Dress Pattern 1935 - 1942

This dress pattern was drawn by Bessie Forman, though we don't know exactly when. It's all in pencil, and the lines have the feeling of something both carefully planned and freehand. The shapes are like a puzzle of parts, laid out flat but somehow suggesting a three-dimensional form about to come into being. The grain and texture of the paper gives it a soft, intimate feel, like a glimpse into a personal notebook. Notice the instructions she's included. "Darts are marked," she writes, then, "and face the direction of the arrow." It's a reminder that even the most functional diagrams can hold a strange kind of poetry. It makes me think of the meticulousness of Agnes Martin's grids, but here, instead of abstraction, we have the blueprint for a garment. There's an art to pattern-making, a conversation between body and cloth, and Forman captures that beautifully.