Sewing Yves Saint Laurent Babydoll (Vogue 1690) for the 2nd time

Hi… Happy new year… Just finished Vogue Paris Original 1690, the YSL babydoll pattern from 1967. I bought the pattern as a reproduction off Etsy, the originals are expensive. I made this dress for the first time at the very end of 2020, home in Oregon, and it was super hard for me and I ended up throwing it out half a year later or something never having worn it. That time I did it in this mid weight yellow twill and tried to draft a lining and it was kind of a travesty technique-wise - wrote a whole instagram caption about that one - it looked cute in the photo but it was just unsuccessful. So now exactly 2 years later for some reason I was possessed to try again, and this is my blog post about that.

Here I am in the first one I made, obviously I picked the color based off the original pattern photo, which is just really cute (great hat I wish was included in the pattern too although it just looks like a pleated square tacked on to a metal loop). There’s photos that show more clearly how bad the sewing was on this. I think looking at the buckled and too-short hem is enough, don’t want to just humiliate past me. enough!

Here is what I believe to be the original YSL dress this pattern came from, from Shrimpton Couture, spring 1966 Rive Gauche. I mean it really has to be this one. This one is lined, the cuffs on the longer sleeves snap, there’s no belt included, and to me the back neckline looks lower but the style and year are correct.

The pattern: One-piece dress. High-waisted dress with oval neckline has back buttons and zipper closing. Three-quarter length sleeves gathered onto bands. Flared skirt has gathered back. Belt with bow at back.

Short and sweet, good enough. After all those Issey descriptions I’ve been reading this one is so terse but whatever seems easy enough!

I made this out of a very nice vintage khadi/sari fabric from the Etsy shop ValueMartIndia, I was looking for an Indian cotton fabric for a dress I was making someone else in a trade (blog post to come), it didn’t arrive in time for that but fortunately, just right for this dress. It is a very soft and lightweight cotton (stripes are woven, pattern is stamped or printed). Here it is, Leo sitting on it like always, anyway super great. India has some really superior textiles and especially hand work artisans, lots of couture gets made in India because the artisans there can do the difficult work. Also 60s counter culture, Zen, Eastern religion etc and the hippies all going to India so it seemed good for a 1967 pattern.

The pattern has all the pieces underlined. So after I cut out all the pieces, I backed them in a very light silk satin I had around. Kind of challenging to be working with 2 super lightweight fabrics and the silk as always was slippery so I procrastinated a bit. But not too bad with tons of pins. Then I went back home to Oregon for a month.

The back has 3 welt buttonholes, which I absolutely could not do the first time I tried this dress, post-FIT classes and a ton of welt buttonholes later, I still kind of mess them up … haha … they were fine, not the best I’ve ever done but they look fine.

All of the bodice seams are whipstitched. This is the seam finishing technique for underlined fabrics, it makes the seams lay flat and keeps them together but is only stitched into the underlining so it’s invisible. It took forever and it still looks sort of sloppy to me (stitches too long). I remember when I first started sewing, any seam finishing that wasn’t serged looked really bad to me because all ready to wear now is made with very narrow serged seams, like if you look at a seam on a shirt you’ll see a row of narrow looped stitches. But now to me this looks more beautiful, to have a hand-sewn whipstitched interior seam. That’s what craft and doing things correctly looks like. blah blah Patricia, I guess it’s nicer to think that way.

OK, what else. Here’s something weird I did making this dress: I realized too late that it was possible to pattern-match the skirt at least along certain visual cues like the row of stamped dots, so I pulled up the skirt back by about an inch and sewed from there. Since the skirt back gets gathered anyway it didn’t matter that this made the back a little bit wider (due to the A line of the pattern piece).

I also whipstitched all of the seams in the skirt, which the pattern didn’t demand but there you go, I wanted to do that anyway. And I listened to a podcast called This Jungian Life, they happen to have a sewing episode I played while doing some of the hand work. So that was fun, it was nice to hear them muddle through sewing terms and concepts while I did my own mediocre-to-bad job stitching, wonder what those Jungian analysts would say to that.

I liked working with this fabric since I liked using certain elements for different parts of the dress, like the leaf/frond motif in the bodice, and the polka dots on the cuffs and belt, and leaving it long to keep the polka dots in the skirt. Bodice center front was supposed to be cut in one, I don’t know how I missed that when I cut but I think the pattern matching on the center red/purple frond print turned out nice.

I will say I think the bow on the belt is super stupid and weighs it down no matter how or where you tack it down so I might get rid of it, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just there to disguise the fact that the belt is just hooked together to close or to add a babyish element to the babydoll. BTW the belt is simply tacked on and then the hook and eyes pull the dress in closer to the body depending on how you place them, so it’s really just there as a little hook and eye tie in matching fabric (possibly the real YSL one could have been the same way). It’s a fake bow, as in a piece of fabric approximated into a “bow” shape and then another gathered loop to look like the center tie of the bow, tacked on the the back of the belt. (perfect invisible zipper install btw.)

I hemmed this with lace bias hem tape, I don’t know why, I suppose I wanted an invisible hem and I didn’t want any puckering in it and I haven’t done this technique aside from a 6” sample for my FIT class. I was worried that I’d cut the underlining unevenly and it would hang wrong if I hemmed it normally or blind hemmed, so I sewed in a 2” wide lace hem tape and then pressed it up and catch-stitched it into the underlining. Then I was worried it would make the hem too stiff for such a light fabric but no, it’s fine. Here it is inside out. I didn’t know what to do with the sleeve seams so just pressed them to the sleeve and left them.

Well, there we go. This took me a month or something, not counting the month I was away and not working on it. A lot of hand sewing. Working on sewing generally makes everything okay despite my life being a bit challenging. And it turned out just right. I listened to a lot of Jung podcast episodes and Joan Baez’s Any Day Now which is her singing Bob Dylan songs. So the year was 1968 around here I guess. I have been acting sort of hippie-dippie, crying about landlords etc. and injustices against refugees, next up I’ll ship myself off to India or San francisco. (never.)

There I am, walking up and down the stairs outside my apartment as I do whenever I make a little outfit for myself. The shoes are fall 1970 YSL to go with the theme and I think they look nice. The hat was my grandmother’s. Love you, bye.