#professionaldressmaking

[professorpski]

To be most successful, you must choose the thing you can do best and for which there is the greatest need in your community, for on these two factors depend your pleasure in your work and the extent of your market. For example, if you live in a town where people do much of their own sewing a cutting and fitting serves will be received more enthusiastically than a sewing service. If you community is one that entertains extensively, novelties that will be attractive for bridge prizes will find a ready market....

So reads the aspiring professional dressmaker in 1924 in a section called "Specializing in Sewing" from Sewing for Profit from the Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences. The book points out that choosing one type of garment or work--children's clothing, lingerie, aprons, etc--makes the most sense.

I like this passages because it shows a concern for both pleasure in your work AND the market. Both seem necessary to success to my mind. I am reading a modern personal finance book written by an economist and am struck by how he measures everything by the amount of money you have to spend each year. Yes, he does not want to urge anyone to stay in an abusive marriage or to work at a hated job, but his yardstick for happiness mostly measures dollars. I like this much passage better because it balances personal pleasure and the hard reality of the marketplace.

[professorpski]

The best profit will come from regular customers, because the dressmaker will have learned how to find the styles they like, how to design for them, and how to fit them, and all this knowledge will make it possible for her to produce better garments with less labor.

This advice comes from a 1924 volume, yet it is just as sound today as it was then. I know members of the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals who make the wardrobes of corporate women. Once the customer has worked out a certain cut of pants or jacket as their favorite, they will have more than one made for different seasons, etc. And many women do the same with ready-to-wear: they find one garment that fits perfectly and buy it in multiples or more than one color. As a dressmaker, I have made the same favorite patterns, tweaked to my satisfaction, over and over again.

The Dressmaker and Tailor Shop is one of the Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences correspondence course booklets on a complete course on sewing, all of which were first written by Mary Brooks Picken. She was the first woman to write a dictionary, The Language of Fashion, which is still in print and very useful for vintage terms, and co-founder of the Costume Institute which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

You can find the ASDP here in case you are searching for custom clothing, or certification as a professional: https://sewingprofessionals.com/