Hand work sewing patterns for 18-inch dolls

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

Trends in Hand Work from World War II to 1973 - Part I

Trends in Hand Work from
World War II to 1973 - Part I