Sewingplums

Manufacturing clothes is very different from what we hobby sewers do.

It’s not one of my goals to make clothes that look like RTW. Round here, RTW typically means black or grey, and badly made in cheap fabrics. Have you ever gone onto a department store fashion floor and seen a sea of black ? Definitely something I sew to get away from 😀

Some mail order is good, some not. One of my favourite designers has lowered quality to keep prices down. Happily that’s obvious from their catalogue. They don’t photograph quality and then send dross.

Here’s a series of recent posts from YouLookFab which make it clear how very different the whole RTW process is from what we do, as non-professionals making single garments.

Design

Making samples

Cut and make

Trim and dispatch

Interview with the designer – Karen Kane

And that’s for making RTW quality garments. The clothes in the big clothing store in this suburb must be made by robot to be possible at that price, which is a whole other world again. (Or by very poorly paid people living in appalling conditions.)

If we want to compare ourselves with professionals (and we don’t need to !), we are most like professional dressmakers who make individual garments for individually shaped people. Or perhaps people who make short runs of clothes for small boutiques.

P.S. 18 months later YouLookFab has another series, on a smaller clothing company. Here’s a fascinating piece on how the pattern maker fits into the process, and the skills involved.

(P.P.S. 2018.
Here’s a post by Brooks Ann Camper, who makes custom wedding dresses, and has never learned either pattern making or clothes construction by the conventional routes. She teaches making personalised clothes directly, rather than by adapting an average pattern.
Here’s her list of on-line classes – with rich materials and much personal help.)

= = = = = = = = = =

My very beautiful new iMac arrived yesterday. My big step for this week is to get it connected to the internet. Then I’ll be able to see everyone’s Flickr photos 😀

– – –

Links available August 2011

= = =

This entry was posted on August 13, 2011 at 9:04 am and is filed under sundry messages. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.