>> Susie Bright is an amateur dressmaker and a professional writer. She blogs at susiebright.com.

Life’s Too Short for Pants

The modern woman endures a lifetime love affair with pants. The tears will come, as well as the joys.

It started off in that golden period, between John Lennon announcing the Beatles were more popular than Christ, and the first copy of Ms. Magazine appearing on our doorsteps. Across the fruited plain, in every school, grade, and class, a voice announced on the public address system: “Next Monday, girls will be allowed to wear pants.” Often, there was a postscript: “Dungarees will not be tolerated.”

The next school day, every female appeared on campus in trousers, leggings, and yes, dungarees (that is to say, jeans). There was only one hitch: it’s difficult to look great in pants. Trouser-liberators like Kate Hepburn were a rail-like exception to the rule.

Jeans were made originally for men to work in, at manual labor. There wasn’t a lot of call for making one’s derrière look fabulous. Most men would just as soon live with plumber’s butt and jackets that cover it all up. Early tailors never thought about making jean designs that held you in the right places and let you out in the others.

Of course that’s all changed now. You walk into a typical jeans store, and they have walls of folded denim and khaki, with signs directing you to styles like “curvy,” “low rise,” “classic,” “relaxed,” “boy cut,” and the enigmatic “long and lean” — is that an aspiration or a current appraisal?

Whatever their euphemisms, after a frantic couple of hours in the dressing room, you’re sweating like a mule and anything but “relaxed.” Every pair looks dreadful. You’ve either got camel toe, or you’re swimming — a sad stick figure, or the broad side of a sagging barn. Perhaps a 10-year-old child would look good in their “boy cut.”

But you — you are crafty. You slam the door behind those stupid gauchos and give the rebel yell: “I’m making my own pants, you sons of bitches!”

And this is where the lycra-denim meets the road, ladies. You’re going to find out that the reason

ready-to-wear jean sizing is a bottomless pit of frustration is because: a) pants must be individually tailored to fit properly, with a first draft and then a final cut, because your bottom is as tricky as a thumbprint; and b) the female form — in which your hips or breasts are wider than your dead center — looks better in a skirt.

Oh, please don’t tell Gloria Steinem I told you this. You’ll still play kickball, hoe a field, and mine for gold far more effectively in dungarees. But your personal appearance will be flattered by a skirt or dress that flows over your hips, rather than cradles them.

If you are a beginning sewer, the first thing you must do when you vow to make your own pair of jeans is to purchase a simple pattern for a straight-grain, A-line skirt. Long, short, slit, seamed — try them all. Kwik Sew has a wrap-around skirt, #2954, that virgins could sew on their first thread-and-needle outing.

The secret is this: you cut the size that closely matches your fullest hip-area measurement. That might be your belly, your pube line, or your thighs, but whatever the wide point is, that’s your magic number. Ignore the listings of waist sizes; it all gets adjusted from the hip. That one hip measure, in a skirt, is your guide, as opposed to a pair of jeans, where you’ll need a ledger to track all your tailoring notes.

Once you’ve made your first, second, and third A-line skirts, your ego-to-ass ratio will soar to undreamed-of heights. You’ll feel mighty liberated. You’ll laugh as you walk past The Gap, “Don’t cry for me, Levi Strauss!” You’ll also have the sewing experience that will lend you the serious patience and grand perspective it takes to make your first pair of beautifully fitted, great-feeling dungarees. ×

 

Go to craftzine.com/04/bright for the full article.

In my next column: How to make your first pair of perfect jeans in under two weeks.