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Housewife Basic fashion Sewing Steps for Clothes that fit continue…

Written on June 22, 2008 – 6:38 pm | by dodo

Pleats came along more rapidly. They began to appear the moment fitted clothes introduced a need for garments that could billow neatly over body contours. At first pleats were tied or pinned in place, not stitched. The first fastened-down pleats were apparently those used around the waist of men’s tunics; such permanent pleating nipped in the material at the waist without requiring a belt. As sewing techniques tried to keep up with fashion changes, pleats were used anywhere an excess of material needed to be concealed—on top of a leg-o’-mutton sleeve, for instance, or around the waist of a wide skirt. Such a pleated skirt was so wide it involved hours of hemming, and it eventually led to the development of a labour-saving device called a hemming bird (opposite) to hold long lengths of material.

What must be one of the oddest quirks in the history of clothes concerns the non- invention of the button and buttonhole. It would seem that such a simple fastening device would have been thought of at a very early stage. But no one got around to inventing buttons until clothes became too tight to pull over the head. Up until that time, along about the 14th Century, garments were held together by an assortment of ties and belts and girdles. There was also a gadget like a safety-pin called a fibula. Fancy fibulae had decorative brooches or animal-shaped figures on top to conceal the real work that was going on underneath. But they proved too cumbersome once narrow waists and tight sleeves required a number of openings that had to be closed, and at last they were replaced by buttons and buttonholes.

By the 18th Century, buttons were everywhere; up and down waistcoats, up and down trousers. Even shoes did not escape. Some of these buttons were purely decorative, but a lot of them a tiresome lot of them it seemed—actually worked.

The nuisance of fastening and unfastening endless rows of buttons inspired Whitcomb L. Judson of Chicago to hit upon the idea of the zip-fastener in 1891. His arrangement—hooks and eyes mounted on a pair of small chains with a sliding clasp that fastened the hooks and eyes automatically —worked reasonably well. Judson did not, however, conceive the name zip-fastener. And despite efforts to promote his device— he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Little Egypt to use a skirt with a zip-fastener in her demure striptease at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893—his ^-C-Curity placket fastener^- fastened few plackets aside from those on tobacco pouches and money belts. The final triumph did not come until 1923, when the B. F. Goodrich Company used a similar gadget on its new rubber galoshes and, so goes legend, the company president called for a name with ^-zip^- in it.

Today, of course, zips close not only galoshes but an extraordinarily wide range of garments. Sometimes, these mechanical fasteners are virtually invisible, unobtrusively tucked underneath a fold of fabric; sometimes they dash boldly across articles of clothing, presenting as many zigs and zags as those rows of buttons of yore. Like skirts, they have their ups and downs on the fashion scene—and perhaps more than one woman, in view of fluctuating changes in skirt lengths from year to year (right), might have wished for a permanent, built-in CCurity placket fastener at the hemline of every dress she owned.

Two stereotypes in American humour are the tense investor checking the ups and downs of the stock market in The Wall Street Journal and the elegant socialite consulting Vogue to follow the ups and downs of hemlines. A look at the trends these two different types live by reveals an amusing correlation over the years. In general, whenever the Dow Jones stock index (graphed at the bottom of the picture at right) rose, hems also went up. When stock prices dipped, hems did too. Though dress designers are not commonly thought of as bulls and bears, they may express in fashion the same underlying cycles of optimism and pessimism that govern the market. Or could it be that when a woman raises her hemline, her husband feels cheerful and buys more stock?

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Tags: america, around the waist, articles, buttons, fashion, history, hooks and eyes, humour, money, pleats, rows of buttons, skirt, stock, ups and downs, work