This is a project for my Drama 113 Intro to Costume Design class students at Diablo Valley College
The One-Hour-Dress-Diagrams-Sp-2021 for my students
The booklet that started it all: The One Hour Dress by Mary Brooks Picken, 1925, Free PDF at the Antique Pattern Library
The class how-to videos:
I recently purchased these pamphlets showing celluloid collars. They show the available collar brand varieties of the Parsons & Parsons Company’s three sub-brands in a given year. I have been hunting through Newspapers.com trying to work out the year of these pamphlets. I have tentatively described them as post 1926 since I own one of the collars, a Par Brand, Amherst collar which has a 1926 patent date on it.
Celluloid collars provided a low maintenance, waterproof, alternative to starched linen collars, and were stronger than paper ones. Their high point seems to have been in the 1880s when they were new, but they still regularly sold through the 1920s. Celluloid collars are given to cracking, especially after they age, so this one can’t be flattened and scanned for a pattern. However, you can use a bleach bottle and a pattern from a linen collar to make a replica that is stronger than celluloid, washable, and cheap.
Students from the DVC Beginning Costume Design Class Sp2018 make plastic collars using bleach bottles:
Catalog of Men’s Tailoring Styles of 1923:
The Chester collar is a very high stand collar with rounded corners and curve at the base that can cause a mild flare at top, depending how well it fits at the neck.
You can reproduce the collar based on these scans:
