PatternVault

Have you heard? There’s a new museum devoted to sewing patterns, and it’s featured in the current issue of WWD Weekend magazine.

West Coast Executive Editor Booth Moore visited the Couture Pattern Museum in Santa Barbara, California for her article, “Preserving Fashion Piece by Piece.”

(online: “How the Couture Pattern Museum Preserves Artifacts That First Democratized Fashion“)

Curator Cara Austine-Rademaker founded the Couture Pattern Museum in 2022, with an emphasis on the Golden Age of couture. The museum aims to preserve sewing patterns as cultural artifacts, recreating couture designs for display (think Balenciaga and Galanos) and granting access to its carefully digitized patterns for educational purposes.

“Besides the feminine culture that these patterns represent, there’s also the couture culture that’s captured in these patterns,” Austine-Rademaker says.

Just as an artist’s sketch records the process of creating a work of art, she says, so a couture pattern provides invaluable insight into the finished couture garment:

“[T]hey have become more like works on paper. And the final piece you can almost see as the oil painting. But to get to that oil painting, the artist has to go through sketches or renditions and outlines. With patterns, not only do we have architectural plans of these designs, but also the instruction.”

Congratulations, Cara!

Read the article here. View WWD’s gallery here.

Visit the Couture Pattern Museum website