The Making of a “Clothes Horse”

With Project Motherhood fixated on two important topics so far this month (Fall Fashion and Beauty Trends and Back to School), I couldn’t resist writing this Editor’s Post about my earliest days of “walking the runway”…on the First Day of School each year! 

The Making of a “Clothes Horse”

Editor’s Post by Deborah Hetrick Catanese

This post constitutes a trip down memory lane, so I will start with the definition of the term my mother often called me as a teenager. She called me a “Clothes Horse”! But what in the world did she mean by THAT?!

According to my research, the term “clothes horse” originally came from a rack used for drying clothes in a laundry room.  My mother, of course, meant the OTHER definition…a person obsessed with fashion.  Yup, that would be me!  But how did this happen?  In my opinion, my fashion obsession began in my early childhood, and I think my dear mother is actually partly to blame on this one, so hear me out!

You can see it in the glowing “Back to School” photos of my two younger sisters and me standing outside of our little bungalow home in Highland Park for our annual “Back to School” photos in elementary school in the 1950’s. While it only took a second for us to “smile for the birdie!”, the capturing of this single moment was many weeks in the preparation.

All of the fuss began because our father bought our mother a beautiful new Singer Sewing machine, equipped with all the latest fancy stitches and a beautiful “blond” cabinet, a purchase that included weekly sewing lessons for Mom. Our former basement, remodeled so beautifully by our dad into a “recreation room” with modern wood paneling and separate powder room, was suddenly turned into Mom’s Fashion Factory, as she pushed Dad’s pool table aside for a ping pong table that could serve double duty for cutting out patterns. (And besides, Mom could play a kick-butt game of ping pong, so there was more than method in her madness!) By the time all three of us were in school, Mom had abandoned the idea of store-bought dresses for our “big day”.

It would start with a scouting expedition to the local department store, the late great Mansmann’s in East Liberty.  I soon learned that “look-but-don’t-touch” was the order of the day, since any attempts on my part to plead, cajole, or otherwise convince Mom to actually BUY me a dress were met with a sniff and dismissal worthy of Mary Poppins.  This trip served simply to scope out the latest fall fashions and colors for the pre-teen set and did not even include trying anything on.

Next, we went to the dry goods section at Mansmann’s, where we sat at counters, flipping through hundreds and hundreds of pictures in pattern books with cool names like Butterick, McCall’s, and Simplicity.  Each of us would take turns crying out, “Oooo, Mommy, look at this one!”, only to have our bubbles burst by technical reasons like, “Oh no, dear, that is cut on the bias and it will stretch out” or “That will take too many yards of fabric!” or worse… “That is too grown up for you!” Hours would go by before we would finalize our choices and (hopefully) find the right pattern size, organized according to pattern numbers in little envelopes stored in filing cabinets that covered an entire wall.

Then we had to get fabric.  As any woman with any sewing know-how could tell you, the BEST fabrics were to be found at Kaufmann’s Department store.  This shopping trip could occur only on the “Semi-Annual Sale on Fabrics Day”, when  we would all dress up in Sunday church clothes, patterns in hand, and hop on the 71 Negley street car to go downtown.  Even though we really wanted to run wildly up and down the many aisles of fabrics on bolts that were like a treasure trove of potential dresses, our “Sergeant” kept us focused on the task at hand: to find just the right fabric for the particular pattern, as declared on the back of our little envelopes, “best for gabardine, poplin, or broadcloth”, for example.  Plaid was another issue, because of the need to “match” plaids at the seams, so it was unsuitable for many designs, sad but true.  Once we chose our fabric and purchased notions like matching thread, bias tape, buttons, and zipper, we all left the fabric department with our dresses of the future in our own little shopping bags and were rewarded for good behavior (the ONLY kind!) with tea sandwiches at Kaufmann’s Tic Toc shop, all four of us perched again at a counter.

For the next weeks, we resumed our games of Sevensies, Capture the Flag, and Kick the Can, with periodic interruptions for fittings as requested by the Creator of All Dresses Beautiful.  Even though it meant that summer fun was ending, going back to school was always exciting for us Hetrick girls, because we would be debuting Mom’s latest creations, tailor-made for us!  The natural order of back to school readiness activities in our family thus ended with that annual photo on the day after Labor Day, bright with the promise of a new school year.

For our mother, this whole elaborate production was purely and simply a labor of love.  But any sense of completion that Mom allowed herself to feel must have been brief, once she declared store-bought Halloween costumes to be “oh-so-chintzy”, and we were off and running again, repeating the whole glorious process!  Witch or Clown or Panda? Oh, the decisions!

So tell me, dear readers…should I reject the notion of being a “clothes horse”?  Yay or nay?  I’m thinking neigh!

If you agree, please tell me when and how you too became obsessed, my dear fillies!

Fashionably yours,

Deborah