In
1974, talking about hand work in the book
Trends in Sewing from World War II to 1973, Fenya said:
A
Fashion Revolution is in progress in the United States, its main impetus
a reawakened interest in home sewing. More than forty million
American women are now estimated to be involved with this form of
creative self-expression. At least half of them are teen-agers
and women in their early twenties...
Some
of the causes of the fashion/fabric revolution were social, paralleling
changes in life style. Some were economic, some technological.
The beginnings go back to the end of World War II.
When
that war ended in 1945, worldwide textile production had dropped sharply
due to wartime dislocations and the exhaustion of such large textile-producing
countries as Germany and Japan. In the United States, where
the decline was less severe, there was an enormous pent-up demand
for clothing fabrics. Because of military needs, these had been
strictly rationed to manufacturers of civilian clothes, with regulations
that limited, for example, the length and width of skirts. The
federal controls were designed to limit the amount of fabric manufacturers
could use for civilian clothes, since the military required vast amounts
of cloth. There was no individual rationing of fabric or clothes,
as there was for many types of food. A large percentage of women
were making their own clothes, as they always had.
A
sort of fashion boredom had set in and American women were more than
ready for style changes when the freeze was lifted. Then, in
1947, came Christian Dior's radical new look of long, twirling skirts.
The effect was to start an expansion of the women's clothing industry
so great that by the 1950s home sewing seemed to be becoming an obsolete
art. A whole generation grew up knowing nothing of the skills
and satisfactions of creating their own wardrobes.
A
contributing factor to the new popularity of manufactured dresses
was that cotton---previously pretty much restricted to house dresses
and aprons---began to be styled for street wear, and the manufactured
fashions were available at very low cost. For example, one
dress I designed in 1950 retailed at $5.95 and could be seen on the
main street of any major city in the United States. To illustrate
how popular daytime cotton dresses became, this one used about three-quarters
of a million yards of fabric during its life span.
Part
II - Trends in the Popularity of Sewing and Hand
Work