THE NEW DRESSMAKER
PREFACE
THE best-dressed women in the world have their clothes made for them, on lines that are suited to their type, and in colors and materials that emphasize their good points and minimize their weak ones.
Women of wealth and fashion go to Paris for their clothes. The woman of moderate means can not go to Paris nor can she have her clothes made for her. The only way that she can be really well dressed is to make her clothes herself. She too can exercise her taste and discrimination in choosing the correct fashion, the new material, the charming color, the line that will make her look young, slender and elegant. And like the woman who wears French dresses, she can have clothes that are cut to fit her figure, that are not too long in the shoulder, too big under the arms, too low in the waist, or too short at the elbow.
WOMEN are so well trained in economics nowadays they will readily understand that in making their own clothes they pay for the bare materials and nothing else, and so effect a tremendous saving which is further increased by the fact that they can buy a better quality of fabric that will lengthen the life of their clothes.
With the present simple styles dressmaking was never as easy as it is now. Compared to the elaborate trimmings of the "awful Eighties" and even the whalebone and crinolines of later date, the extreme simplicity of the dresses of to-day has reduced the work of dressmaking to its lowest possible terms. Trimming is so often in the form of effective but bold, easily executed embroidery, braiding, etc., for which you get the newest French designs in Needle-Art, the special Butterick publication on this subject. The Delineator, Butterick Fashions and the Butterick Fashion Sheet illustrate the latest French way of using the new trimmings and the little finishing touches that give a dress a Parisian look.
The object of this book is to enable a woman to make her clothes with the same perfection of finish, the same attention to detail that she would receive in the atelier of a French dressmaker or in the workrooms of a Fifth Avenue establishment.
The success of a dress depends on four things: style, material, construction and finish.
THE first is line or style. This you get from Butterick Patterns, which give you French fashions adapted to the needs of well-dressed American women. It does not give you conspicuous, ephemeral extremes. For example, when the French mannikins wore dresses which reached just below the knees at the same time that certain American manufacturers of ready-made clothes were making the very long lead-pencil skirt, Butterick Patterns kept to the smart conservative length of skirt used by the best-dressed Parisians and New York women. You can absolutely rely on the styles given you in Butterick Patterns.
An interesting collection of the latest Paris and New York fashions appears each month in The Delineator and Butterick Fashion Sheet, and at the beginning of each season in Butterick Fashions. You get every phase of the new fashions including the Parisian conception of the French modes as sketched from the models of Worth,
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