Coat Sew-Along: The Design Inspiration

Hello, readers! I am back home from a wonderful time at the American Sewing Expo. And now it's sew-along time! (Reminder: you can join the sew-along by joining this Flickr group.) Today, I wanted to write about my design inspiration for Butterick 5824, as I think it will give a better perspective on the intended fit of the coat.

The whole reason I wanted to do a line of patterns was to recreate vintage silhouettes that are hard to find for the home seamstress. You know that rare and iconic vintage pattern you've always wanted but costs $200 and is only for sale in a bust size 30"? That's what I'm talking about. For me, one of those designs was the 50s Princess Coat.

The Princess Coat is a direct descendent of Dior's 1947 New Look, which was marked by sloping shoulders, a dropped armscye, a nipped waist, and long full skirts.

In the early 50s, this style of coat became known as a Princess Coat. (Designer Lilli Ann made some of the most gorgeous styles, in my opinion.) If you look closely at the examples below, you'll see some of the design details I was most inspired by: very full skirts, dramatic collars, fitted waists, and loose kimono sleeves.

Lilli Ann coat

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I used photographs of coats like these as I was designing Butterick 5824 and also sewing the blue sample coat that you see in the pattern photo. So I'm hoping that these visuals will also help you as you're fitting your coat. As you can see, the sleeve and underarm area is not meant to be fitted at all. You will have folds of fabric in this area, which is intentional. I know that moden fitting techniques have us believe that all drapes of fabric are "drag lines" and therefore bad. But in this case, it's part of the design. Dior even brought back this fit in several recent couture collections!

So there you have it, readers. I hope this was helpful! More sew-along posts coming at you all this month.

Evening Dresses of the New Look and Early 50s

Vogue’s New Book for Better Sewing was published in 1952, and it was a wonderful time for evening gowns. Christian Dior’s New Look was unveiled in 1947, and by the early 50s the silhouette was well established, with its full skirts, tiny waists, and structured bodices.

Waspie "corset" from the V&A collection

The New Look silhouette relied upon a corseted waist, so it’s a happy coincidence that I just made my first underbust corset. My corset is very similar to the waspies of the late 40s and early 50s, actually. It’s narrow, encircling the waist and leaving the hips and bust free. (Of course, a true New Look devotee would take this opportunity to add hip padding and bust padding to increase hourglass proportions; I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got in those areas.)

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Evening gowns provided even more opportunity to use obscene amounts of fabric than day dresses and suits. At least, it must have seemed obscene in those early post-war years. It’s no wonder that the New Look was protested by some: after years of rations and “Make Do and Mend,” skirts that ventured below the knee seemed extravagant. Fabrics were milled in narrower widths in those days, so it’s not unusual to see an evening dress call for ten yards or more of fabric.

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I read an interesting statement in the book Theatre de la Mode: Fashion Dolls: The Survival of Haute Couture that's stuck with me ever since. The author wrote of the marvels of seeing a fresh couture exhibit in a recently war-torn continent: "Today, freed from such preoccupations, are we even capable of being sufficiently amazed?" Likewise, I don’t think we can manage to be suitably impressed by the wonder (and perhaps anger) these huge evening gowns would have instilled in someone of the time period. (Interesting side story: I told Jeff about about the above quote, and he replied, "I don't really think we're sufficiently amazed by anything anymore." How true!)

The pattern for the Evening Dress featured in VoNBBS actually came out a bit earlier than the book. It was originally released in 1949, and I think the styling betrays its late 40s origins. Which I think explains why there’s something relatively restrained about this dress. The skirt could be much fuller than it is. But perhaps that's because this is from the very early days of the New Look, when designers were still testing the waters with the idea of excess and volume.

The pattern was reissued in a new envelope for the publication of VoNBBS. The illustration style certainly changed, didn’t it?

The model pictured has raven (Elizabeth Taylor-esque even) hair and bright red lips. The line quality of the art is different: less restrained, I think. And of course the brilliant pink screams femininity.

Well, that's your Evening Dress installment of the day. I'll be back tomorrow with my adventures in muslin-ing the VoNBBS dress!

The Net Corselet

 

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Many vintage dresses have built-in corselets, especially those of Dior's New Look. These were complicated inner structures, with boning, a grosgrain waist stay, and bust enhancers. I often think they're almost as beautiful as the outer dress; is that crazy? However, it's hard to find good pictures of the insides of these dresses. Ah, wouldn't it be nice to own a New Look Dior to be able to inspect it at will?

All the corselets that I've seen pictured in vintage dresses were made of cotton net, which I find fascinating. I've also seen this called bobbinette. As Claire Shaeffer writes in Couture Sewing Techniques:  

Traditionally, the corselette was made of two layers of cotton tulle; in more recent years, fabrics such as silk, linen, and power net (a girdle fabric with spandex) are used more frequently. The cotton tulle, sometimes called English net or bobbinet, is lightweight, soft, cool to wear, and does not ravel; it is also expensive and difficult to find.

Shaeffer recommends this online source for cotton net, and it is indeed expensive (though 72" wide, so you wouldn't need much). I believe I may have seen cotton nets at B&J; I'll need to go check that out.

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I've made a corselet out of cotton batiste and liked the results, but I'm interested to sew one with the cotton net method for a true vintage vibe. Have any of you tried this?

Update: To answer a reader question, a corselet isn't necessarily meant to be your only support. If you're large busted, you'll need to still wear a bra. As Susan Khalje said when I took a class with her, the corselet acts on the dress, while a bra acts on the body. That said, I'm small busted and can get away with just a corselet. Also, liking the sew-along idea! I'll have to ponder that.

The New Look, Deconstructed

Would you mind terribly if I continued to gloat about the awesome gifts Santa brought me this Christmas? After coveting a certain outrageously big and expensive book for years, it is finally mine all mine! I’m speaking of the book Dior, a massive hulk of a tome that could easily break several toes if dropped. It’s huge, glossy, and gorgeous. I’m seriously considering tracking down one of those book stands that huge dictionaries are situated on in libraries so that I have it available for my perusing pleasure at all times. (Okay, perhaps not all that seriously.)

Anyway, the point is, I am obsessed with this book. It celebrates 60 years of the famous couture house’s designs with huge, gorgeous photographs. I was not surprised to be drooling over the earliest New Look designs of 1947, but I was unexpectedly drawn to the Galliano years. Don’t get me wrong, Galliano is a genius, but the early years of Dior have always been my thing. Well, now I have discovered Galliano’s fall/winter 2005 couture collection, and I seem to have a new obsession. Galliano was brought to Dior in 1997 to design a 50th anniversary tribute to the seminal New Look collection. Well, the book posits that the designer didn’t actually truly achieve a tribute collection until 2005.

But the collection goes beyond being a tribute; it’s a brilliant deconstruction of the New Look. And more than that, it makes the New Look fabulously transparent, wrenching out the innards for all to see. Take this dress:

See how the organza bodice dispays the boning and padding underneath? And then there's the draped skirt, revealing hip pads underneath, which were an integral part of the New Look construct. (I blogged about hip padding here, if you're interested.) In the runway piece, you can even see a bit of bust padding slipping out.

Here's another example from the book, in a lovely blue-violet shade.

One of my favorite details from these dresses are the handwritten labels, which are displayed on the outside of the bodice. Early Dior pieces had these labels on the inside to identify the style names.

These dresses are, arguably, much more striking on the dress form than on a model. Perhaps the concept was taken too far with the styling (i.e. the wig caps and drawn-on eyebrows). It would be interesting to see these looks on a model made up with classic early 50s hair and make-up, allowing the deconstruction of the dresses to stand out in contrast.

This one takes it a step further by mimicking the look of a dress form underneath the draped skirt.

So why are these looks so invaluable to the modern retro seamstress? Well, there are few things I love more than finding a close-up shot of the interior of a vintage Dior gown. With their intricate corselets, bust and hip padding, waist stays, crinolines, handwritten labels, boning and taffeta linings, I’ll admit that I sometimes find them more lovely than the gown itself. I’ve always been intrigued by the architecture of complicated vintage clothing, and it doesn’t get much better than a New Look Dior. And photos of these interiors are, sadly, few and far between. I love that Galliano takes the artifice of the designs and makes that the focal point.

Do you find this collection inspiring or bizarre--or both? These looks have me dreaming of making a lingerie-inspired dress with lots of boning, tulle, organza, and peach satin!

When Women Padded Their Hips

Readers, I just scored the coolest piece of 50s sewing ephemera off of eBay: a Vogue pattern for shoulder and hip pads! Casey knows that I'm obsessed with the engineering of Dior's New Look suits (blogged here) so she sweetly e-mailed me when she spotted this pattern. Hip pads are a sort of mythical being to me: I've read about them countless times but never seen them in their natural habitat, so to speak. Hence, I had to make this pattern mine.

A New Look jacket, like that of the Bar Suit below, would have been intensely structured with interfacings, pad stitching, and padding in the shoulders and hips. (And, of course, the model would be wearing a "waspie" corset to cinch her waist.)

I think the reason hip padding is so fascinating to me is that it's such a foreign concept to a modern woman: we're supposed to want to make our hips disappear, not emphasize them! (That's what you'll learn if you watch any yogurt or cereal commercial today, right?) But think about it: a little tailoring goes a long way in a jacket (just see the difference sleeve heads made in my red suit) to creating a more flattering fit. And there's nothing worse than a droopy, flimsy peplum. (Okay, that's not true. There are actually a lot worse things, but you get my point.) Wouldn't it be great to create a smooth, structured line on the hips as well? Hence, I've actually become rather attracted to the idea of tailoring the hips of jackets, just as the shoulders would be tailored.

So how does this pattern work, you ask? Well, I was surprised to see that it's not really padding at all, but three layers of heavy stiffeners: one layer of heavy hair canvas, one of buckram, and one of heavy muslin. (That's a lot of heaviness!)

There are two pattern pieces: an inner piece for the three stiffeners, and an outer piece for a fabric cover.

Here's how the construction works. All three layers are basted together, stitched in horizontal rows (this is how padstitching is done by machine), and then covered with a fabric outer cover.

Pretty cool stuff, huh? I'm kind of dying to try this in a jacket. What's really exciting is that you could manipulate this idea to be more extreme too: for example, deeper darts and some serious hand padstitching could get you super-structural hips, like in the Bar Suit above.

But this more subtle effect (well, relatively speaking) of the pattern above would be perfect for a slim suit, like the one from VoNBBS. (Which, by the way, I finally found! Thanks to a helpful reader. Only one VoNBBS pattern left to find!) Can't you just see this with the hips getting a little help from these pads?

What do you think? Could you ever bring yourself to pad your hips? Or will you happily leave this idea in the 50s?