I’ve been working through every single pattern I can get my hands on, and transcribing them to metric. My pattern manual is intended to make them so easy to use that all you need to do is skim to get to what is needed. I’m very limited by how limited tailors were though. They had to work within the law in terms of their practice and in terms of what and how much fabric they were allowed to use based on both their practicing level and how much of any fabric was allowed to be used in any garment.

There is also an incredible document I need to track down because it was a demand that tailors outside of that country to made a brides garment be of the style (and social level) that would be expected once she arrived.

But the limitations had much more immediate effects on clients who physically did not fit within the narrowly defined limits of cloth. I don’t want to perpetuate that, nor give even a hint of validity to it in our lived context.

So my collection of portraits does help a lot in the structure of garments across a range of sizes and how that varies so much between not only countries but even cities. But not yet many adaptations of cutting diagrams. This is why I’m going through each pattern. There are a few, I want to know if the differences are universal or if they are to illustrate the first step of a series of grading.

And with my renewed eye for tailoring flow on effects I can even work out systems for creativity within the very rigid sumptuary and tailoring laws.

So my aim is to explain why these bottlenecks occur without telling people to follow them.

The aim of a Modular system is to do exactly that. Don’t like the skirt? Swap it out. Like the skirt but it doesn’t work as it is, I’ll offer alternative ways of using it to find a commercial pattern or book or other artisan.