Dress forms!
So I spent my sleepless early hours of this morning looking for dress forms online as I want to make sure that I’m making clothes in the easiest way possible.
For a long time I’ve had my eye on a full size dress form called the lady valet:
My hope was that it would not just a tool for sewing but a tool for helping me plan my outfits for my next work day the evening before!
So I still plan to get the above dress form at some point, but while browsing amazon for pattern making books, I happened to stumble upon Tomoko Nakamichi’s amazing Pattern Magic range of books and noticed that she was using a half or quarter size dress form to design her clothes! It occurred to me that this would not only be cheaper and easier from a fabrication viewpoint, but also a space saver and easier to work with just when it comes to pinning and getting your arms around the thing!
This led me to search for her dress form. The Bunka half size dress form:
https://www.bunka-koubai.com/shop/itemdetail.php?n=45
The bad news is that it’s not available outside of Japan. The slightly more interesting news is that Bunka is actually a fashion institute and every few years or so, they measure the student intake and create a new “average body” dress form from the data!
Anyway, undeterred, I managed to find lot’s of other info about other dress forms. Here are some of them:
In the UK, there’s one where for me, it’s measurements in centimetres are very close to my measurements in inches! (2.54 scale in other words!)
https://halfsizemannequin.com/store/#!/Red-half-scale-mannequin/p/44638193/category=11424985
Of course, while Bunka won’t ship internationally, I believe there are other Japanese companies that do. One such company is:
(24000 yen is around £174 at the time of writing)
Heading over the water to the US, led to me to find a half size dress form here:
https://www.pgmdressform.com/professional-female-miniature-dress-form-ladies-dress-forms-Chicago
($150 is around £118 at time of writing; measurements look like they are the same as the UK one)
I also found another UK one on etsy:
It’s a bit more expensive at £150, and I’m not sure how I feel about it using fibreglass on the inside (I don’t know how these things are typically made, but the Kiiya page says that theirs is paper maché).
Oh, and I also found this one from China, but I don’t know much about using alibaba.com!
But it’s cheap at least and it also inspired me to see whether there were dress forms on the more consumer friendly aliexpress.com. There were!
There’s also a 1/3 option from the aliexpress store too, so lot’s of options really!
So there’s my quick round up!
Are there any other options available? Well, it got me thinking. A half scale one wouldn’t be too hard to make out of paper maché. You’d just need to finish it in a thick felt to make it pin-able and either extend the torso so that it’s freestanding, or insert a cheap microphone stand inside (this one perhaps: https://www.thomann.de/gb/millenium_ms2004.htm ). It would certainly be cheaper, but then I guess the question is how much is your time worth?! Oh, and how does one make a dress form with a collapsable shoulder? And is it important? What exactly is a collapsible shoulder?*
*The collapsible shoulder dress form allows you to put garments on over the ‘head’ of the body form. It also usually has a little bit of a plush top so that you can put pins into it. … A collapsible shoulder dress form is for someone who sews and wants to put a garment off and on the form easily.