So if you need something in a hurry, get your orders in before 10AM Wednesday!  As always, please call for expedited shipping (Express Mail).

We wish all our friends and customers a blessed Easter holiday weekend!

We use the United States Postal Service exclusively to ship our orders.  As of yesterday (27 January 2013), the USPS increased its rates.

For domestic shipping, nothing changes – USA customers will see the same $7 flat-rate shipping with free shipping on orders totaling $100.

International shipping is another thing entirely.  USPS didn’t quite increase their prices by an order of magnitude, but it’s close.  The good news is we at RH will still maintain flat rates for our shipping charges – there’s one flat rate for orders of two or less patterns, and another flat rate for orders in excess of two patterns.  So while these new rate changes might look daunting at first blush, you can always gang up with some friends to place a larger order and save on shipping!

Also, international customers, you can save on shipping charges and transit times by patronizing one of our international partners – see our Where To Buy page here.

Rates for our friends in the Great White North (hello, Canada!) are as follows: 1-2 patterns = $20; more than 2 patterns = $42.

Everywhere else in the world: 1-2 patterns = $25; more than 2 = $60.

Again, USA rates remain the same.

We don’t want to increase our shipping rates, but this new international rate increase is so severe that we just can’t keep things in statu quo, as Jeeves might say.  We’ve also looked at UPS and FedEx, but – just like the last time we looked at switching – their rates are completely over the moon.

Thanks for your continued patronage!

Bob & Kass

Reconstructing History wants to be a big part of your historical clothing needs in 2013. Dress Downton with the most extensive 1910s patterns available anywhere. Vamp up the vintage with a skin-out wardrobe using out 20s, 30s and 40s repro patterns. Get medieval with our highly-acclaimed 000-series.

Don’t sew? You deserve something made just for you! Check out our Custom Suits. Anything you can dream up, made perfectly in your size. Men and women accommodated.

Page through our site and tell us what you like.

“Interesting” in the sense of the Chinese curse.  Which is not so much fun.

By now you may have heard we moved.  We are now fully operational in our new location.  The trouble is it took a full two months to get our equipment up and running.  That’s put us well behind the power curve.

Orders are now shipping in the order in which they were received.  I hope to have the backlog cleared by Monday, 10 December.

If you’re ordering now and need your pattern ASAP, please please PLEASE call first.

Thanks!

Bob

Today, I’m going to show you how to make a bias cut 1930s dress without sewing anything on the bias. Seriously. Not a single seam is on the bias!

This is a dress designed by Madeleine Vionnet in 1929. This dress is documented in Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 2: Englishwomen’s Dresses and Their Construction c1860-1940. It is housed in the Centre du Documentation due Costume in Paris.  It is made from two layers of silk gauze, ivory and black, and embroidered with pink flowers.  The dress appears to have a very complicated construction, but it is in face made from rectangular skirt panels sewn to a square bodice that is turned 45 degrees to the bias.

Remember the 20-minute Vionnet? Well, this is more like the 10-minute version.

Take three 35″ square silk scarves (I recommend the pre-hemmed silk scarves from Dharma Trading). That’s it. Just three.

1. Find the exact center of each of the four sides of the three scarves. You can do this by bringing the points together and marking where they fold.
2. Fold one scarf in half diagonally.
3. Line up the center point of the folded scarf with the center mark of another scarf. Sew the second scarf to the right side of the folded scarf.
4. Line up the center point of the folded scarf with the center mark of the last scarf. Sew the third scarf to the left side of the folded scarf.
5. Line up the center point on the back of the folded scarf with the center mark on the left scarf just like you did for the front. Repear for the right scarf. Sew all this together. The dress should be identical front and back.
6. Sew the left and right (second and third) scarves to each other from where they meet at the point of the folded scarf to their ends
7. Find the center of the folded scarf and cut a hole just barely large enough for your head.
8. Try it on!

The unsewn parts of the folded scarf make lovely sleeves. And the other two carves make a gorgeous handkerchief hem. You can cut the neckline into any shape you want.

Even unpressed and right out of the dryer, you can see the slinky bias cut working its charm on the dress form. And you didn’t have to sew on the bias once. You didn’t even have to cut on the bias! Told ya.

© 2012 Kass McGann. All Rights Reserved. The Author of this work retains full copyright for this material.

Sorry for the huge lapse, RH fans. First we were prepping, travelling to, and then selling at Gulf Wars in Mississippi. Then we came home to a madhouse of new pattern production. The last of the new patterns rolled off the printers over the weekend and I am once again free to bring you all there is to know about historical clothing. *snerk*

By the way, you can see all the new patterns in the new vintage patterns section here.

Before I went AWOL, we were talking about the ideal 1920s figure.  Today, we’re going to talk about underwear.  But first, some more about…

The Ideal 1920s Figure

Have you ever seen someone modernly wearing 1920s clothing and they just don’t look right.  You wrack your brain to figure out why.  And the usual answer you come up with is:  ”We’re just bigger than they were.”  But that’s not true.  I have been through hundreds of tailor’s books and patterns from the late teens and early 1920s and none of them go below a size 32″ bust.  And that’s considered a “teen” size.  The modern size charts of one of the “Big Three” pattern companies starts adult female sizes at a bust 29.5″!

But let’s look at sizes on early 1920s patterns.  Here’s a chart:

That’s a three to six inch difference (depending on bust size) between bust and hip measurements as opposed to a mere two inch difference between bust and hip (regardless of size) nowadays.

So we’re bigger, right?  And you have to be a stick to wear 20s fashions, right?

Wrong!

See what I’m saying?  See what I’m trying to communicate to you here?

Why We Look Wrong in 20s Fashions

Famous actress Tallulah Bankhead age 23 looking like not a waif in 1925

Graphic Representation of the Ideal 1920s Figure

So why do we look so wrong when we wear 1920s fashions? The question we have to ask ourselves is “what is wrong?” Are we trying to look like an Art Deco graphic of the ideal figure (right)? Or are we trying to look like a real person (far right)? Chances are that we have the cartoon image in mind. And darlings, that just isn’t real. Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, not even Louise Brooks or “It Girl” Clara Bow were shaped like that. They all had curves.

But their curves were different. And here’s where we really mess it up.

We wear bras.

Calm down. Calm down. Before you start writing me hate mail because you are a double-D and have needed a bra since you were 11 years old, hear what I’m saying.

We wear modern bras. Modern bras push the bust up and out.  I have seen photos of many beautiful slender women (much more slender than their 1920s counterparts) wearing 20s fashions at events like the Jazz Age Lawn Party on Roosevelt Island in New York.  But they are almost always wearing a modern bra under their dresses.  And it makes them look like they’re hiding two B-52s in their blouse!

Look at Miss Tallulah at right.  Do you see where her bust is?  It is at the level of where our bra straps are today.  She probably isn’t wearing a bra at all.  Bras were not yet a support garment and movies and old photographs of quite famously fashionable people show bustlines that are far lower than “normal” to us today.

So what do you do?

Luckily there is a period solution that won’t leave you braless while not ruining the look of your 1920s clothes.

1920s corset

The 1920s corset

The corset in the 1920s (sometimes also called a “corselette”) was a very different thing from the whaleboned waist-cinchers that came before it. The purpose of the 1920s corset was not to compress the waist or lift the bust, but to flatten the bust and control the hips. More what we’d call a girdle than a corset at all, this is the garment that more zaftig women wore under their garments in the 1920s.

1920s brassieres and bandeaux

The 1920s bra and bandeau

There is an alternative to the corset that started to turn the fashion tide in the flapper era. The brassiere was invented in the early 1900s as a way to keep the bust controlled when the underbust (or at least low-bust) corset was introduced in the Edwardian period. Early brassieres were meant as bust enhancers for those who were not well endowed. Their horizontal boning was meant to imitate a large bust, not support one. But by the 1920s, brassieres had become unboned constructions of non-stretchy material designed to hold the bust close to the body. The narrow strips of darted cloth known as bandeaux had the same function.

The bandeau and brassiere could be worn with a girdle-like hip corset (to which they were attached with that hook you see in the cover art) or they could be worn alone with the new “belt” — a wide elastic band almost like a micro-mini skirt that was worn to keep the hips from jiggling.

So that’s the story. We’re not too big. We’re not too curvy. You don’t have to be a stick. You just have to throw out all your pre-conceived and mistaken notions of the 20s figure and wear the right underwear.

And guess what! Reconstructing History now has patterns available for both these 1920s undergarments and much more in our new Vintage Patterns section. Let us outfit you with everything you need to look as period-appropriate as you wanna be.

• 11 10 formal evening gowns
• 4 2 semi-formal dinner dresses
• 15 14 day dresses or ensembles
• 3 suits

But you know what we haven’t done?  Coats!  This is no Caribbean cruise, RH fans.  Crossing the North Atlantic on a ship that averages 26 knots requires a coat.  And the wardrobe I’m building requires something special.  So let’s start with a classic shape from the late 1910s — the Raglan wrap, shown at right.

A Raglan Wrap from an early 1920s German pattern book is pictured at left.  We are currently working on a pattern for this wrap.  The front of the coat can be seen in the upper left corner of the illustration.  It closes with one button at the lower waist.

The Raglan Wrap requires about 4¼ yards of 45″ wide fabric plus fur collar and cuffs. I have some lovely black velvet that I think will fit the bill nicely.

Next:  More wardrobe planning!

© 2012 Kass McGann. All Rights Reserved. The Author of this work retains full copyright for this material.

Are you human?  Then you can wear clothing from that era.

Yes, my darlings.  I am here once again to correct your misconceptions of fashion history and enlighten you as to the truth.

I understand from where this misconception comes.  In almost every coffee-table book, TV documentary or website about the 1920s, you’ll hear about the hipless androgynous figure of the ideal flapper.  You’ll read about how the corset went out of fashion and the bra hadn’t yet come in.  This puts a picture in our heads of skinny little waifs, girls who aren’t fully mature.  The art of the period — often depicting women as rectangles with egg-shaped heads and stick arms and legs — reinforces this visual in our minds.  But this is a caricature that is exploded once you start looking at photographs of the period.

Would it shock you to know that the base measurements in pattern books from the 1920s are 34-26-42?  (That’s six inches larger in the hips than the modern analogous size!)  Doesn’t sound very hipless and boy-like, does it?

The silhouette of the early decades of the 20th century is columnar.  But this effect was not created by a lack of hips.  The lack of the waist is the desired end.

To understand from whence this misconception springs, we must analyze the stylish figure of the previous time period.  From the middle of the 19th century, the emphasis of fashion was on the waist.  Corsets were employed to make the waistline smaller and crinolines were used to fluff out skirts and increase the visual effect of a tiny waist.  Eventually crinolines shifted to the back in the form of bustles and then reduced to mere petticoats under the smooth skirts of the Edwardian period.  By the end of the 19th century and the very early years of the 20th, the skirts were no longer large, but the shoulders took their place and were further adorned by shirtwaists with decoration on top of decoration.  Marry this to the S-curve corsets that forced the female figure forward and we have a very top-heavy effect occurring in fashion.

Paul Poiret (center) and his models. Not a hipless androgyne among them.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, along came Paul Poiret around 1906 discarding the corset and narrowing skirts to an unnaturally encumbering hem width.  Poiret is often given credit for this rather radical change in style, but in fact it was happening in a few different quarters at once.  The columnar shape of the 1910s was profoundly natural compared to the heavily-structured figures of the previous decades.  But that doesn’t mean that only women shaped like columns could wear these fashions.  The hourglass-figured women of the previous decade were not suddenly locked in cupboards and not allowed to show their faces in polite society.  They just did what everyone else did — they took off their corsets.

When one has an hourglass figure, wearing large skirts and over-decorated blouses tend to make the figure look larger than it really is.  We have this notion modernly that Victorian and Edwardian clothing looks good on larger women, but that the clothing of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s only looks good on fashion models.  This is simply not true.  The return to simple, tailored forms with beading and embroidery for decoration rather than layers on layer of lace and trimmings caused women to look more slender.  The lengthening effect of the narrow skirts also made them look taller.  A survey of extant garments, patterns, and tailoring books from the time period will demonstrate figure measurements that can hardly be called “boyish” or “hipless”.  These are the same women who had hourglass figures five or ten years earlier

Famous actress Tallulah Bankhead age 23 looking like not a waif in 1925

Diaghilev dancers Sokolova and Woizikovsky in December 1924. The 28 year-old Ms. Sokolova looks like she has no waistline in this clingy knit bathing suit.

As the years progressed from the columnar 1910s to the dropped-waisted 1920s, this slenderizing, lengthening effect was not lost.  Removing the narrowing at the waist and dropping the focus of the eye to the hipline creates the illusion of no waist.  It is this “unfeminine” figure that the flappers sported, not a hipless one.  As the decade progressed, dresses hung from shoulders to hips without much change of breadth in between.  The focus was less on the female figure and more on the exquisite beadwork and embroidery that decorated many of the fashions of this time period.  In a time that ushered in a record number of rights for women, is it any surprise that fashion became about the clothing and not about the body they covered?

By the final years of the 1920s, a new trick was being employed that would become the stylistic mark of the 1930s.  Clothing began to employ the bias or cross grain which naturally clung to the body rather than requiring careful fitting and tailoring.

Archival photo of one of Madeleine Vionnet's creation on a model.

So make yourself a Vionnet Handkerchief Dress and have no fear!

Next:  More wardrobe planning!

© 2012 Kass McGann. All Rights Reserved. The Author of this work retains full copyright for this material.

But first, some history (come on… you know this is what I do). The distinguishing characteristic of the clothing of the 1910s is the break it made with the styles worn before. Not since the French Revolution had clothing changed so radically in so short a period of time. In the 10 short years from 1913 to 1923, corsets went away, necklines plunged, and hemlines rose to the knees.  Can you imagine what it must have been to live back then?  Here you are, wearing chemises and corsets and petticoats and corset covers and bloomers and all this stuff even before you put on your dress.  And then suddenly, women are running around wearing dresses that are less covering than your scantiest slip!  And it wasn’t just the highly fashionable Parisian crowd who were scandalously underclad in the 1920s.  It was everyone!  The Sears catalogs from the 1920s show these short skirts and deep necklines.

But the beauty of this time period for Costume Historians isn’t the radical change of fashion.  The most interesting bit the change in construction techniques.  In the 19th century, clothing was highly structured.  Every layer depended upon the layers under it.  Fabric was cut to fit the shapes that the undergarments gave to the wearer.  When the corset and crinolines went out, there was no longer any reason to cling to this concept of structured clothing, so it went out too.  Designers such as Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin and Madeleine Vionnet were renown for their technique of draping — as opposed to pattern drafting — and their exploitation of the unique properties of each fabric and how it conformed to the body.

Today, dear RH fans, we’re going to make a dress like Vionnet did… in the same manner that Vionnet did.  And you could probably do it in the time it takes you to read this blog post.

You’ve all heard of the One-Hour Dress?

Meet the 20-minute Dress.

Yes. I’m going to teach you how to make a gorgeous 1910s evening or party dress in 20 minutes, start to finish.  And by “finish”, I mean done, in the bag, ready to wear.  No finishing work required!

This is a design originated by Madeleine Vionnet in 1919. Vionnet was a master of drape, and this dress (known as The Jabot Dress because of its distinctive handkerchief decoration) was one of her favourite designs.

What you need:

• four perfectly square silk scarves (I recommend the pre-hemmed silk scarves from Dharma Trading)
• lotsa sharp pins
• needle and thread (or a sewing machine)
• 20 minutes

Lay one of your square scarves directly on top of another, wrong sides to wrong sides. The right side of the top scarf should be facing up.
	Pin the top scarf to the bottom scarf along a diagonal line running from approximately 11″ from top corner to 8″ from the bottom corner (the path of the pins is shown by the position of the rulers)
Open up the scarves on their non-pinned corner and add another scarf, wrong sides to wrong sides, to the pile. Pin the second and third scarf together as pictured above. Repeat the pinning process with the fourth scarf.
Repeat once more, pinning the last (fourth) scarf to the first scarf. Your scarves should look like the photo at right: two rows of pins traveling diagonally across the scarves.  (The fabric has been plumped up around the pins to better show their position.)

Pin each of the two adjacent corners to each other, wrong sides to wrong sides.

Put the dress on your dress form.  Adjust the pins as necessary at the neckline and armscye.  Sew along the pinline with your needle and thread or sewing machine.

Add a sash around the hips and you’re done.  (See, it’s already hemmed!)

The 20-minute Vionnet

Next:  More wardrobe planning!

© 2012 Kass McGann. All Rights Reserved. The Author of this work retains full copyright for this material.