Making a 1930s Wool Suit Jacket | Casual Vintage

From around the 1920s on, more recognizably menswear-inspired clothing was becoming increasingly socially acceptable for women to wear. Women’s suiting with slacks in the 1920s was kind of a fringe thing, but as suit jackets came to resemble their male counterparts in the 10s, 20s, and 30s, we see trousers start to enter the female wardrobe as practical, casual, working garments. Of course, during and after World War 2, they became a lot more common because of the number of women in the workforce. And, in the 1950s, suiting and pants begin to look distinctly feminine, with fitted skirt suits and tapered cigarette pants. I wanted to capture a moment of this gradual progression of men’s styles entering women’s fashion, and being inspired by photos of actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, I chose to make a late 30s suit jacket. While the style I was attempting to emulate is relatively casual and loose-fitting, I wanted to try tailoring techniques like pad stitching and utilizing the iron to shrink the fabric. I mainly referenced Bernadette Banner and Royal Black Couture's video on pad-stitching ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IatcT84AuME ) and The Complete Book of Sewing (1943) by Constance Talbot. I used a shoulder pad pattern from Pattern Drafting and Grading by Michael Rohr, available here: https://charnold.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pattern-Drafting-and-Grading-by-Michael-Rohr-1961_text.pdf Vintage Music, in order of appearance: By the Fireside, I