First came the home-baking revival, which prompted trays, tins and icing accoutrements to fly off shop shelves. Now more retro skills are making a big comeback: home sewing and dressmaking.
Retailers are reporting a big leap in sales of dressmaking patterns and sewing machines, as a new generation battles with bobbins, pins and pinking shears.
More than 1m people - almost all women - have taken up sewing in the last three years, according to research by the Craft & Hobby Trade Association (CHA-UK), and 7.7m now count running up their own clothes as a hobby.
According to Hobbycraft, the UK’s biggest arts and crafts retailer, sales of patterns for both sewing and knitting soared 60% in 2016 — even though a dress pattern can cost more than a similar finished item at Primark — while sales of sewing machines have climbed nearly 30%.
There has been a similar surge in the numbers reaching for their knitting needles, with their ranks swelling by 900,000 to 6.8m over the same period.
Katharine Poulter, commercial director at Hobbycraft, said that, just as the Great British Bake-off boosted home baking, the BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee has helped rekindle interest in tailor’s chalk and tape measures. The TV shows, says Poulter, “make people think the makers movement is a lovely thing to be part of.”
Low cost high street fashion and the end of school needlework lessons put a big dent in the popularity of sewing in the 80s and 90s, but the Sewing Bee, together with YouTube tutorials, enthusiastic hipsters and the wider handicrafts’ renaissance has aided its comeback.
“How we learn to do things is different now,” says CHA-UK executive director Craig De Souza. “If you don’t know how to sew and knit you can just watch a video on Youtube.”
Alex Jaycott, a director at Jaycotts, a Cheshire based family business that has been selling patterns and sewing equipment since 1920, says there has been a “definite resurgence” in interest. “In the last couple of years we have seen a huge uplift in sales of patterns and sewing equipment,” he said. “There’s been grassroots interest in sewing, thanks to the TV, but there is also the hipster thing going on, with the younger generation getting into it.”
Jaycott says sales have been boosted, as well-known pattern brands, such as Vogue and Butterick, have reissued vintage designs. One of last year’s bestsellers was Vogue’s Mondrian Dress, a £10 pattern that enables DIY fashion enthusiasts to stitch together a lookalike of a classic 60’s Yves Saint Laurent creation.
“I’ve been in the business 30 years and certainly during the 80s and 90s it was tailing off and a lot of schools wouldn’t have had a sewing machine in the building,” says Jaycott. “Over the last decade it has started to come back and sewing is being tackled from a fashion and design point of view.”
While many women used to learn how to sew in a straight line from their mother or grandmother, more recently that transfer of knowledge has broken down. Stores like Hobbycraft and John Lewis have stepped into the breach by offering tutorials, but for many learners the internet is key. A search on the word “sewing” produces 1.9m how-to videos, tackling everything from threading a sewing machine to guides demonstrating how to draw your own complex patterns.
Patrick Grant, creative director of Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons, who was one of the Sewing Bee judges, says: “It’s very therapeutic to make something with your hands. Sewing disappeared off the radar for 20 years but it, and craft in general, now feels a bit cooler. When I was a kid there was a stigma attached to wearing something homemade, but that has completely reversed.”
Grant, who is launching a range of sewing tools with Hobbycraft, has some words of encouragement for beginners: “Sewing is difficult to do really well but you can do something quite straightforward and it be good and wearable. Pyjama trousers are pretty simple, there’s just a few steps - you just have to make sure they are big enough and long enough.”
