Saturday 19 March 2016

Making Madeleine Vionnet

Friday I got in the mail my very own copy of Betty Kirke's fabulous book on Madeleine Vionnet. Delight - better than ice cream! (or whatever your treat of choice...).

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However...

The 30 patterns in the book are mystifying, to say the least. Yes, there are lines labelled "D" and "F", and instructions to "join D to F", but there is no scale, there are no measurements. The best a person can do is measure the actual little drawings and scale up - which, as I know from other pattern scaling during the course, can lead to disastrous magnifications.

So I turned to Dr Google, and indeed, there are great discussions of how to recreate Vionnet there. One of them is a most informative blog post comparing Kirke's Vionnet, and the Japanese book based on it, in Fashion-Incubator hosted and edited by Kathleen Fasanella. Even if you don't read Japanese, this is apparently THE book to get if you want to actually make a Vionnet, since the patterns have been tested and retested by a research team, and recreated. Bonanza!!


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For a sample discussion on recreating one of the patterns, see Recreating Pattern 14. This sewist, too, used both Bunka (the Japanese book) and Kirke's. I guess I'll be ordering one more book!