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.
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