Vogue’s Book of Practical Dressmaking - part 1, advertisements

The 'Georgian lady' V insignia makes an appearance

I recently added this 1926 publication to my library of old sewing manuals. Like its successor, it only cost one shilling.

Showing the full size

This seems very reasonable, given that at the time Vogue magazine itself cost one shilling per fortnightly issue and Vogue Pattern Book, which was then sold separately and had six issues per year, cost one shilling and sixpence (1½ shillings). Most Vogue patterns cost either one shilling and sixpence or two shillings and sixpence, while a few "last minute especially advanced designs" cost four shillings.

Vogue Pattern Book information

I'm guessing that the low price was because the book was a sort of loss leader, to sell more patterns, and also to sell the pattern book and Vogue itself. It also made some money for Condé Nast by carrying advertisements at the front and back of the book, which are the subject of this post. Click on any of the images to enlarge them.

There are more advertisements than in the 1932 edition. As with later copies of Vogue Pattern Book, they are a mixture of sewing-related and more general female-interest items.

Harrods took out two separate adverts, one at the front and one at the back. The first lists some of the fabrics they have for sale, mostly wools and silks, and is one of the few to include prices.

So many fabrics, in so many colours!

The second is for synthetic 'Celanese' fabrics (made from wood pulp), available in different weights for dresses and lingerie.

"Textures for every fashion need"

The manufacturer British Celanese advertised their relatively new fabric as well, albeit without any details of stockists.

Extolling the virtues of 'Celanese'

Not to be outdone, Courtaulds also advertised, although their fabrics seem to have been exclusively for lingerie.

"Cami-Bockers"?

Clearly there was competition in the synthetic fabrics market, hence the 'Xantha' name being included on the selvedge. A similar tactic was used by Louis Velveteen. I've been able to find adverts for this product going back to 1885, but none later than this one.

Was this the last hurrah for Louis Velveteen?

According to this website, John Falconer and Co was founded in 1928, and was taken over by House of Fraser in 1952.

Tweeds from Aberdeen

Kendal Milne also became part of the House of Fraser group. Now called Kendals it is that rarest of things, a department store which still exists (although I doubt if it still sells fabric).

Samples by post - the internet shopping of its day

There is an advertisement for Darnley's in the 1928 issue of Vogue which I blogged about here, so possibly they were regular advertisers.

All the awkward bits done for you

Unsurprisingly, the only clothing advertisements are for items which home dressmakers could not make themselves.

George West seem to have specialised in rainwear

Corset adverts appeared regularly in Vogue Pattern Book

How to make yourself entirely cylindrical

Shoes only occasionally appeared in the pattern book

But stockings, especially Aristoc, were another regular

Like Aristoc, Ovaltine and Boots are still going strong.

Don't omit to soothe and feed your nerves

When Boots sold laundry soap

Phyllis Earle was founded in 1918, and seems to have later concentrated on hairdressing. If this rather alarming advertisement for its skincare is anything to go by, that may have been a wise decision.

This would not tempt me to buy a product

Sandwiched between these advertisements is about 60 pages of sewing information, but that will be the subject of another post.

Back to school again

I don't seem to have had a lot of time for sewing this year, and now I'm about to have even less. Starting next month, I am enrolled on a single module of the English degree at the University of Chester. Called "Fashioning Fictions", it looks at the role of clothing, fabric, objects and, of course, fashion in fiction.

My reading matter for the next few months

For anyone squinting at the above picture on their phone, the books are:
The Ladies’ Paradise, Émile Zola
Gigi, Collette
The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Blue Nights, Joan Didion

There is one other set text, "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernadine Evaristo. A friend is lending me her copy, but she has just moved house and has yet to unearth it! Fortunately it is studied later in the course. I rarely seem to read fiction these days, so this is going to be a bit of a change. However, the 'historical' texts cover some of my favourite periods, costuming-wise, so reading them with a particular interest in references to clothing and fashion will hardly be a hardship.

On top of that, one of the things which drew me to the module was the fact that there is an option to submit a sewn or knitted piece in one of the assignments. I am hoping that this may be the prompt for me to take up my long-neglected historical dressmaking again. I am also really looking forward to having the run of an academic library once more!

Selling sewing machines in the early seventies

Not much sewing for myself this week, and alterations for friends are only of interest to them, so here's a brief post about sewing machine adverts in Vogue Pattern Book in the early 1970s. One in particular from 1973 caught my eye, so then I had to check what else was out there.

Adverts for fabric and haberdashery were often full page, colour, and ran for several issues, Those for machines were very different. There was at most one machine advertised per issue, mostly Elna or Singer. The Elna adverts were black and white, and usually only part of a page. Click on any image to enlarge.

Summer 1973, combined advert for sewing machine and press

Summer 1974

Spring 1975

This Pfaff advert was full page, possibly part of the message that this was a machine for serious sewists.

Early Autumn 1975

Not only was Singer one of the two firms who advertised in colour in this period, they also ran to double-page spreads.

Autumn 1973

Early Spring 1974

And the other firm? Well, this was the image that started this post.

Winter 1973, it's certainly different!

Leaving aside the idea that your sewing machine and your décor should match - I would have to live in a black and gold house, which sounds alarming - there is the small matter of the, erm, 'Viking'. This was the era when it was normal for boat and motor shows, certainly in the UK, to have scantily clad women draped over their wares to attract attention. So perhaps Husqvana just decided that what was sauce for the goose?

The sewing department at my school had Viking machines and now I'm wondering what, exactly, caused Midlothian Education Authority to go with Husqvana as opposed to, say, Singer or Jones. Hopefully it was for sound financial reasons rather than the sales rep!

Grown-on sleeves, 1960-style

When I made the bodice for my peppermint batik dress from Simplicity 3662, I used modern techniques. After all, it was such a simple design - just two back pieces and one front - that there was no need to consult the instructions. I did a second row of stitching on the underarm seam curve to reinforce it, and machine hemmed the sleeves.

Easy peasy?

For what I am now calling the 'Riviera' dress, after the print, I actually looked at the instruction sheet - and neither of these techniques appears on it!

Just like our current British summer - not!

The cutting layout for the view includes a note to cut two 'facings'; bias strips 1⅛" wide and as long as the lower edge of the sleeves. Once the darts and shoulder seams have been sewn, the underarms are stay stitched, and then the facings are attached*.

The facing sewn along the sleeve edge

The seam allowances are pressed towards the sleeve, and the side seams are pinned. Then the curve is reinforced with either straight seam binding or a selvedge strip of the fabric. I used a narrow cotton tape, and tacked it on to make sure it was placed correctly.

Tape tacked centrally over the seam position

The side seam is then sewn, including the facing.

The seam runs from the facing edge to the base of the bodice

The underarm curves are snipped, but not the reinforcing tape. Then the facings are pressed back - I did mine with a tiny sliver of the top layer folded over to the inside, as I would do a neck facing.

Making sure the facing is invisible from the right side

Finally, the raw facing edge is turned under, and slip-stitched in place.

The finished sleeve edge

On the dressform

I will be interested to see how this reinforcement technique lasts over time. When I was ironing Vogue 5215 recently, which has a similar grown-on sleeve, I noticed that the seam was starting to tear slightly. It's now on the mending pile to be discretely patched.


* -The instructions actually say to attach the neck facing before the sleeve facings, but I am going to leave this step until I have put the zip in - some modern habits die hard!

July review

This is going to be a very short post because, as expected, I had very little free time in the month.

I have discovered that one of the joys of knitting is that unlike dressmaking it lends inself to working in short bursts - you can just pick it up and do a sneaky row or two if you have a few spare moments. Thus the body of my new Wondrella cardigan is complete. I decided to do the sleeves next, rather than the collar and bands. However, I picked up the stitches in a bit of a rush, and after I had knitted the first row I realised that I had picked some of them up in the wrong place.

The two stitches to the left of the marker were picked up too far in

There were more iffy stitches than just those two, and because I am that fussy, I decided that I needed to fix them all. However, I didn't want to take the whole thing out and have to space out and pick up 118 stitches again. So I undid the row of knitting, and then tried an experiment.

I transferred all the stitches to the right of the stitch marker, plus the two that were wrong, onto a length of scrap yarn. Then I took the leftmost stitch off the yarn, and pulled out the loop for the stitch, used a crochet hook to pull it back through in the correct place, and placed it back onto the needle. I did the same with the second stitch, and then returned all the other stitches on the holding yarn back onto needle.

All now in the right place

I suspect that this is nothing new to seasoned knitters, but I was very pleased that I had worked this out for myself. I'm used to (mostly) being able to fix sewing hiccups, but knitting is a whole new world. To be honest, it probably took longer to do it this way that if I had just frogged the sleeve and started again, but learning a new skill was far more satisfying.

More new skills await with my dress. I have got as far as sewing bodice darts and shoulder seams, and the next stage is the side seams and sleeves.

Progress so far

I went for the radical approach of actually looking at the instructions, and discovered that they differ slightly from the methods I used for the peppermint batik dress. Hopefully once we are into August I'll find some time to try them out.

Vogue's mature woman goes globetrotting

Following on from last week's March 1942 issue of Vogue, another recent acquisition is the December 1959/January 1960 issue of Vogue Pattern Book.

Marking the start of a new decade

Naturally much of the magazine is given over to sewing for the festive season but, rather surprisingly (to me, at least), there is also a feature on Vogue Patterns in Russia.

Not what I was expecting

The article is about what it calls the "Moscow Fair", which was actually the American National Exhibition. This was held in Moscow in 1959, and ran from 25 July to 4 September. While the reciprocal Russian exhibition in New York concentrated on heavy industry and space exploration, the American National Exhibition was far more focussed on consumer goods. According to the accounts I have found online, US household names such as Sears, Kodak and General Motors took part, and clearly so did Vogue Patterns.

Whereas the 75 official exhibition guides were all younger than 35, a deliberate decision to reflect America's youth, Vogue Patterns chose to include a model to "represent the mature American woman". The woman selected for the role was Mary Whelchel, and the article is written by her. As the introduction states, she had "often appeared in Vogue Pattern Book", as one of the models who represented Mrs Exeter in both the Pattern Book and the main magazine. Although given that she celebrated her 44th birthday while in Moscow, she was at this point far from "approaching 60" as Mrs Exeter had been described when she first appeared in print.

The first two pages of the feature . . .

. . . and the last two. All the images are enlarged below

The exhibition included fashion shows, presumably featuring clothing from American manufacturers, but here Mary Whelchel focuses on her 'personal wardrobe', mostly made by her from Vogue patterns. A trip of seven weeks, combined with a baggage allowance of only 75 pounds and temperatures ranging from 45° to 90° F (7° to 32° C), required careful planning and clothes which could be part of multiple outfits. A big part of Mary's solution was her "wardrobe-within-a-wardrobe".

Some of the options in the capsule wardrobe

This consisted of two dresses with different sleeve lengths made from pattern 9747. Open-end zips replaced the waist seams, allowing the tops and skirts to be worn as dresses or separates. The capsule wardrobe was completed with an extra 'top', also made from 9747, and a coat with two zip-in linings. This was made from 9489, and could be worn belted and without the lining as a warm dress.

Vogue 9747, "Easy to Make"

Vogue 9489

As well as straight skirts, Mary’s wardrobe also included two pleated skirts made from pattern 9410.

Vogue 9410, "Very Easy to Make"

One was white, worn here with a matching blouse made from 9485.

Vogue 9485, "Easy to Make"

Not shoes I would wear for sightseeing!

The other was made in a leopard-printed silk.

Browsing in the pattern department of the GUM department store

The matching blouse was part of suit pattern 4028, with the jacket and skirt made in beige jersey.

Vogue 9048, this pattern was also available in Junior Miss sizes

The hood of the blouse worn as a cowl collar

According to the article "suits are essential to every travel wardrobe" and Mary made two - the beige one above, and 4867 in a black and white silk blend plaid.

Vogue 4867, another Special Design pattern

With Pat Nixon, wife of the then Vice President

She also had a three-piece, made from 4860. Like the pattern illustration, hers was made in red with white edging.

Vogue 4860

In Red Square

Her final daytime outfit was a knife-pleat skirt with a blouse and short jacket, all made from 4997.

Vogue 4997, I was unable to find the pattern for this one

For evening parties she made Vogue Paris Original 1391 by Jacques Heim in moss green chiffon.

Vogue Paris Original 1391

Mary made her version with a narrower belt and a fuller underskirt

Mary describes her role on the trip as "an American "ambassadress of goodwill"", something which she enjoyed. Most days were busy, but in the evenings the Vogue Patterns party was able to explore Moscow, and go to the ballet and opera at the Bolshoi, and also the State Circus. There were also some interactions with ordinary Russians. She writes about giving her lipstick (warmly received) to her female cab driver, and conversations, mostly in sign language, with people on the street. One of the most frequent questions she received was about why she didn't dye her greying hair! I’m not sure if this reflects Russians' view of American society at the time, or if it's just an age-old question directed at older women everywhere!