Simplicity Pattern
The Simplicity Pattern Company is a manufacturer of sewing pattern guides, under the "Simplicity Pattern," "It's So Easy" and "New Look" brands. The company, now owned by Wrights, began in 1927 in New York City. During the Great Depression, Simplicity allowed home seamstresses to create fashionable clothing in a reliable manner. The patterns have been manufactured in Niles, Michigan since 1931, but the products are distributed and sold in Canada, England, and Australia. In some markets, the patterns are sold by Burda, and they are sold by third party distributors in Mexico and South Africa. The company licenses its name to the manufacture of non-textile materials such as sewing machines, doll house kits, and sewing supplies.
Each Simplicity pattern has step-by-step instructions for the cutting, stitching, and assembling of clothes. Simplicity aims to emulate fashion designer clothing, and the company currently produces over 1,600 patterns.
Simplicity Patterns, like most home sewing patterns, consist of tissue paper with numbers and instructions written on it. This paper is pinned on the fabric to be sewn. The hobbyist then stitches and cuts along the printed lines to create the finished clothing.
Novelist and short story author Eudora Welty claimed that she used Simplicity Patterns for her short stories, that she would re-use the paper and pin her paragraphs to the paper and rearrange passages for greatest effect.
Read more about Simplicity Pattern: History, External Links
Famous quotes containing the words simplicity and/or pattern:
“It may be said that the elegant Swann’s simplicity was but another, more refined form of vanity and that, like other Israelites, my parents’ old friend could present, one by one, the succession of states through which had passed his race, from the most naive snobbishness to the worst coarseness to the finest politeness.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is a very true and expressive phrase, “He looked daggers at me,” for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the eye.... It is wonderful how we get about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. Yet it is rare that one gets seriously looked at.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)