It took 10 minutes of college class time. Ten increasingly maddening minutes that taught me how much my hands know.
I had asked students in my fashion history course to cut from paper the outline of the top of a dress, what we dressmakers call a sloper. This outline on paper is the beginning of garment-making, the simplest element, a kind of first blueprint and an invitation to design.
Sewing is taking two-dimensional fabric and turning it into the three dimensions needed to cover the human body. You can drape fabric directly on a body or a dress dummy, if you have one handy, but most garments begin on paper. You start with the sloper; from it, you create a paper pattern, which you lay on fabric to cut out the pieces of cloth that make up the garment. Via an astonishing variety of methods of manipulation — slashing, gathering, spreading, folding and the like — what starts as a sloper becomes a garment falling gracefully along the lines of the human body. But my students could not begin to appreciate these methods of manipulation, which was the point of that part of the class, until we got the slopers cut out.
As I paced the room impatiently, I saw how slowly, how anxiously, my students wielded their scissors. A sloper is just three straight lines — center line from neck to waist, waistline across, shoulder line — and then the two curves of the neckline and the armhole. Like second graders working hard but clumsily, they took many short cuts down each straight line and ground to a halt of worry along the curves.
For me, this was a 30-second job, blades flashing once on each straight edge, then one sweep around each curve. Yes, my students can text up a storm on their phones, but that’s about all their hands can do. I have what we call hand skills, yet that term shortchanges the interplay between hand and mind and the stuff that makes up the world. It seems inadequate to describe how such ability satisfies the human need to create.
I started sewing as a kid, got set up at my mother’s machine, learned from doing and botched plenty of projects along the way. My mother had a sewing book on the Bishop Method from the 1950s, but its black-and-white photographs seemed dated and uninteresting to a tween mind in the 1970s. Home economics was a pale shadow of what it once had been. My junior high instructor helped me make a ghastly pair of overalls, but she never attempted to explain the principles that lay behind what we were doing.
Decades later I came across a 500-page, costume-and-textile textbook from 1956, and I began the research project that culminated in my book, The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish. That’s when I realized that a valuable legacy that had once belonged to women had been lost in the years between. I dubbed those women who had once taught the art of dress and the craft of sewing the “Dress Doctors” after a story told by the first among them, Mary Brooks Picken. She was asked to “prescribe” a new wardrobe for a female physician in the early 20th century. Once the prescription was filled and the medicine taken, the doctor reported back to Picken that previously dismissive male physicians now consulted her and hospital nurses treated her with far more respect. She was cured.
Drawing on the Western art tradition, the Dress Doctors developed a set of principles that fostered the feeling of artistic repose — when the mind, spirit and eye are satisfied by what they see. As I read dozens of their books, I realized that I had only slowly figured out through trial and error some of what they had taught their students. The Dress Doctors thought everyone deserved beauty in their lives and that clothing could serve that purpose. They also wanted 20th-century girls and women to be able to dress for every occasion in their lives from sports to leadership roles. But surprisingly, they never insisted that women sew their own clothing.
The Dress Doctors were almost all home economists, and they wrote textbooks on sewing and taught clothing classes in schools and colleges. They ran 4-H clothing clubs for girls and clothing remodeling workshops for women, but by the 1930s they were also aware that the garment industry had perfected the mass production of women’s clothing. Technological change — standardized sizes were invented to clothe 19th-century armies — and fashion trends had made this possible. The ultrafitted silhouette for Victorian women, which required a custom-made garment, soon loosened to a pleated skirt and the easy-fitting bodice of the 1910s for women who expected to play golf and tennis. After that, store-bought clothing fit most women, more or less.
Every girl should learn to sew, the Dress Doctors advised — knowing how to mend and remodel made sense at a time when your wardrobe might be only three dresses — but she should keep at it only if she had the time and inclination. Ask yourself, they wrote, “Is the trouble or inconvenience of making a garment repaid by the saving in money?” They were, after all, home economists, who recognized the value of sweat equity as only one part of the equation. They also valued women’s time.
“Busy, overworked mothers should not be further burdened with the task of making many garments,” advised one Dress Doctor in 1918, “nor should the girl at school or college, nor the woman in business be pressed with work of this sort in her leisure hours.” Only if she enjoys dressmaking as a “creative leisure experience” should she bother with it, declared a textbook from 1938 — during the doldrums of the Great Depression.
Women did enjoy sewing even when poverty made it a necessity. Ruth O’Brien, the first head of the division of clothing and textiles at the Bureau of Home Economics — an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1923 to 1962 — organized a survey on sewing in the 1920s that included women from South Bend. The questionnaire posed four reasons for sewing: one, it was hard to get to stores offering ready-to-wear clothing; two, home-sewn clothing could be made of better materials; three, home-sewn garments cost less than buying retail; and four — notably vaguer — “Homemade garments more nearly meet individual needs.”
Almost all the poorest respondents affirmed cost as a reason to sew, as did a large majority of wealthier women. Better materials came next, with a majority of women of any income citing it. “Individual needs” netted around 50 percent agreement. But these predetermined reasons did not capture what women were thinking.
Women added their own remarks to O’Brien’s survey to say they sewed because they enjoyed it. “This reason was volunteered by many women and indicates that not all are sewing entirely because of economic reasons,” wrote O’Brien, who was clearly a bit chagrined at the limitations of her original questions. I wondered whether the possibility of enjoyment had occurred to O’Brien who, after all, was a textile chemist and not a sewing specialist.
The women also added that they made clothing that looked, fit and wore better than what they could buy. And they preferred the styles and color combinations they sewed themselves. O’Brien concluded her report by emphasizing that dressmaking was “one of the best avenues and often the only one which women have for expressing and developing their creative ability.” She expected women to continue to find such creativity “a joy and a satisfaction.”
I feel a kinship with these women from almost a century ago. I recognize that joy and satisfaction of putting the hands to work when creating what the mind imagines. My own projects may start with an idea in the culture. I spot the graceful sweep of a full skirt as Barbara Stanwyck crosses a room in a 1940s comedy, and I think, Hmmm . . . nice . . . how about a skirt like that, a bit longer, in a fabric with drape, maybe rayon? Or I face a need: how to get from the Stadium parking lot to my office without freezing solid. Rich men in the late 19th century lined their cloth coats with real fur. Why not try that with faux fur?
Years of working with fabric has given me a reservoir of knowledge. I know how a rayon crepe falls, why it’s the best choice for that style of skirt, and how to handle a fragile fabric prone to unraveling. I know that shorter fur will work better as a lining, and that I will be pulling tufts of fur out of the seams after I sew them.
Sometimes the stuff of the material world sparks a project. “Stuff” used to be a word for fabric as well as for other goods.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us it was first used that way in 1462. A supplier noted, “Item, delyvaryd to Willyam off Wardrope ffor stoffe ffor my lordys doblett.” A soft, wooly stuff blending plums, dark pinks and blacks into tweed catches my eye, pleases my hand and becomes in my mind a 1960s-style jacket with a collar that hugs close to the neck.
When I was a teenager, I sometimes encountered a sneer from people who learned I was wearing something homemade; they saw it as badge of poverty. Today, my students have a different response: awe.
Most of them have no idea how clothing is made, so dressmaking borders on a magical craft. A few ask shyly how they might learn to sew, and we talk about online classes.
And as we talk, I always think a whole big world of stuff awaits them, and I hope they enjoy the journey.
Linda Przybyszewski is an associate professor of history at Notre Dame. She may be the only scholar to lecture at the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit that won a blue ribbon at a county fair. Her book, The Lost Art of Dress became a New York Times bestseller.