Alice West by Simplicity

 Mail-order patterns are something of a specialty of mine.  There were a few brands/nameplates (different "brands" that had a shared publisher) that were well-known and ran for decades: Anne Adams and Marian Martin, American Weekly, the "pattern bureau" family of Edwina/Clotilde/Clarice/Madeline, but there were also some lesser-known or shorter-lived names that pop up and then disappear.

Enter Alice West.

I saw a few of these here and there in the mid-1940s but didn't look at them closely right away.  When I did finally do some focused searches, I realized pretty quickly that I was seeing some design elements that I definitely recognized from other patterns.  This wasn't that surprising, though, since there were style trends and "borrowing" ideas has never been unusual.

But then I ran across 1866.

I would know this pattern anywhere.  I own an original copy of it.  

It's the Simplicity "pirate cuffs" suit.

This is the pattern that was redrafted in 2016 as 8424, if you think it seems familiar.

So once I knew this I started running numbers on Alice West vs. Simplicity to compare them and, yup--Alice West was Simplicity.  

So far I've only seen Alice West ads from 1946 and 1947 so it appears to have been a short-lived endeavor, and some of the styles lag a bit.

 4989 was from 1944 but appears in an ad from 1947:

2014:

1644:

2026.  I own an original copy of this, too, but goodness knows where I thought I'd wear it.

1923:

I'm not sure why Simplicity tried this.  Attempting a mail-order program makes sense--mail-order patterns seem to have been booming in the 1940s when there were still a lot of rural women who might not have a shop nearby that carried many patterns.  But why under a different name?  One reader suggested that maybe it wasn't to dilute the market or damage Simplicity's image, since some of the offerings appear to be clearing old stock, but surely women would have noticed pretty quickly.  Why not just sell them as Simplicity?  Surely a known name would have sold better.

Danish poplar cloth

 I noticed at some point that a bunch of my 1910s patterns, when they had advertising on the envelopes, had advertising for something called "Danish poplar cloth".  Google was almost no help with this because it turns out that the Shakers made something they called "poplar cloth" out of woven strips of wood and used it to make their famous baskets and boxes, and most of the references I found on the Internet were to that.  

A swing through the various newspaper archives sites brought up a load of ads, mostly from the late 1900s (the decade, that is) to about 1920. These are from 1911 to 1919:

But what was it?

The ads say that it was a cotton-wool blend suitable for school clothes and other day wear but don't tell us anything about the weight, weave, thread count, etc.  I even looked in the old dictionary at work but, nope--not under D or P:

So I did what any desperate eccentric would do, got online . . . 

. . . and ordered the only bolt of it I could find. 

Because I was curious.

Not kidding.

I am now the owner of 16 yards of hundred-year-old fabric.

It says so right on the bolt:

It was produced by the Hamilton Woolen Company in Soutbridge, Massachusetts.  Hamilton operated from 1831 to 1934; their 1836 building is still standing.

 

If I'm honest, it's sort of anticlimactic.  It's a plain weave and very open.  The weight and feel are most like dress-weight linen or homespun-style cotton, except that since it's wool it's harder and itchy.  Very itchy.

I slightly wonder if it fell out of favor when undergarments became smaller in the 1920s and you were in danger of your outerwear actually touching your skin.  I do love wool but either this was as inexpensive as it seems to have been or the lanolin is so long gone that it's not getting fair representation here.

This bolt is showing its age; I don't think it was ever unwrapped but it's faded and there is some edge wear and some runs.

. . . so that's it.  That's the ubiquitous Danish poplar cloth.  I still have no idea why it was called poplar cloth or where the "Danish" came from--I got some hints that "Danish" was added later but no idea why.  I'm going to look for a few more antique dictionaries to see if I can figure that out.