SEWING FOR SHOW : Educated, Well-Off Women Are Reviving Threadbare Industry by Making Clothes for Pleasure

While the other girls in her New York junior high sewing class were making aprons, Daphne Maxwell Reid was stitching a tailored wool suit--complete with lining. Reid, taught to sew at age 9 by her mother, by then was helping to stretch her father’s small salary by making clothes for the entire family.

“My brothers had suits and hats, and I had organza dresses. My mother and I always matched for the Easter Parade. And I matched my dolls,” Reid said recently. Unlike most of her peers across the nation, Reid didn’t stop sewing when economic necessity was no longer a factor. Today, the 40-year-old actress sews to show off her considerable skill and to give a unique look to a wardrobe that is 85% homemade.

She makes dresses and suits from cotton, silk, linen and wool gabardine. There are jaunty hats made from molds purchased in New York’s garment district. For Hollywood parties, she makes evening gowns of taffeta and lace. Though she mostly sews for herself, her godchildren often sport outfits fashioned in the large sewing room of Reid’s Encino home. Her husband, actor Tim Reid, who recently starred with her in CBS television’s “Frank’s Place,” was the recent beneficiary of a homemade leather jacket with cashmere collar.

It has taken awhile, but the American home sewing industry now recognizes that women like Reid are the key to its future prosperity.

Unlike the legions of housewives of the past who sewed for the entire family to save money, the typical home seamstress today most likely has a career and is motivated mostly by pride and personal artistic expression. Most are women between 24 and 44, are well-educated and relatively well off. They use their skills to decorate their homes and sew garments primarily for themselves.

After 15 years of decline, the home sewing industry is showing signs of revival as it caters to these women’s taste for high fashion and their demand for home decorating and craft ideas. (Surveys have found, however, that men have not yet joined the renewed interest in home sewing.)

The industry is vigorously promoting new, technologically advanced machinery and offering classes for the uninitiated. Sewing machine sales increased 8% in 1987 after being essentially flat for about a dozen years. The National Sewing Guild, a group for those who sew, has since 1985 increased membership to 72 chapters in 35 states from 11 chapters in 10 states.

It doesn’t amount to a boom as yet, said Leonard Ennis, executive vice president of the American Home Sewing Assn., the New York-based trade group for the $3.5-billion industry. “But we have hit bottom and started a turnaround.”

For years, the industry thrived on a philosophy supported by mothers and schools alike that every female--the nimble-fingered as well as the clumsy--should have basic sewing skills. In those days, men usually brought home the cash and women usually made it go farther with their labor at the sewing machine and other household skills.

The women’s movement and acceptance of blue jeans as the basic wardrobe in the 1960s started the erosion of the market. Still, the industry continued to grow until about 1970, when millions of women working away from home began to see no economic incentive in taking precious time to sew when cheap, ready-to-wear retailers were growing rapidly.

The American market was flooded with cheap imported clothing, and stores such as K mart offered an ever-increasing variety of inexpensive garments. “If you are looking to recreate something (at home) on the K mart level, you are not going to save money,” said Madeline H. Guyon, a spokeswoman for the Sewing Fashion Council, the promotional arm of the industry association.

The largest proportion of women who stopped sewing at home were lower-income mothers and housewives, according to industry executives, leaving a relatively small group of women who sew just for the pleasure of it. The sewing industry, however, didn’t seem to appreciate or cultivate these dedicated customers until the mid-1980s, acknowledged Robin Rose, a spokeswoman for Simplicity Pattern Co. “These are people who are starting to spend more on better fabrics because they know they will get a better garment.”

Spend $457 a Year

A recent survey by Sew News, a Peoria, Ill., magazine for those who sew at home, discovered that its readers had average annual household income of $41,600. About 37% work full time outside the home, and another 20% are part-time workers. Readers also reported that they spend an average of $457 a year on fabric, patterns, tools and accessories.

The magazine found that among the most active sewing enthusiasts, 18% had post-graduate degrees, nearly 19% had college degrees, about 30% had attended college and 30% were high school graduates.

A greater percentage of highly educated women are likely to sew than those who are less educated, according to demographer Margaret Ambry, who recently wrote about changes in the market for American Demographics magazine. Some in the home sewing industry speculate that well-educated women may be more aware of the staggering markups included in most ready-to-wear retail prices. Customers often pay double what the retailers pay for garments, and in some cases the markup is 200% or 300%.

Sew News magazine has prospered because it provides those who sew at home with fashion ideas “in step with the same ready-to-wear fashion hits seen on the runways of Paris and Milan,” said editor Linda Turner Griepentrog. Under new owners, the magazine was been revamped to appeal to the upscale home sewing audience, she said, and in the last five years monthly circulation has swelled to 250,000 from 10,000.

In the competition for glamour and style, Simplicity, which is known for making patterns for beginners, recently signed model Christie Brinkley for her first home-sewing assignment. Last month, the company rolled out its “Christie Brinkley Signature Collection” of patterns. They include business attire, evening dresses and casual outfits.

The industry has been aided in recent years by the trend among high fashion designers to expand their markets by putting their names on a variety of items, including fabrics, sheets and towels and perfumes. Marketing of high-fashion fabrics to home sewing customers began with designer Bill Blass, who put his name on an ultrasuede in the mid 1960s. But the trend has accelerated rapidly in the 1980s.

The sewing industry has also been helped by technological advances that lowered the cost of quality fabrics. For example, polyesters now have the look and feel of silk, a radical change from the polyester of the 1970s.

Cost Savings Not Critical

Fabric retailers stress that they now buy fabrics from the same sources as the upscale ready-to-wear manufacturers. At the Sew & Sew in Cypress, for example, owner Micki Callahan shows off a printed taffeta by the current darling of haute couture, French designer Christian Lacroix. There are other fabrics by popular New York designer Patrick Kelly. In the window is a black, ribboned lace fabric that is identical to that used in a smart evening dress recently on display at Nordstom department stores.

Cost savings alone aren’t usually enough to persuade women to sew, Callahan said, but they are a persuasive argument for women who want to duplicate the look of high fashion. “This is a synthetic leather that is washable,” she said, fingering a fabric that is not readily discernible from real leather. “It cost $45 a yard and it is 45” wide. It takes less than a yard to make the (leather miniskirt) that is so popular. That’s less than half what you would pay in the store.”

Reid doesn’t claim that she always saves money by sewing, although she tries to be economical by buying fabrics when she is traveling. Better quality cashmere and wool are cheaper in London, and Singapore is a good place to buy high-quality silk, she said.

Sewing fashion outfits at home allows the typical working woman “to afford a better quality wardrobe,” she says. Better-quality women’s suits cost $500 or more at retail, she said. “I can get the same fabric for $125 and make the same suit.” Guyon offers another example demonstrating that home sewing is more of a bargain for women who can afford about $100 for materials. The organization analyzed the cost of reproducing at home a $3,500 Bill Blass suit and found that it could be made with a Vogue pattern for $95, she said.

For its part, the industry now seems fully aware of what motivates those who sew at home today. But it has to cope with a knowledge gap on the part of its customers. The sewing industry has spent a lot of money on advertising but not enough on teaching people how to sew, said Jody Nickel, an Orange-based sewing consultant who conducts workshops for retailers, schools and consumers on sewing techniques and the use of machinery.

Learning to Sew Again

A prolific seamstress, Nickel said her father, an architect, first taught her to sew when she was 9 because “I was tall and skinny as a kid and I couldn’t buy anything in the stores and I hated the stuff my mother had seamstresses make for me.” She learned more in school as a teen-ager, she said. But, beginning in the 1970s, sewing classes virtually disappeared from American public schools.

Ambry raised the same issue in her article in American Demographics. The good news for the industry, she wrote, is that the number of women over 35, who now spend the most on sewing goods, will grow rapidly by the year 2000. But, she added, that group will include a large number of women who won’t know how to sew because they were in school between 1974 and 1983--”the era when sewing classes disappeared.”

Many industry executives now acknowledge that their failure to fill that void was a mistake that they must rectify. “One of the tests for the industry is to get more women to sew,” said Gary Larkins, chief executive of the 660-store House of Fabrics chain. The Sherman Oaks-based company is in the process changing some store leases to larger spaces to create superstores, in part to make more space available for sewing classes to be offered at a minimum charge, he said. About 250 stores are in the process of moving to larger spaces and will be opening over the next six months, Larkins added.

House of Fabrics is one of seven chains that control about 40% of the sewing retail market. It is also considered by many observers to be the most successful of the large companies at adjusting to the new dynamics of the home sewing markets.

The company has diversified its inventory to satisfy the current boom in do-it-yourself home decorating and a new interest in crafts such as knitting and needlepoint among younger woman. (Home decorating patterns have been among the top 10 best sellers for the past two years, said Gail Hamilton, vice president for advertising and promotion at McCall Pattern Co.)

About half of House of Fabrics’ current revenue comes from fabric sales, Larkins said. But, he added, as much as half of those fabrics may be bought to make draperies, bedspreads and to cover furniture, among other home decorating uses. Another 30% comes from the sale of threads and sewing notions, 10% from craft sales and 10% from the sale of sewing machines.

Craft projects are a good way to get young people interested in sewing, Nickel said. Especially popular, she noted, are decorated sweat shirts which are created by ironing fabric cutouts onto shirts and outlining the patterns with special paints. Sweat shirts are quick and easy to stitch and the decorating provides teen-agers with “the instant gratification” they need, Nickel said.

At Birmingham High School in Van Nuys one recent afternoon, gratification was slow in coming to a group of girls who struggled to decipher patterns and get control of tricky knit fabrics. Birmingham is one of the few in the Los Angeles Unified School District able to keep sewing teacher Martha MacFarlane occupied full-time. The interest is uneven throughout the district, said district home economics specialist Kirsten Giving. However, the school system is working with industry to open a fashion magnet high school in the fall of 1989, she said.

Linda Mary Gonzalez, a 14-year-old in MacFarlane’s class, said she wouldn’t be interested in attending such a school. “I want to be a psychologist,” she said while puzzling over the threading procedure for her machine. Still, she said, she’s determined to learn how to sew because she likes the things her grandmother makes. “One day I might have a kid and want to make him something. I think when you sew your own stuff, it looks better.”