Day Dress, Late 1820s
Early nineteenth-century dresses were relatively simply constructed and easy for the home seamstress to complete. Dressmakers still used traditional draping methods for making a bodice pattern, but instead of being pinned to a lining as in the eighteenth century, this process produced a flat pattern. As The Book of Trades explained, its illustration of the “Dress-Maker” showed “the mantua-maker taking the pattern off from a lady, by means of a piece of paper, or of cloth. The pattern, if taken in cloth, becomes afterwards the lining of the dress.”
This method made it easier for home sewers to copy the dressmaker’s pattern and make more dresses. Bodice styles were quite fitted, but nowhere near as glove-tight as they became in the 1840s, and a decent fit would not be too difficult for the amateur to achieve. This view of the dress’s interior shows the relatively simple construction, with a bodice of just a few pieces, a pair of darts, a full sleeve with gathers at the top, and a skirt made of a tube of fabric gathered into pleats. Running stitches on bodice darts and down the skirt lengths, backstitches around the armscye (armhole) where extra strength was needed, and whipstitched hems (this one is made with running stitches) were all basic stitches in the skillset of every woman who sewed.
Silk satin, cotton. Gift of Margaret Merritt Broecker 82.138.16