Messing About With Soviet Pattermaking Manuals

05 Oct 2018

Soviet Patternmaking manuals are weird. There’s a fair bit of calculus. Perhaps that’s because of how the research was packaged, but one has the that a new sort of fashion was being engineered for homo sovieticus. There are probably equally nerdy publications in english sequestered behind paywalls and hefy licensing fees.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the standard drafting method was Центральной опытно технической швейной лабораторией, (Experimental Center for Clothing Design) or ЦОТШЛ for short. It seems realatiely straightforward.

I figure it’s worth my while to code up a few examples, and see if java script can handle the cyrillic. I’ve got a manual of soviet lingerie that needs encoding. In the meantime, here’s a horribly basic dress pattern– without even a bit of waist shaping,

I’m still trying to figure out how to retranslate it into english– it was easier to just encode the russian original, without translation. click here for a dynamic version of the pattern

note: a good reference to keep all the acronyms straight seems to be Gronow J. & Zhuravlev S. 2015. Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21435/sfh.20

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