Threads, Needles, and Other Eclectic Haberdashery
- Phoenix Yu Wilkie
- Jul 16, 2020
- 7 min read
There’s something magical in creating usable art that can be worn and loved, tailored to custom fit and modified through years of use, or passed down. With each pass of a needle, a colourful thread can weave patterns and pictures only previously seen in your mind. Embroidered imagery can renew old clothing and mend holes. Their uniqueness showcase hours of hard work and skill. Perhaps because of its beauty and labour intensive creation process, embroidered fabric has been used to symbolise wealth, power, status, and celebration from even the earliest remnants of leather sewn clothing. In fact, this ancient art form has been practised for millennia with remains found dating to 30 000 BCE. Many of the earliest specimens of embroidered clothing seem to originate from Asia.
Although this used to be a skill taught to many young people, with modernisation and the industrialisation of factories, in the past century there has been a huge decline in the practice of this art. Instead, we more commonly see unskillfully designed machine embroidered embellishments on fast fashion items that are heavily mass produced and then discarded by the masses. Even in haute couture, it is sometimes not justifiable to pay the exorbitant labour costs to produce hand embroidered clothing. With the declining costs of machinery, the use of computerized embroidery allows for more people to accessibly buy embellished fabrics. However, machine embroidery pattern making is an altogether different skill-set which many fashion houses and people lack. A seemingly simple pattern involving many colours and trajectories can take hundreds of hours and prototyping in order to perfect. The advantage of a well designed machine embroidery pattern is the consistency of always producing the same result. However, in its consistency will be a thorough lack of life. Any advanced embroiderer and most seamstresses will be able to instantly tell a machine embroidered piece from one that is hand done. Perhaps you could even say that it is the human inconsistencies of an embroiderer that produces the more beautiful piece that shows off the maker’s blood, sweat, and love.
Growing up biracial as a Chinese-Ukrainian kid, I was exposed a lot to traditional embroidery from both of my cultures. My paternal grandparents would both regularly embroider in the evenings while watching TV. While my paternal grandmother worked on delicate linen vyshyvanka (traditional Ukrainian blouses), table cloths, and runners, my paternal grandfather would create very large wool embroidered pieces for upholstery and pillows. My paternal aunt would often embroider wall hangings and her frequent sewing and designs of her own clothing heavily influenced my own journey into vintage fashion. On the other side of the planet, most summers I would vacation in Suzhou, China. Suzhou is known for many things and among them, it is considered the silk embroidery capital of China. My maternal uncle is a fashion designer and as such as I grew up, he would often take me to various embroidery houses to watch the masters working. While I have never received any formal embroidery training, I have explored many different methods and I like to think that I have refined my own style to a certain extent.
When I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and was at my lowest mobility function, I was drawn to learning how to create functional art under the form of embroidery. The small needle was easier for me to hold than a pencil and the slight methodical motions of passing the needle in and out of the fabric slowly allowed me to exercise and regain mobility in my hands. Throughout the years, my skills have improved and I’ve created different items of clothing. While I usually embroider more traditionally Ukrainian patterns, I have since begun exploring traditional Chinese designs and incorporating bead work into my projects during the Covid19 pandemic. The goal of my journey with the embroidery hoops is simply to experiment, have fun, and create usable items for my loved ones to cherish. The added benefit of embroidery is that it is a wonderful stress reliever. ^After all, who wouldn’t enjoy poking a piece of fabric a hundred thousand times to vent out their own frustrations‽^
Since we are now experiencing our own modern day plague in light of the Covid19 Pandemic, I thought it was only fitting that my very first big sewing project of the year would combine embroidery and sewing to create a plague doctor mask! (Actually, I had a burning desire to parade around my neighbourhood wearing the distinctive corvid shaped silhouette). In terms of the actual construction, there is not a lot to say. The materials used consisted of one layer of interfacing sandwiched between two layers of white cotton for the inner and outer part of the mask. The bias was created using black cotton and a pair of black sunglasses were sacrificed in order to silicone the lens onto the eye sockets. The pattern was pretty straight forward. There was a lot of hand stitching. There were lots of individual bones that had to be made and then hand stitched on the inside. Finally, the beak was stuffed with sweet smelling herbs (in my case freshly harvested lavender and lemon balm) in order to rid the nose of putrid air in accordance to the Miasma Theory of disease.
As I had previously mentioned, my aunt heavily influenced my interests in sewing, and particularly, in vintage fashion. My first sewing machine was a 1940s Singer that I inherited from my paternal grandmother. It was also the first sewing machine that my father and my aunt had learned to use. Although I now own a total of four sewing machines (including a beautiful prototype Victorian Singer sewing machine from 1885), my grandmother’s Singer is still my most reliable beast.
I find there’s something intrinsically right about using an 80 year old machine to sew up a 70 year old clothing pattern. It’s almost as if you could be transported back in time to experience some of the daily life activities of elder relatives. But more than using my vintage machine to create vintage clothing, what draws me towards these styles in the first place is their classic charm. The way every item is tailor fit to your exact body type and shape is something that fast fashion lacks. Each garment is made to last decades. Even though certain styles don’t remain perpetually trendy, clothing was meant to be altered and restyled. On a fundamental level, this was done because fabric is expensive.
Historically, the fact that clothing is constantly remade is also one of the reasons that all surviving historical clothing rarely includes plus-size specimens. It’s simple and easy to go the route that most people do and say that humans from 200 years ago were simply smaller or made differently, but if you look at historical measurements of women throughout the past few centuries, they haven’t changed much and those variations that exist can often be attributed to malnutrition and shorter heights/frames. Yet, because fabric is expensive, oftentimes, the matrons of the families would be the only ones to have new clothing made of fresh fabric. Once it was out of style for the season, it would be remade to suit the next season’s trends and since you can’t easily expand dresses, it was much easier to take them in. Thus, one single dress could undergo many restylings until the final dress had a waist-line of 24 inches or less which would nicely fit the youngest lady of the house. Another historical fashion myth is that all women suffered from corsets and were tight-laced to 18 inch waists or less. This did not happen. The illusion of extreme hourglass figures that we see from portraits and daguerreotypy are the results of clever padding and Victorian Photoshop (yes, images were heavily altered around the waistline with clever painting -- skip to 7 min of the YouTube video). In fact, women rarely laced up tighter than a two inch waist reduction and the silhouettes were mostly achieved with ruffling, bum rolls, hoops, hip pads, and petticoats.
What makes a historical item of clothing believable? The answer lies in the silhouette and the cut of the clothing. Instead of focusing on silly notions that human bodies were simply built differently in centuries past, we should instead explore the ingenuity of undergarments in their ability to create masterpiece illusions of the perfect figure. The cut of the shoulders and armholes influence posture and are often heavily padded on the top depending on the ideals of the time period. These silhouettes are what evoke the perfect recreation photos of bygone eras even though fabrication techniques and materials are no longer the same.
Although I have created some vintage clothing styles, I’ve never really worn them with the correct undergarments. This summer, I decided to explore sewing bullet bras, and other 1940-1960s undergarment silhouettes. I discovered that when paired with modern fashion articles, you can evoke the same vintage feel simply by putting on a bullet bra, girdle, and petticoat.
To create my bullet bra, I used the Va Voom Vintage pattern for an authentic bullet bra and heavily modified it to fit my own measurements and proportions. The defining characteristic and ingenuity of the design lies in the spiral stitching of the cups. Although this was not an easy task to sew, I learned so many sewing techniques along the way (including the fact that modern computerised sewing machines are very flimsy and will get very upset at you if you sew more than 5 layers of cotton – better off using a vintage machine built like an ox). Amazingly, the bullet bra does not include any underwire, is incredibly supportive for D+ cup women, and breathable perfection for hot summers when constructed in a nice cotton fabric. While I have not yet perfected my ideal bullet bra, I have started the exploratory process of drafting my own pattern designs and intend on posting tutorials and sew-alongs when I do. Among the designs I plan on making are the inclusion of faggoted stitches (which were commonly seen in 1950s French lingerie) and perhaps a modernised silhouette of the classic bullet bra that would showcase less of the pointiness. So stay tuned for future free patterns and sew-alongs.
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