How the Couture Pattern Museum Preserves Artifacts That First Democratized Fashion
On the third floor of a Spanish-style office building in Santa Barbara, Calif., Cara Austine-Rademaker is spotlighting a little-appreciated aspect of fashion history that had a big impact.
The Couture Pattern Museum is dedicated to preserving the paper sewing patterns women used to make French fashion at home for a fraction of the cost, from Jeanne Lanvin’s 1921 “new summer clothes” made for and modeled by actress Mary Pickford, to Yves Saint Laurent’s famed 1965 Mondrian shift dress.
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“Besides the feminine culture that these patterns represent, there’s also the couture culture that’s captured in these patterns,” Austine-Rademaker says of turning her collecting passion into a museum in 2022. “A lot of museums are just glorifying the end piece. But how long is that going to last? In 200 or 300 years, cloth decays. Even now, museums will very rarely lend out their clothes because they’re so fragile. We’re seeing them already making and displaying reproductions,” she says of how patterns can be educational tools.
Dressmaking periodicals began to flourish in the 1850s with the rise of the home sewing machine, and tissue pattern production became its own mass market industry in the 1860s, according to the 2014 book “A History of the Paper Pattern Industry” (Bloomsbury) by Joy Spanabel Emery.
By the 1920s, French couturiers including Lanvin, Chanel, Vionnet and others were licensing their patterns to McCall’s, one of a handful of publishers that would dominate the pattern market as it began featuring more named designer fashions.
Couture patterns had their heyday in the post-World War II era, when French maisons roared back to life following Dior’s New Look, and Vogue entered into licensing agreements for the use of original couture toiles for its Vogue Patterns Paris Couturier Line, which even included woven cloth labels in the pattern envelopes.
Sold for $1.50 to $3.50 at the time, couture patterns were available through magazines and newspapers, and they could be bought at department stores, where home sewers could also purchase fabric to whip up a dress like Audrey Hepburn’s in the span of a weekend.
“They democratized couture because millions of women participated in this culture from around the globe,” Austine-Rademaker says.
While the University of Rhode Island’s Commercial Pattern Archive has 55,000 scanned images from 61,000 commercially produced patterns dating back to 1847, they only picture the garments, envelopes and schematics, not the individual pattern pieces. The Couture Pattern Museum is believed to be the only institution dedicated solely to patterns and digitizing them piece by piece.
“There is definitely value in collecting them, because they are an important part of creating and producing fashions. You can understand how designers represented the body by looking at how patterns created clothes that shape the body in certain ways,” says fashion historian Valerie Steele. “For example, when avant-garde couturiers like Paul Poiret were inspired by Japanese kimonos, he learned to make patterns that created flat shapes around the body, thus freeing it, in contrast to Western patterns that shaped the body by cinching the waist, exaggerating the bust and hips.”
Since she started collecting more than 20 years ago, Austine-Rademaker has amassed 2,000 patterns, from Poirets to Duchess of Windsor designs she sold under her name, as well as corresponding vintage clothing, her own reproductions sewn from the patterns, counter books, historical magazines and ephemera.
Her small museum has a portion of the collection on display, rotating exhibitions, programs and classes. Memberships range from $5 a month to $299 for those who want access online to the database of 320 patterns she has digitized herself. (Those members must sign a legal waiver agreeing they are not going to duplicate or sell the patterns, some of which are still copyrighted.)
She’s attracted visitors from as far away as Europe, and hosted events with fashion authors and designers, including Ralph Rucci, who participated in a recent talk about Balenciaga and has donated patterns by Halston and Bobby Breslau.
“Cara’s idea is totally original, a museum dedicated to just patterns,” says Rucci, who lost his own patterns when he sold his company. “It’s extraordinary when you are able to see an incredible technical original pattern when it’s in its flat state. You envision how it’s transformed. It’s an education within an education when museums have patterns.”
“Some patterns have 40 pieces, and they’re so delicate because they’re printed on tissue, they’re really only printed for one time use,” Austine-Rademaker says of the digitization process, which is done using a proprietary method. “And so I have to be very, very careful to be able to upload that information accurately and capture it accurately. Each one takes over an hour to digitize.”
A first generation Korean American immigrant, her interest in fashion and how it’s made was a reaction to a difficult, impoverished childhood, she says. Adopted from South Korea at age 4, she worked a family farm in Iowa as a young girl before running away from home, attending community college where she majored in finance, and making her way to Los Angeles to work at Met Life in an actuarial position.
While in college, she’d discovered designer patterns as a way into the exclusive world of fashion and, being an avid sewer, thought if she could improve her skills, she could wear designer clothing, too.
Austine-Rademaker started collecting from eBay and Etsy, estate sales and vintage stores and elderly patients she met when her career detoured into nursing.
Today, vintage couture patterns (if you can find them) can sell for $1,600 to $1,800, she says, “because they have become more like works on paper. And the final piece you can almost see as the oil painting. But to get to that oil painting, the artist has to go through sketches or renditions and outlines. With patterns, not only do we have architectural plans of these designs, but also the instruction.”
Her museum tour starts with an explainer about the process of couture, told using an original Givenchy “slow curve” dress toile pinned to a dress form. She discusses how couture patterns are special, made from toiles that take into account the drape of a fabric and the shape of the body before they are unpinned and laid out on a flat surface to make a paper pattern.
Among her holdings, the oldest is the 1921 Lanvin couture pattern of Pickford’s summer clothes published by the Home Pattern Company started in 1905 by Condé Nast, which appeared in Ladies Home Journal magazine. “He was testing the idea and when he started to see the monetization, especially after the war, he was motivated to sign a contract with the Chambre Syndicale,” she says of Nast’s vision to grow the Vogue pattern business.
The museum has a 1956 McCall’s Givenchy pattern for a dusty rose organza dress which Audrey Hepburn was photographed wearing during a night out in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra, alongside the one Austine-Rademaker made for herself using the pattern. She documented the process stitch by stitch on the museum’s blog.
One of her rarer items is a Norman Norell Women’s Illustrated pattern for Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 velvet with ermine trim Coronation cape, which unbelievably was sold to the mass market.
Her holdings also include several patterns by Madame Grès, one of the most prolific designers when it came to releasing patterns, and a reconstructed 1957 Madame Grèss dress.
“At the end of her career, all of her archives are basically destroyed. She couldn’t afford rent anymore, and so one of the things these patterns capture is the archives of some of these designers that don’t have them,” Austine-Rademaker says.
Patterns would hit the mass market at the same time as the originals did, sometimes faster, and would also have a longer shelf-life if they were popular designs, she explains.
“Sewing was such a part of American culture that Schiaparelli came to America to judge competitions that were kind of a precursor to ‘Project Runway,'” Austine-Rademaker says of the events sponsored by the sewing machine company Singer, fabric companies and department stores.
Her collection largely ends around the 1970s when many women stopped making their clothes due to readily available, affordable ready-to-wear options. Today, there are no couture patterns being sold, although some rtw designers do still sell patterns, including Badgley Mischka and Rachel Comey. Rick Owens just released one digitally through ShowStudio in December.
She’s wondered about moving the museum to a big city, but in Santa Barbara, she’s had an enthusiastic response from locals who are hungry for fashion, and those willing to travel to see it.
Her collection is kept in a temperature controlled storage facility outside the area’s wildfire zone.
“Look what happened in Los Angeles,” she says of the recent fires. “With global disruption and climate change, at least digitally, stored in the cloud, these patterns, if anything ever happened to them, there’s still a history that they existed.”
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