The Mother of...Style?

It can be difficult to construct a skirt without a zipper. One must have some way to cinch the garment around the waist. Of course, there is always elastic, but it usually does not provide a very tailored fit. The design of the skirt has to be conducive to an elastic waistband in the first place, too.

A few weeks ago, I was in the predicament of needing a zipper for a skirt I was making--but I did not have one. Granted, zippers usually are not very expensive, but I wanted to use what I had on hand and not make a trip to the fabric store just for a zipper. (You might have noticed the high gas prices recently.)

So I dusted off my resourcefulness.

Last fall, I spent some time reading various materials from the 1940s, such as some Cornell Bulletins for Homemakers (archived online) or a copy of The New Encyclopedia of Modern Sewing. (Modern, in this case, is definitely relative: The copyright date is 1943.) If anyone knew how to be resourceful, it was the woman on the homefront during the Second World War. Nearly everything was in short supply--including zippers, because most of the metal was diverted to the war effort.

Anyway, when I began the skirt I was talking about and I ran up against the wall of having a need with nothing to fill it, I recalled a passage from one of the resources I had been perusing (I wish I could remember which one), in which the author mentioned that clothing designers became very creative during wartime in order to compensate for the lack of various things--such as zippers. One of the techniques mentioned was that of using lacings.

Aha! I did not have a zipper, but I could make a lacing. It was quite simple, actually, and it gave an ordinary corduroy skirt quite a striking feature. Perhaps I will have to make more items with similar closures...