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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. Prior to their efforts garments were made individually for each woman by dressmakers. These tailors became aware of some commonalty in the shaping, fitting and making of garments, and pattern making was born, one pattern that would fit more than one woman. They developed a mathematical sizing system to accommodate most women with very few patterns. As businessmen they continued devel-oping 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. Pattern making was 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. Some of these 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.
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It was in the 1950's, graduating from college and working in the design rooms of New York, that I learned something very different about the fashion schools and colleges. Teachers were primarily “dressmakers” and emulated the Paris couture system - and these teachers taught other teachers, becoming a narrowing circle of knowledge and ex-perience. Therefore, all of the workers hired in design rooms were likewise very narrow in knowledge, and had little respect from the manufacturers or pattern engineers located elsewhere, who called these creations “loving hands at home”. I easily excelled way be-yond them with a technical pattern expertise learned from my own experiments as a teen-ager coupled with the knowledge of production. Creators of high fashion styles today make “First Patterns”, which they spend endless time redoing for quality. While creating my high fashion styles and First Patterns I could result in an “Engineered Pattern” to re-produce the creations into ready made garments to be manufactured cost effectively. There was a positive effect from these fashion schools, in that America began producing more creative designers, but also a negative effect: there became an ever widening gap between creative design and pattern engineering. In my National Science Foundation grant work in the 1980s I developed a graphic that explains it well: “The Wall Between Design and Manufacturing”. By combining great creativity with unequaled technical expertise, I became an extremely successful designer and manufacturer of high quality designer clothing at low cost through mass producton pattern techniques, selling nationally to all the top retailers from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Unfortunately, as Boston firms went south in the 1960s and then overseas in the 1980s, to reduce increasingly heavy production costs, Boston's technical expertise faded dramatically. No longer were there firms to apprentice pattern designers, so pattern making was only taught in schools from books. Overseas manufacturers, in Italy, France, London, and today in Japan, China, Korea and India, copied these systems as well, but none of them learned it by hands on stitching and other work in production that makes an expert pattern maker. The result is that today's pattern designers and engineers can reproduce the sameness of clothing design, but cannot create technical pattern design and engineering systems, nor can they ever work with creative styling to make them into efficient production systems.
Adding to the demise of creative technical expertise are the CAD/CAM vendors selling their technology into the apparel industry production systems. Those elements that are mathematically oriented, such as “grading of sizes”, and “marking of layouts” for cutting, are very efficient technological systems. But no CAD vendor has designed a pattern making system that can deal with creative styling, or fitting of difficult women's bodies. The result is that all over the world we have an anathema of sameness in the mass production market, and increasingly, far out creativity that is enormously high priced - with a gap between them that is an ever-widening schism.
When I sold my manufacturing business in the 1980s and won some NSF grants, it was for the sole purpose of using our great history in technical pattern design to create technologies that could work with and for, creativity. I have been accepted all over the world for my creative technical expertise, but not by the American fashion industry, nor by their schools. I reached an apogee in representing the whole American fashion indus-try at an MIT workshop on comparing design practices between industries. Now, in the 21st century, I am determined to do whatever I can to “redesign the fashion industry in America”. I started by teaching “Fashion/Pattern Design for Beginners” but realized that it is too long a road. Now I am researching and developing the Stylometrics Pattern Engineering System of a set of nine Primitives and myriad sets of Generic Styles and Styles Pieces for Couture Fashion Designers.
I am always looking for people to work with me, but I must be extremely discriminating as to whom I will train on my system, their commitment and ability to grasp 3- principles. Fashion schools nationwide graduate thousands of fashion designers that can't succeed, and I haven't the time to "unteach". Consumers are frustrated and bored with sameness, not finding creative, quality fashions that will fit them without paying thousands of dollars. Consumers are becoming involved in designing in various ways, and I insist that every fashion designer must become collaborative and drop personal egos.
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