge of designing for the austerity years?

UK Board of Trade restrictions during the war dictated in dizzying detail exactly what design features commercial garments could and couldn’t have. For instance, according to the civilian clothing regulations of 1941 (CC 41), a  woman’s suit was allowed no more than two pockets, six skirt seams and four meters of stitching in order to prevent labor and materials from being diverted from the war effort into the civilian clothing industry. That sounds unbelievably drab, but just look at this chic little dress by Victor Stiebel:

The restrictions applied to tailor-made clothes as well as ready-to-wear. British home sewing patterns of the time come marked with a warning:

“Professional Dressmakers are reminded that they must comply with the Making of Civilian Clothing (Restriction) Orders.”

However, home dressmakers in the UK would not have been bound by CC41 design constraints, although they had other challenges to contend with, including super-tight fabric rationing and shortages of trimmings, haberdashery, needles, thread and practically everything else. Assuming they could get hold of what they needed to make a dress in the first place, you would think they would have tried to make it as un-austere as they could. On the other hand, I have read that along with official austerity regulations came a patriotic trend towards greater simplicity in dress and ornament. It would be interesting to have a more comprehensive view of home sewing patterns to see how much they reflect the austerity aesthetic and how much room they left for departure from it.

From combing through the VADS image library, I’ve discovered that in addition to the Big Four (Butterick, Vogue, Simplicity and McCall’s) and Du Barry, plenty of other UK-based companies supplied the British public with patterns during the war years. Mike Brown’s book The 1940s Look reproduces magazine advertisements for mail-order patterns from, among others, Woman, Modern Woman and Home Notes. And there’s more. Ever heard of Weldons? Maudella? Practical Patterns? Odhams? Blackmore? How about Bestway, who made this charming little frock pattern I found at Vintage British Style?

Nearly everybody must have done at least a little sewing in those days. Making your own clothes cost fewer coupons than buying the same garments ready-made, and local schools, colleges and women’s groups all over the country taught basic dressmaking and make-and-mend classes for those whose skills weren’t up to scratch.

So what happened to all those patterns? Wartime publishing restrictions were tight, and paper was so scarce that newspapers in the UK shrank to four pages, books and other paper products were pulped and re-pulped (50 million prewar books were pulped in 1943!) and toilet paper didn’t bear thinking about. Were the print runs too small for spares to have survived? Did they all get used and re-used to death? Did the women who bought them ditch them later as they abandoned austerity and flocked to the New Look? Or am I just looking in the wrong places?

If you have any experience buying, selling or working with WW2-era patterns from the companies I’ve mentioned, do please drop me a line and tell me where they can be found!