Decades ago, in the hallowed days before the internet, sewers would walk into a haberdashery store, pick a paper pattern labelled Vogue, Simplicity or McCall’s, figure out how much material they needed and head over to the fabric department to choose something they liked. It was a careful in-store ritual for sewers contemplating their next project, and especially for those who were beginning their sewing journey.
“That was my process when I started sewing, which was a while ago now,” says Michelle Sanger of Melbourne. “It used to be a big investment and you would choose carefully based on what you could afford.”
But in Australia, these paper patterns from legacy brands are on the way out. In early February, Simplicity and McCall Pattern Service Australia, the company behind the “big four” sewing pattern brands, announced it would be winding up operations and closing its Sydney warehouse as part of a global restructure.
The company, which operated under the name Simplicity McCall’s, encompasses the brands Simplicity, McCall’s, Vogue Patterns and Butterick – the big four – as well as New Look, Know Me and Burda. They were the major suppliers of paper patterns to craft retailers and reportedly supplied 99% of Spotlight’s patterns.
Paper patterns are a heritage business: Simplicity was founded in 1927, while Butterick has been around since 1863. But the consensus among regular sewers is that these brands failed to evolve.
“They weren’t moving with the times,” says Ann Grose, the founder of online store Designer Stitch and who has three decades of experience as a designer and teacher. “They were only offering hardcopy patterns, and they were falling behind on seasonal drops.”
Grose says independent designers, by contrast, have been offering pdf (digital) sewing patterns for over 20 years. “The commercial industry has been badly affected by all the independent people coming up.”
Like a lot of the sewing community, Sanger chooses to support small businesses, but she still feels “really weird” about the closure of a major garment patterns company. There is “no one steering the ship”, she says; if pattern production is left to independent designers – who don’t always generate income from it – it’s possible pattern-making “will just kind of die out”.
“It just feels like that base option isn’t there for people who might want to start out that way,” she says.
Others have met the announcement with the pragmatism you might expect from anyone who regularly employs the maxim “measure twice, cut once”. “In terms of me and my sewing community … I don’t think it will impact us at all,” says Siobhán Leyne, a keen sewer based in Canberra.
“We all support independent retailers. They don’t stock the big four and haven’t for a very long time.”
For Janet Ogilvie, the founder of The Sewing School, the decline of paper patterns – coupled with the popularity of online sewing and upcycling tutorials on social media – is a natural evolution.
“The young kids now, they’re going into the op shops, they grab dresses to alter, they might even grab some of the old patterns and they’re getting taught stuff from YouTube,” she says. “Everything in this whole area – the machines we use, the books, the internet, the whole world has changed.”
Part of this world is the growing number of online, independent pattern makers who can draft, test, and sell digital patterns that reflect current trends and accommodate a wider range of body types.
“I can get a pattern up and tested within four weeks,” Grose says. “The internet means my PDFs are available all over the world and it’s instant delivery.”
One news outlet reported a stockist who was holding patterns from Simplicity McCall’s on consignment had been asked to destroy remaining stock. But Kathy Sozou from McGrathNicol, the liquidator overseeing the company’s wind-up, says that’s “certainly not something as liquidators we have asked people to do”.
Instead, the liquidator is working with Spotlight to purchase as much of the remaining stock as possible and is contacting smaller stockists in the hope they’ll buy up too. It is unclear what will happen to any unsold inventory. Guardian Australia contacted Spotlight for comment and did not receive a response.
But sewers are thrifty and many – including Sanger and Ogilvie – are sitting on enormous collections of vintage patterns. “We’ve got enough patterns here to last my lifetime,” Ogilvie says. “We reuse them; we design from them. I share them with everybody, like a library.”
She remains philosophical and optimistic about the future of garment making. “In life there will always be food, so we’ll always have people cooking and we will always need garments to wear. So, it’s not going away.”
