Couture Close-Ups with Charles Kleibacker: Designing with Fabrics, 1978

my name is Charles clay Becker I'm a couture designer from New York City and I've been here on the beautiful inspirational campus of Iowa State University working with it's very fine holding Economics Department conducting a week seminar in Couture design and construction I thought you might like to know how a designer does start we first by sample lengths of fabric which might be somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 10 yards and in my particular case when I have that sample length I take it in my hands first on the straight grain to feel the richness of the folds on that grain and then I take it in my hands on the cross grain to see what happens with the folds on that grain because in my work room in New York City we are very often placing the pattern on the cross grain when it comes to woven because many wovens are meant to be worked on the cross grain I'm always taking it also on the bias not really a grain but could we refer to it that way at the moment and it is that beautiful fluid stretch of bias which I feel is the most beautiful grain for the female anatomy where that Anatomy goes out and indents in and then out again that fluid limpid stretch of bias really follows that curve and that Anatomy after I have done that experimenting with the fabric and when I talk about taking the cross grain on woven's what we do in my workroom is to grain off a small piece and we see whether it is the cost grain or the selvage straight grain that first stitch is better at the machine and which ever works better at the iron whichever grain works better on woven's that is how we determine whether to cut on the straight grain or the cross grain and of course most of the clothes you see today will be hitting the bias after I played around with the fabric I let the ideas gyrate in my head and work on a form and put the fabric against the girls body and then my idea develops into muslin and so I'd like to bring on Cindy in the kind of a muslin I do first to develop an idea yes I do a complete muslin and that's where we work out the initial fit because I feel the only way to get beautiful designer Couture clothes is to concentrate on fit that short word as I see it is the crux of it all so I work out first my fitting in muslin and I do my pinning my fitting on one half of that muslin and then that half I take apart and that becomes my permanent pattern you see here Cindy without a sleeve when I fit a sleeve I don't have it in the garment initially or the muslin and initially and then I really work from the outside we're going to go into this a little bit later on how I set in a set in sleeve from the right side incidentally this is a bias sleeve and could I give you a thought if you're getting out of a garment with a bias dress and those are skinny sleeves turn that sleeve inside out it will slip off very easily I'm going to pivot Cindy to show the back of it we are bias front and back the sleeve all bias which means that if you bend that elbow that bias grain is going to give with you and be comfortable where I had a great deal of the fitting problem was in this yoke and that is where my money goes very often in all of this careful fitting and you might be able to see this little bit of a pie shape in the back over the shoulder which had started out as two darts which looked very tacky to me so we worked those two darts into what I like to think of as a design line the anatomy on the anatomy was telling me what wanted to happen here it is my not dictating it is not my dictating rather to the anatomy it is the anatomy telling me what it wants the first version of that dress we're bringing Judy on in it please if I may have you here Cindy the first version of that dress is here on Judy or rather at the moment we're showing it to you as a skirt and a blouse it is a day and age when it seems to me in fashion that many women think in terms of a blouse and a skirt a blouse the trousers say for more of their daytime wear I find it costs me as much practically to make a blouse as it does a dress and it seems to me that every time I make one of those blouses I hear from the woman the next day that she couldn't get it tucked in with that thinking I've been doing finding first very very skinny fabrics and I've decided that that blouse could actually be a dress and I would not have the problem of hearing from the woman the next day of how do I keep it tucked in and in that way in that I feel the economics and the aesthetics must be combined in the Couture world I can sell a dress and make more money than if I was doing a blouse so here is really the first version from the muslin this is in what I think is a very beautiful and interesting piece of Jersey it is a combination of silk and fiber on the very lush rayon fiber here we are that same via sleeves instead of the four inch belt which I know can not always be that comfortable we've done a skinny little biased tie which became a bit of a theme in the collection I did this time but here it is that same PI shape that did the fit here again we are all biased grain I never put a zipper in and bias so that with all of this sharing or gathering we really didn't have to put a zipper there's enough fabric there to cover I did have what I thought was a rather interesting detail when we were first fitting this garment I had one large button - one button hole and the buttons and the buttonholes were slopping all over the place and I realized I would have to put on ending hooks and eyes or snaps so I came into the thinking that maybe two small buttons - one buttonhole would hold it right there and as it happened it did do just that I have a great time when women come in insight isn't that a marvelous detail and I say well yes but I know that it all developed out of necessity so here we are this dress takes about seven and a half yards of fabric in the short version the next version on Diane is in what I'm hoping many of you will consider because beautiful pure silk taffeta marvelously romantic and Russ Lee is back in the fashion picture and here again how I developed from that muslin because the more I can use this muslin which I spent so much money in fitting on the more I can develop it into different dresses in my collection the more identity I get for that collection and secondly speaking economically the more money I save and it is very interesting I feel that each and every time the girl in one of my work rooms makes this dress it becomes just that much better so having initially invested in this yoke with great many fittings and in the body of the dress I now like to work around that so here we are with that same yoke on Diane in pure silk taffeta what you see we have done here is to simply cut to make a peplum which we've hand rolled and added a very wide bias ash and I will start now in saying to you that when you are stitching long bias seams preserve that grain until you are at the Machine but once they're having hand basted stretched like mad just what I'm doing as you are stitching at the machine we've done this skirt as the one you saw on Judy so that if you would like to wear this would say a simple short waist for a less formal occasion it would give you more where as you're seeing on these girls with their great waist lines if you have a little bit of more flesh there all of this bias tucking does give with you Robin may I have you to show another version of this joke idea from me a superb piece of silk chiffon satin striped made by buccal in France I worked long at deciding what grain I was going to cut this on I finally arrived because I felt the lights in the satin were so much better on the cross grain and I thought that might make an interesting slim skirt which fashion seems to be getting back into the picture of it also so here we are on the cross grain in the front on the side we drift into byes excuse me robbing and on the back we're on complete stripe grain weave hand rolled this entire cape and we tried our best to make it look as though it were over flesh so we lined the yoke part we underlined first in silk shantung and then we faced it and that rather the top under lining was in silk crepe de Sheen I have another layer of silt shantung and then we have faced in the silk crepe de Sheen again the skirt a very simple shape straight grain on the cross underlined first in the silk crepe de Sheen and then in another layer of silk now what is it silk shantung now here we had the idea that we wanted to very bare look and I went through this business again of wood we do a separate myau or a halter so to speak and there again that story of how do you keep it really weighted on the body so I decided that what we would do would just be another under dress that you could have on its own for a different time of day this is a very very lightweight piece of silk crepe de Sheen so much so that one layer of it was not good so what we did was to underline in exactly the same fabric now yes I must get a certain amount of money for my clothes and I feel I should give the person who comes to me as a private client every so rather than trying to find an underlining that maybe would not have caused quite as much I simply took the same fabric and underlined it is a very very fine supple piece of silk crepe de Sheen this dress has been held in the way most of my dresses are in the back here so it stays right up against Robyn's body will go more and more into that it is a day and age of what is called unconstructed fashion I'm all for for that kind of a garment but I find that one must hold in the fabric that it has been held in here also to keep that dress supported I think the person who does this in the most magnificent way is Madame Gray's in Paris I've had conversations with her and we have an interesting interesting time agreeing upon how one holds in the fabrics all the way around could I bring on dr. Agatha you can Becker who is the head of this great department at Iowa State University and on Agatha we have that same idea of the yoke this time I turned it around but that pie shape is there we did it with a very wide piece of fabric to make the cake because there is no seam in this cake but for the yoke in other words in the back I'm on the cross green and in the front I'm on the straight grain and then again on the sides we hit all these biases this is a jersey out of the Kiana fiber but the people who made it had silk in mind and they took the Kiana fiber and did it as though it were the silk fiber here again that story that we did two buttons to one buttonhole and in the yoke I have four layers the outer layer of Jersey which incidentally we stretched to get all of the stretch out of it pinned it all around on a table so we could make it act as a woven then underlined it with two layers of silk shantung and then faced it with the heavy four ply silk crepe and underneath the same silhouette from that yoke with that very bias lease leave so you could bend your elbow and be comfortable this time we did not do the tucks as you see here and as I should have shown you on the muslin where we really stitched tucks to held the bias in here we left them out did a tiny little opening in the side seam and I think that that way you got a rather marvelous flow to this different combination in a crepe machine this is 50% silk 50% keanu because we have 13 yards in this fabric I left a rather high opening in the side so that you might go up a step or you might dance with ease so here we are as how one gets an idea does it first in muslin then to give your collection a continuity a theme and also to help you in the way of economics because this must be thought of in this fashion world and this fashion design the many different diversions that derived from this first idea you