My Two Cents Worth on Personal Style

Keeping informed about fashion is compulsory if you sew. If you don’t, you could end up looking pretty weird. And not in a good way. Being able to make whatever you want can be a double sided sword.

Of course fashion is all about timing. What we must have today we very likely laughed at yesterday and will definitely sneer at tomorrow. It’s hard enough when we aim for the mainstream, but even more tricky if we want to be just a little off key, a little more individual. Funny how it has to be a recognisable ‘look’. If it is too far from the norm, but not legitimised by fitting into a certain defined trend, it becomes a costume. Take Princess Leia for instance.

If one person wears the side buns and the white dress, it is a costume. If lots of people do, it’s a fashion. Peculiar, isn’t it? Anyway, if you are a little adventurous and in search of a personal style, and don’t want to end up looking as if you are wearing a costume, Pinterest is a great resource. It helps find the style you like, refine your understanding of the components, calibrate your taste buds and analyse what works and what doesn’t. Not to mention that it is an endless source of inspiration. I have to say that Pinterest lifted my hand-made wardrobe to a new level and made me more content with what I have to wear than I have ever been. I think this is because I no longer browse the commercial pattern collections, restricted to choosing the best that is on offer. Instead I look at outfits on Pinterest that wow me and try to figure out how to make them. It doesn’t always work, but it works often enough. I am fortunate that I can be content with relatively few patterns and reuse them often. It saves a lot of time and frustration, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. After all, half the world runs around in jeans and tee-shirts. The pattern companies make money out of selling lots of patterns, not out of selling a few very good generic patterns that can be made over and over. Their business model is geared to people wanting to buy lots. What it means for the consumer is that you end up with hundreds of patterns in your drawers, but only use a fraction. Plus there is no style continuity, hence wardrobes are a jumble of bits and pieces with no coherence. If you are not sure what I mean, think of what an op shop or secondhand clothes shop looks like, as compared to an upmarket store, where the buyers have had the resources to carefully curate the season’s collection.

Even when each individual garment is beautiful, without coherence, everything will look rather ordinary. Why, you ask, if you can only wear one outfit at a time? Because personal style is all the outfits you wear as a whole. You could not tell if someone has personal style from seeing only one of their outfits.

But to get back to finding something you love and trying to figure out how to make it, I recently saw this top.

I loved the look and happened to have a very similar piece of linen in my stash, but I wanted the top to be a bit longer. One of the privileges of being a sewist is that we can take something we like and fine tune it to our preferences. One of the many reasons, apart from sticker shock, why I will never go back to RTW. Here is my version of the top, albeit not as beautifully starched and ironed as the original. At least not yet, I may do it for the final photo when it’s finished. Call this one the ‘already worn for a few hours’ version.

Apart from the increased length, is summer in Australia, and 3/4 sleeves are much more wearable, now and into autumn, than long ones. I cunningly made it so I can unpick the 3/4 cuffs, which will make the sleeves full length, and then put a shirt cuff on, if it becomes a favourite and I want to wear it into winter as well. My basis pattern was the Tessuti Fave Top, although with hindsight its trapezoid shape probably wasn’t the best choice. The original top must fit pretty closely across the hips, with side slits to the waist, so when the front pieces are pulled to cross over, the slit will open and form those nice pointy hems. At least that is how I think it works, but my brain is a bit geometry challenged and I am always happy to stand corrected.

With my version the sides are closed, and too wide to make the points, even if I should put in a slit. To achieve that, I would have to take out the width at the side. I rather like it as it is though, and taking out width is something I can always do later if I want. For the moment I will leave it as it is. Here is are some pics showing the changes I made to the fave top pattern. The first shows how to convert the sleeves to wrist length. If you look carefully, you can see the paper pattern on top of the white fabric. I used waste paper for the download, in case you are wondering.

This shows the shape of the front pieces extended to make them cross over.

I was a bit over-enthusiastic at first and lengthened by 30cm at CF, which was too much, because it makes the top too wide at the neck, which will droop. It may do so in an attractive fashion, or it may not. I like the ‘set and forget’ type of garment, anything I have to fiddle with throughout the day won’t get worn much. So a 15cm front extension piece is enough, and I folded back the extra to the inside to make a cut on facing. I also narrowed the sides down a bit.

The original does not have a collar piece, but just drapes into a cowl. Again this might drape the right way throughout the day, or it might have had to be arranged by a stylist for the photograph to look attractive, and will do its own thing when worn by a real person on a busy work day. I didn’t want to take the chance. So I made a straight rectangular collar that will be buttoned to stay nicely in place. I’m not quite finished yet and the collar is still only pinned, but you get the idea. I might write a PR review when I am completely done.  

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Pants – Some Eye Candy

Ok, I will never look like this without a radical starvation diet, giant platform shoes, or better, a total body transplant. So why struggle to play a game I can never win? Instead, I decided to think outside the square and go for quite a different aesthetic. Pinterest is really invaluable here. It allows you to be inspired by the best available from all over the world, not just by what you can see in your local shopping centre, or what your friends are wearing, or, heaven forbid, what you see in the women’s mags. It also shows you that you are not alone. There are plenty of talented designers out there who are also bored with the classic shape. And not because they are experiencing a dire shortage of thin, leggy models. Once you have recalibrated your taste buds away from the conventional, you will see that there is a smorgasbord of alternatives to choose from.

And that is just the beginning, there are many more interesting options on my Pinterest board.

Once you let go of the idea that you need to conform to the classic pants shape, which does us pears no favours, you are on your way to feeling much better about yourself and your body shape.

Harem Scare’em

When I departed from the norm I did so with quite an extreme shape: low crotch, very voluminous harem pants. I have since expanded my repertoire to a couple of other styles, but I still like them a lot.

Here they are, an Issey Miyake design, no less.

An online friend kindly gifted me the now OOP pattern, and I made quite a few pairs, both for winter and summer. They turned out to be very tricky regarding fabric choices. I found out quickly that knits tend to look cheap. You need a woven, drapey enough not to be too bulky, and preferably something that does not crush too much, because of the bulk in the crotch area. A big ask, but I did succeed with several pairs, some with very thin cotton, almost a voile but a tad less sheer, and also in a Korean high tech knit/woven. I wore those pants enthusiastically, frequently and almost nothing but, as far as pants were concerned, for more than a year.

As I said, I still wear them now quite happily, but I have moved on with my sewing. The extreme harem look is all very well, and where I live harem pants are fairly common, but the look is too distinctive to wear exclusively. What finally gave me the push to look for a new pattern was a trip to Brazil, where I expected to do a lot of walking in very hot weather. What does that have to do with anything, I hear you ask. Well, the answer is simple, if a bit embarrassing: abrasion. The main advantage of pants over skirts in summer is that they protect your inner thighs. Low crotch pants don’t do that.

I was looking for a pants style that would, when I discovered the Tina Givens patterns and I thought I would give her Phoebe pants a try.

Of course all of Tina Givens pants have a low crotch as well, but this is much easier to fix than with the Issey Miyake pants. I eliminated it by adding length at the leg hem and taking off an equal amount at the waist. This moves the crotch upwards. The Phoebe pants have an inset panel all along the side, which gives you a nice vertical line breaking up the expanse of fabric. And pleats and a cuff at the ankle, which I also like. I don’t do the pockets because I don’t want the bulk, but lots of people prefer to put up with bulk in favour of pockets. Lucky when can sew and please ourselves!

This was my first try.

A bit too loose in the hips when seen with a tank top, too wide in the leg, makes me look short and squat. Of course, with a Lagenlook top all that becomes irrelevant, thank goodness. I no longer need to try to look slim, tall and leggy.

I still decided that I liked my Phoebe pants fairly fitted through the hips, with just enough ease for comfort, so that is how I made the black pair below. The actual shape of the crotch curve is a definite non-issue with these, as it is then same front and back. Tina suggests to fold your fabric so you have 4 layers and cut all 4 pattern pieces at once. What could be simpler? Of course it is it is true that, when you eliminate the low crotch, the fit could be not as good as a pair with a proper crotch curve, depending on your shape. Not a problem for me, as they fit pretty well, and in any case, no one will ever see this area under a Lagenlook top. I do make the back higher than the front, to accommodate the aforementioned generous rear end of mine. However, if you are a purist, you could transfer the crotch curve from a pattern that fits you well to the Phoebe. Yay for frankenpatterns!

I have posted the first two pics before when discussing the Fave Top, and you probably didn’t even notice the pants, which is how it should be. The pants are the supporting cast, not the focus when you are a pear shape. The last photo is the pants worn with the Zelda dress, sans ruffle and with short sleeves and bodice part taken from the Tessuti Eva dress.

And below is my latest variation, with horizontal pin stripes. Hard to see those in the photo unless you click it to enlarge. I have eliminated the side panel because I did not want to have the stripes go the other way, and making them go the same way as in the main part of the pants would have given me a headache trying to match them all exactly. Normally having the inset with the stripes going the other way would not be such a bad idea, but I had already played with the direction of the stripes with the top, and more would have been too much. I also wanted to make these pants more tapered to the ankle instead of gathered into a cuff.

Not sure the top is right in this combo. Too much volume perhaps at the sides, too long? I always find it hard not to use up all the fabric I’ve got, but at least it’s easier to cut a bit off than to join it on. We shall see after I have worn it once or twice.

Another possible interesting variation is the detail on these Oska pants. This would not be too hard to do with the Phoebe pattern as a starting point.

It looks like you cut the hem longer at the outer side seam than the inside seam, then take out the extra with the tuck. Bless Oska for a photo with stripes, they make it so much easier to work out how it is done.

Some Thoughts on Pants

I have been thinking about pants for a while, and about what constitutes flattering pants for my figure type. Kate’s recent post on Jan 13 gave me the push I needed. The article discusses different variations of the classic pants shape suitable for various figure types.

But I very seldom wear classic pants and I don’t wear jeans. Ever. I do like jeans on other people and this is not a value judgement. I wore them a lot from my early teens, when they appeared on the fashion radar in Europe, to my early fifties. Then I saw the light and realised that they did me no favours.

Just to be clear on this. A pair of jeans on a slim and leggy woman looks fantastic.

If I could look like that I would be wearing jeans. With bells on. But the reality is that I am a pronounced pear. Short legs, big bum and thighs, not to mention saddlebags. Even when I was very slim it was an uphill battle to find jeans that made me look good. These days I am a couple of kilos above the normal weight range, which is eons above the weight of that model. Not to mention the long legs >sigh<. No matter what I do to my body, it will never look like that.

A few years ago I got serious about wanting a flattering jeans pattern and did some comparisons of different ones to see what looked best on me.

Clearly, the pink pair on the left are the worst. This taught me to steer clear of any pattern that curves in below the hips.

The middle pair is actually not a jeans pattern but a classic straight leg pant that I used as a comparison to see if jeans looked any good on me at all. They do. The ones on the right look fine. They taper in a straight line towards the ankle without the curve inwards of the pink pair.

But I was 6-8 kgs lighter when these pictures were taken. And I still wore high heels and platforms happily every day. This makes quite a difference to proportions if you have short legs like me.

This is the difference in look from bare feet or flats, to medium high heels to very high platforms. Alas, I have sworn off high heels and platforms for everyday wear. I am now only willing to undergo this torture for special occasions, which means pretty rarely. Since I have discovered the daily comfort of flats, style has had to take a back seat. The fact that you need full mountaineering kit to get up to our new house from the car port may have had something to do with it too.

So my high heels have been shown the door, my jeans pattern has been retired and my dress pants are hanging out in the back of my wardrobe, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for a meeting with an important corporate customer to see the light of day. I still take care to dress conservatively for the latter. But in my ordinary day to day life I have thrown caution to the wind. Instead of striving for long, lean and leggy I have gone for short and round. Of course the quest for the perfect pair of pants goes on, but it is no longer in the least about crotch curves and drag lines, but about proportion and a pleasing overall silhouette. If you are a shape like me and interested in liberating yourself from the tyranny of conforming to the classic pants shape, then read all about my ongoing quest in my next post.