Fashion Future: Crafts, Consumer/Designers & SELF

The new postal stamps, with “Quilts from Gee’s Bend” are very inspirational and timed well to what I see as an extremely important development in the fashion industry for DEs (Designer Entrepreneurs) and consumers. For those who are very creative, and love to play with art, graphics and colors in fashion, the spring/summer season is great for experimentation, especially for those DEs that sell directly to consumers. The sleeveless jacket and skirt is one from the 1980s of my huge vintage collection. The photo is by Ron Ranere, Positive Image, http://www.positiveimage-boston.com. It is in Ivory colored leather with the leaf patterns (front & back) in different colors of lambskin suede. It could sell very well this year, but I’m not selling anymore. I simply want to inspire you. Can’t you see using some of those color combinations or even some patterns of the quilts as appliqués or pieces of the garment shape in a dress, skirt or top?

I have been very busy helping DEs locally in Boston. As you well know, I am organizer for the Boston Fashion Industry Meetup, for all aspects of the industry to help one another, by meeting face to face locally. http://fashion.meetup.com/1/ You also know that I organize the Fashion Product Development Meetup, that is now completely virtual, online for CHAT discussions. I make announcements on this web site for when I will be online to talk. You can join (anyone, anywhere & free) and then learn when. http://fashion.meetup.com/221/ I now have just added a third meetup, Boston Craft & Fashion Sellers Meetup. Ivy Glass is my assistant organizer, and we hold the meetups at her studio in the artists spaces at Fort Point. It’s purpose is to research all the craft shows, fashion shows for DEs, and set up some as well as trunk shows and home parties in New England – all for selling direct to consumers, that helps you to make an income. If you go to the web site, you will see the same photo of my leather outfit with the leaf patterns. Click: http://craftsellers.meetup.com/76/ We will be having our first meetup Feb. 8. I’m telling all of you about it because eventually, once we get it well established here, those of you in other parts of the country could also set up a Craft Sellers Meetup (and I will help you). Then, we could even exchange products and help each other sell over all parts of the country. Wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of “organized selling power”?

There’s some other things that keep me very busy as well, all for helping young DEs. I am a business consultant for the Center for Women & Enterprise (CWE) in New England. They have the best and cheapest business advice and classes. If any of you are in this area, you should check them out. http://www.cweonline.org I just met one of their clients that is really interesting, and represents the wave of the future in fabric coloring. She has been doing customized fabric dying for chains like the Gap, Ann Taylor, etc., and now is going big. Everyone is interested world-wide because she has established STANDARDS for fabric coloring, globally, and will be having it digitally as well. In my talk with her, she knows that the future is for consumers, and small businesses on the web, and eventually will have something for you as well. I will keep you posted. Go see her web site. http://www.precisiontex.com/index.php

All the work in SELF (Self-Employed Laboratory of Fashion) keeps mounting, because the group of members are all each making a tiny collection of dresses for spring/summer that are based on my Generic S-Patterns, both to test them and to help the members develop their styles. There is a great deal of graphics and craft influence in what we do. Unfortunately for you, this is completely local. We are having a meeting on the 3rd. and will keep you updated on what we set up. We also have one member that I’m helping to set up a business for sourcing cottons and silks from India. Once some of these things are set up then we can offer it to you as well.

By now you must realize that I do not have the time to set up an online teaching structure for learning about the S-Patterns. I’m sorry that some of you had hopes of this. Maybe I will meet someone in the local area that I will teach and she or he could do it?

If any have questions, please ask me. I love to answer them. My commitment is to help young DEs for a very interesting 21st century future.

More on S.E.L.F * Standards * Prepare for CHAT

Many of you are asking to learn more about SELF and the S-Patterns, or Stylometrics system. Here’s a very simple example, even though they are not ready yet for you to buy and use. In the Nov. 18th post, “SELF (Self-Employed Laboratory of Fashion) Coming” I diagrammed five of the nine “Primitive Patterns” that were designed and researched in my grants on Stylometrics, and that I said would be a base for the S-Patterns – P-1 Bodice, P-8 Skirt (as a dress in first sketch); P-2 Blazer, P-7 Pants (in second sketch); and P-9, Gored Skirt (in third sketch). The first sketch above is now a dress pattern I am calling AB Primitive. Note that it includes the sleeve accurately related to the bodice, and all pieces are planned to match perfectly. The second sketch is a generic evolution I am calling AB-1 Generic. The critical plan to make the system easy and excellent quality for everyone is that each generic will have just the key style as changes in the pattern. That is, note that the all over 3-D shape is almost the same except for the indent under the bust, and the jewel neckline, sleeves, sheath skirt are identical. This is very important for the ease in pattern making. There will be hundreds of generic patterns as we evolve them from all the primitives, including necklines, collars and sleeves.

What makes the Stylometrics system work is that the Primitive Patterns are standards, that is the #6 definition in the dictionary, “a structure built for or serving as a base or support”. The Generic Patterns will all evolve from the primitives, and you will need to evolve your personal styles from the primitives or the generics. I will not evolve the patterns for you, although there may be some technical designers connected to SELF eventually that may do that for you. I will do some instruction, but I’m trying to keep it simple. One thing to realize that this system takes an ability to see creatively in spatial dimensions inside the mind. That’s why I wrote the Oct 17th post, “Inner Visualization of 3-D / 2-D Translations in Pattern Making”. Please look at it again, and ask me questions if you don’t understand it. I am experimenting with a couple of designers online to see if they can understand this basic principle. That is this system is not drafting at all. If you study the photo of the blue silk dress with panels interwoven at the waist, (See Nov. 11th post, “4 Successful Vintage Fashions”) you will see that it can be evolved from the AB-1 Generic, with an empire waist. (Note, the photo was by Ron Ranere, Positive Images, www.positiveimage-boston.com ) But, it does require for you to “design”, “drape” and “see in your mind to develop further. It’s interesting that Georgene, designing for 25 years, says she “prefers draping to drafting”. Drafting is very old hat and belongs in the cheap commodity trade. But draping can be difficult to get a pattern for reproduction for more of the same styles. I’m trying to set up a system that still requires you to drape your ideas, but evolved from a standard so you will have the result reproducible.

I hope all of you will join our CHAT tomorrow, so we can discuss this further, and I can answer any questions. Remember you must go to Fashion Product Development Meetup and RSVP Yes, so that I know you are coming. I will cut anyone I don’t know from joining us.
http://fashion.meetup.com/221/

1960s Fashion Show in Italy * More on SELF

One summer in the mid-60s I was invited to teach fashion design in Florence, Italy for an American college’s program called “Garland in Florence”. At the time I was chair of the fashion department at Mass. College of Art in Boston, so I had many of my own students with me. As a finale for the course we put on a delightful garden fashion show, and I added some of my own designs. It was a grand opportunity to use some of the magnificent Italian fabrics.

These are two of the group I designed. The photos, however, were taken in November, 2004 at my fashion show “Half-Century of Vintage Designs” by a great photographer, Ron Ranere, who also co-organizes the Boston Fashion Industry Meetup with me. It’s a great photographer who can take such good photos when models are concentrating more on moving fast for a show than on the photos. You can see more of Ron’s photos at www.positiveimage-boston.com, and learn more about the Boston Fashion Industry Meetup at http://fashion.meetup.com/1/

The dress on the left is in a four-ply pure silk crepe, and cut on the bias. The big bold black print was very 60s, as was the dress length. The unique feature was the neckline, which I call a “bib”. It was cut as a halter tying in the back, and the front was a few cowls shaped upward to form the bib shape. The dress on the right is in a 100% wool woven with gold and silver threads. The top is cut as a blouson, and the skirt is cut as a yoke skirt. The pleating was formed by tucking in an “umbrella” shape.

S.E.L.F. “Self-Employed Laboratory for Fashion

I’ve been getting a lot of requests from young designers who want both the Stylometrics Pattern System and the instructions on their use for quality, efficient, and fast pattern making. However, I am building a “research laboratory” with a few committed assistants who are self-employed in their own fashion design businesses to test further development. This takes time to make these beautiful for you with instructions for use. So, I beg your patience. I may have some beginning things after the first of the year.

We have agreed on the five primitives, and are in the process of deciding on what generic patterns we will have. Many pieces from my vintage collection will be used to explain some of those generics and how to use them. As, for example, we will have a “generic blouson”, and a “generic yoke skirt”, as developed further in the photo above. Eventually we will have a series of necklines and collars, such as a “generic cowl” neckline. If any of you have specific needs, please email me and let me know. It would help to add those needs into our plans, and you will benefit later.

4 Successful Vintage Fashions * Join Our Live Chat

To join our “Live Chat”, with many other fashion designers and consultants from around the country (California, Texas, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, and hopefully China) who will be there, you must click on the Fashion Product Development Meetup to find out the time and other details.
http://fashion.meetup.com/221/

The 4 fashion styles in the above photo were voted by the consumer audience as their favorites in the NEFI (New England Fashion Industry) show in November, 2004. I showed over 60 pieces from my half-century of vintage collections. Ron Ranere of Positive Images took these great photographs while the models waited to go out or while moving in the show. See: http://www.positiveimage-boston.com If any of my readers want to ask me any technical questions, I will answer them. But for now I will simply tell you about the style details and the dates.
1) The first on is from an early sixties custom collection, a royal blue silk crepe, and consists of vertical bias panels in the front and back that are basket-woven with horizontal bias panels from the hip-bone to the empire waist. You can’t see in this photo that the panels in the skirt are free to move very beautifully as you walk.

The next three are in a very soft lambskin suede, and were from my collections in the 1970s that I manufactured for many of the top designer retailers in the country. I did very well, and sold the business, when it was making a million dollars, to a men’s wear manufacturer in the 1980s.
2) A wrap coat, buttoning with one large very old button, and with raglan sleeves. This coat was enormously successful in selling because it looked flattering on a tiny petite, or a tall, heavy woman. Although there are very few I will design for today, I did repeat this one recently for my favorite customer (from the 1960’s) in a brown cashmere wool.
3) The third one was my successful suede evening gown that I talked about in a previous blog, http://fashionsolutions.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-famous-suede-evening-gown-2.html.
It was the one around which I designed a very new kind of production systems for my 25 stitchers, that made me reap a 60% profit on each, even with selling it wholesale. The gown wrapped in the back and tied in the front, and I sold it as well to some celebrities.
4) One of a collection of “landscape fashions”. The flared skirt was cut in pieces in which the aqua color represented waterways, and the beige color represented sand. You can see the bare brown tree on this side, but the other side had a series of houses. I had a girl, Toula, who had just come over from Greece, and who took these home to stitch together, the few hundred I sold. The top was a halter with a collar that wrapped in the back by brown belt ends that came to the front to be buckled.

Let me know if you have any questions. Today, I am totally committed to helping young designers.

My Sunburst Dress, 1962, Intricate Pattern Design

The sunburst dress was a piece in my spring collection for 1962. A proud moment was when the Boston Sunday Herald photographed it for a full page article in its Sunday Magazine, March 4, 1962. Under the photo was the following:

“SUNBURST is the name given to this new style by young Boston designer Shirley Willett. Of bright orange silk pesante, the dress is hand pleated and all the fit is within the pleating.”

It certainly goes along with today’s spring 2007 collections in which orange is a color choice of Paris fashions. A piece from the article:

“SHIRLEY WILLETT is one of Boston’s new young designers who shows an originality of design and individuality of concept that is unusual for her twenty-eight years. She is an exponent of cut and shape and believes that each garment must have something unique as well as flattering for the wearer. Shirley also feels that high fashion design warrants superior workmanship in order to be recognized as true couturier. Because of her fresh young approach we felt her styles will be of great interest to the new, young brides of 1962.”

The early 1960s was a time of extensive technical research for me, a time of intense creativity that would challenge every engineering skill I could dream up, in order to result in simplicity and the ability to reproduce easily, yet maintain the intense originality. It was a time of fashion shows, and a small but loyal group of customers, before I went into manufacturing and selling to retailers. However, because I was so devoted to research and self-learning, I made no money. But, it didn’t matter. I was a “fashion sculptress”, and supported my art in other ways. I look back at that period nostalgically. It was my kind of schooling because everything I know was self-taught. That self-teaching is what helped me to create the original technologies and educational principles that won me National Science Foundation grants in the late 1980s, after I sold my manufacturing business.

Saying the “fit is within the pleating” means that all the shaping for the bust, the waist, the hips, and in the back as well as the front – all comes into the sunburst point in the front. The way I approached the pattern then was to “slash the paper pattern” wherever I wanted the pleating to fall, and add in whatever amounts I determined. It was very complicated, a technical challenge. Today I would do it quite differently. In fact, as I tell my students and protégés, the best quality and easiest approach to complicated draping as here, is to start with my basic “dress primitive” and then drape on top of it. This is very simple explanation of something that needs a lot of visuals to help understand the principles.

Another feat I accomplished is the soft armhole. Women in the 1960s considered the armhole line hard and ugly, and did not like showing their underarms. Study the soft drape I achieved over the arm. It means the lining does the work of being a support , a different shape than the shell, in order to support the drape. Again, it would take some visuals to full grasp the technique.

I get so many questions on how to achieve some of these things that I am playing with ideas of how to do this online. What do you think? Let me know.

1960s: Hemlines and the Stock Market!

Here’s a fun post for my readers. The newsletter was sent out by Harris Upham, Inc., a stock brokerage firm, in May, 1967. My roommate at the time was working as a trader for the firm, and brought home the newsletter for me to see – since I was in the fashion industry. Hemlengths were a big fashion discussion topic in the 1960s and 1970s. Whether you believe it or not, these brokers really did believe that there was a relationship between the two. A newsletter one month later had Ralph Rotnam, a stock analyst for Harris Upham, saying that “as a barometer this chart is 100% correct.” Here is what the 1967 newsletter says:
“For some time there has been a suspicion in Wall Street that the stock market and the hemlines of women’s skirts move in the same direction. To find out if this was true we sent our textile and apparel researcher, Foy Roberson, to the library to make a detailed study. The results are shown on the chart on page one. From the days of street-sweeping skirts in 1897 to the days of Twiggy in 1967 the market is up 2100% in value. And as the chart shows the hemline changes and the direction of the market have been amazingly parallel. Perhaps we should be listening more carefully to the planning in Paris. Someone has called this a “Mini Market”. There are mini skirts, a mini recession and mini stocks.”

I used this later in the 1980s, when teaching about fashion marketing, production, and trends. I explained that a lot of fashion trends have to do with “collective social emotions”. And those affect general business, stocks, politics, etc., as well as fashion trends.

We’re getting some fashion people from other parts of the country joining us in “Fashion Product Development Meetup” on our “Live Chat”, which will be in a few days. Go to:
http://fashion.meetup.com/221/
It’s going to be a great Virtual, 21st century, Web 2.0 experience.

Logo & Label for Designer Identity & A New Chat Room!

It has taken awhile to set this up, but we finally have a Chat Room so we can chat with young fashion designers and others interested in fashion – all over the world. You know that Tess, one of my protégés that I mentor, is now in China producing her collection of cashmere and silk coats and jackets. Hopefully, we may be able to chat with her in one of the scheduled chat room times. The way it is structured, so that we don’t have people from the Internet we don’t want, is to have you join the “Fashion Product Development Meetup”, that I organize.
http://fashion.meetup.com/221/
It is free, you answer at least one required question: “What experience in fashion design, patterns, production, do you have?” You can answer with “aspiring designer”, or just interested in fashion and talking to others in fashion. I accept you quickly and then you can see the scheduled times for the chat room. I hope all of my readers, who are a great audience, will join. If you click on the chat room any other time, there will not be anyone there. But you can click on the Bravenet chat rooms, to discover other chat rooms and topics.

One of the first discussions that so many have asked me about is “Designer Identity”. First, you need to be sure of the direction of your fashion product development. That is, you know that your fashion product is saleable and has some uniqueness that the product can be identified with you. Then, it shows a high degree of professionalism if you design a “logo” that is completely yours, and people will recognize it as such. My logo I designed in the 1950s, when I started in business. It is an abstract fashion figure (very 50s) and also represents an S, my first initial. Next, when you are designing a label to go into your fashion apparel, consider the impact of the “lettering”. Again I designed this label in the 1950’s and used it throughout every business I developed, in custom and in manufacturing for retail stores – to this day. The black lettering is woven into the label, and it’s base is a pure white silk satin.

Please sign up for getting my posts by email, and sign up Fashion Product Development, so you can be a part of our Chat Room. I love questions, and love to answer them. And, as you have seen, I will make posts on those answers.

Tess, Protégé, Producing in China

Mentoring individual designer/entrepreneurs and leaving my 57 years of expertise is my greatest satisfaction in life, especially now in my senior years. Tess, “Teresa Crowninshield”, is one of my “student/protégés”, of whom I am extremely proud. She went to China a few years ago to teach English! She couldn’t find nice clothing for herself, but she fell in love with China’s beautiful cashmere wool and silk brocades. So she went to a tailor and had him make her own ideas in these fabrics. With no formal training she sold some to others around her, and then began to bring some production lots back to Boston to sell at trunk shows and boutiques. The cashmere coat on the left, and the silk brocade jacket on the right are two examples from last year’s collection.

I met her about a year ago at the Boston Fashion Industry Meetup (see link in sidebar), for which I am Organizer. She had been doing the production for a few years utilizing beautiful trims on basic shapes, and now wanted to learn more about high fashion shape, motion and fit of coats and jackets. I took her on as a student/protégé, and she has blossomed into creating exquisite, exceptional styles, with her own unique designer identity – and with technical excellence. She worked with me about nine months, then went to China in September to produce her collection. In a telephone call a few days ago, she told me she needed to upgrade her factory in China, and is going to go bigger!! Hopefully in about a month, we may be able to see some photos of these beautiful new styles.

The important message for all the designer/entrepreneurs who read this, is how critical good communication is. I started Tess and others with a beginning study of “inner visualization” and “our standard set” of the meaning of terms so we could communicate well by phone. When she has a problem in pattern making or production, she has even called from China, and we discuss it, and solve the problem. There are some basic “principles” that I teach (never rules – as Frank Gehry, one of the world’s great architects says: “Beauty Without Rules”). In other words most technical fashion problems have the best results when creating the solution. I teach only one class as a group, “Fashion/Pattern Design for Beginners”. Learning to SEE Is the primary focus, so thereafter the class, you can learn to create your own solutions.

I am also Organizer for another fashion meetup, “Fashion Product Development Meetup” (see sidebar for link), that I am trying to figure out a way to take “virtual” and link to this Fashion Solutions blog. That is, have all the members (even around the world) meet online at a certain day and time, to discuss, and solve problems for designer/entrepreneurs. If anyone can help me with this (maybe chats?) I would really appreciate it.

Creative Technical Design Solutions, 1960 Bias Shaping

Many have been asking for more stories on my past creative technical solutions. When you are intensely creative then you also desire to create different ways to solve technical problems, while making the style even more beautiful in shape for the ultimate consumer. In my early collections in the late 1950s and early 1960s I did a lot of bias cuts, which I love. As I played with the bias I realzed that you could do some masterful tailoring by manipulating the bias in various ways.

Here, in this silk doupioni dress, the skirt section was bias cut, and I "stretched" the bias at the empire line seam, and the fall over the body and indenting at the waist was superbly feminine, with it's gentle waving at the hem. The top was a series of tiny box pleats, with the pleated frill a separately sewn piece. It was easy in the 50s and 60s for a young designer to get small lots of this pleating done. The model is Jo Summers, who today, owns the Copley Seven Model Agency, and owns some of my past styles. In fact, I sold this model quite well, directly to consumers from fashion shows.

If any of you want to know more about this creative technical bias cutting, please email me shirley@shirleywillett.com and I will do some diagrams to show you.

Pattern History of Fashion Apparel Industry

The textile industry was brought to America in the 19th century from England. But the apparel industry is an American creation at the turn of the 20th century in the Greater Boston area by Jewish tailors, who engineered dressmaker patterns into patterns for mass production . Prior to their efforts, in the 19th century, garments were made individually for each woman by dressmakers who went to each woman’s home. These Jewish tailors became aware of some commonalty in the shaping, fitting and making of garments, and production pattern making was born, one pattern to fit more than one woman. They developed a mathematical sizing system to accommodate most women with very few patterns. As businessmen, interested in lowering costs, they continued developing these patterns to become paper “information systems” engineered to control quantities of exact reproductions in cutting and stitching clothing in mass production systems.



The apparel industry grew from these tailors/businessmen, as they built manufacturing factories for production, which pattern engineering accommodated. The chart above was drawn for my National Science Foundation grant report, 1991, “A 3D-4D Computerized Model for Human-Machine Integration in Apparel Manufacturing Engineering”, to show the “Fragmentation of Designer and Maker Skills, Distancing Them Further and Further from the Consumer”. Pattern engineering grew a great industry in the early and mid-20th century. But, by the end of the century, our great American apparel manufacturing industry began to fade. My personal belief is that it was much less, going south and then overseas for production, and rather these “old hat” manufacturers inability to change. They were stuck on both style and production sameness, the foundation of mass production, in order to keep costs low. As a result, they never knew, nor listened to consumers for any of their needs, and consumers are less satisfied. My grants researched ways to do “mass-produced” custom (and later “mass-customization”), computer technologies that could make consumers an integral part of a “future fashion apparel industry system”. Unfortunately, I was ahead of my time in the early 90s, and even the apparel industry’s CAD-CAM vendors, took parts of my ideas, but they too, were unwilling to change. (Perhaps I will tell some interesting stories about these vendors, later.)

Pattern making was first taught to “apprentices” who were called “designers” in the Boston area. Creative designers of styles in America didn’t exist in the early 20th century. Americans were “copyists” or interpreters of the creative ideas coming from Paris ever since the 18th century. Later some designers created booklets for teaching these systems mathematically – that came to be called “pattern drafting”. In the 1940s, when 16, I was old enough to work in these factories as a stitcher on sportswear, and met some of these pattern designers, whose information was passed to them by the old apprenticeship system. I also learned first hand about mass production systems that made America, and Boston area specifically, so famous for quality/quantity production – a system that in the second half of the century we taught to the rest of the world. (Another story later of my experiences in the 1960s that validates this.)

It was in the 1950’s, graduating from college and working in the design rooms of New York, that I learned a sad truth about fashion schools and colleges. Teachers were primarily “dressmakers” and emulated the Paris couture system – and they taught this to other teachers, becoming a narrowing circle of knowledge and experience. So, an even more extreme distancing from the consumer was taking place in the education of young designers for the industry. All workers hired in design rooms were taught in these schools, not as an apprentice in manufacturing, experience that taught critical production knowledge. I easily excelled way beyond them with a technical pattern expertise learned from my own experiments as a teenager coupled with the knowledge of stitching in production. Creators of high fashion styles today make “First Patterns”, which they spend endless time redoing for quality, but never preparing for production. While creating high fashion styles my First Patterns were “Engineered Patterns” to immediately reproduce creations into ready made garments for cost-effective manufacturing. A positive effect from these fashion schools is that America began producing more creative designers, but the negative effect is an ever widening gap between creative design and pattern engineering. (Click the “Wall Between Design and Manufacturing”) By combining great creativity with unequaled technical expertise, I became extremely successful as a designer and manufacturer of high quality designer clothing at low cost, selling nationally to all the top retailers from the 1960s to the early 1980s. . One driving point I continue to make in my grants and to students is that decisions of marketing and production, costs and quality must be made at the “Point of Design” (P.O.D., another chart I will post soon).

My Successful Chemise, 1957, Fad to Present Market Theory

In 1957, when working as a designer for a moderate dress house in Boston, I was inspired by the famous Balenciaga's "chemise" dress, and designed my own unique version with a bow on the back, for me to wear. It is a great story I have told hundreds of times since - "How fads are created, die, and sometimes reincarnated with a new name or form."

Before 1957, the only mass market styles that had sold for a couple of decades were all based on the "shirt-maker dress", with a tightly belted waist. When Balenciaga, Paris, designed the chemise (a term from 1920s of a straight hanging dress) I fell in love with it, and designed a version for myself. My boss was intrigued, and suggested I design one for our line of moderate-priced dresses - $11.75 wholesale, $22 retail. The one in the photo is an exact replica I did for a recent fashion show.

We sent it to the New York showroom, where buyers laughed at it, so it was put on a rack to come back to Boston. A buyer from J. L. Hudson's in Detroit saw it, and exclaimed: "Is this a chemise? I'll buy it for an ad – if you cut it." We put it back on the line, and sold very few, about 200. We decided to cut it – just to order - that is, not cutting the many extras to prepare for reorders. When it hit the stores – it astounded us all – it sold out so fast, and reordered so many tmes that we were completely producing only chemise dresses for two years. SECONDS IN TIMING AND I WOULDN'T HAVE HAD THIS GREAT SUCCESS - THE 2nd HOTTEST CHEMISE DRESS IN THE MARKET.

THE FAD:
After two years, the chemise died. It took research and time to discover why. Every buyer said don't even mention the name chemise. "We're stuck with a whole bunch of them in inventory. Fortunately for us, our chemise dress sold out, but the "bad ones" were like bad apples and poisoned ours as well. Why were they bad? Most dress manufacturers saw the chemise as a "golden apple", took their shirtmaker dress patterns, let out the darts and let them "hang". They were horrible on the body. Ours was beautiful because I had "shaped" the chemise as a beautiful form, emulating Balenciaga's great sculpture in my unique styling. FADS DIE BECAUSE EVERYONE GETS IN ON THEM AND FLOODS THE MARKET WITH POOR VERSIONS.

REINCARNATION:
It was years later that I began noticing the chemise in stores again, but never called the chemise. It was now called the SHIFT. It sells to this day as the shift dress, and has become a commodity item for women's house dresses, and occasionally higher styling. Interestingly, as I monitor technology as well as fashion, I saw a similar event replicated in robots, and more recently in the "dot,coms". It all comes down to "quality". When everyone gets into a big selling item and makes it, and does it, poorly, the item dies, and it's called a fad. But, those that continue to do it right, or study how to do it right, reincarnate the item, but it always becomes quieter, without any market hype. That is happening with robotics, and the dot,coms, today. In my engineering design papers I explain this as my "Chemise Theory". It's a fun story, and I've told it at many seminars.

Please, readers, let me know some comments, even if it's just to tell me you read it. Then I'll keep the stories coming. I have many to tell. Thanks