Long-sleeved Dress, c.1928

Back to the Women in Railroad program: a dress for a Pullman maid in the 1920s. There are actually a few decent reference images, and I was also able to access the company's guidelines for maids. It was thus clear that interpreter needed a plain black dress accessorized with a white apron, cuffs, collar, and cap/frill. 

 

Dora Holloway (center) with her recent trainees.
From The Pullman News, January 1924.

The dresses in the contemporary photographs are mostly covered by the aprons, or else have their details disappear in the grayscale. I wanted a pattern with the classic 1920s silhouette, and from the photograph we see that the maids' dresses had high necks, long sleeves, and hemlines near the lower-calf.

The pattern illustration.

I ended up using the "girls dress" from the 1928 Haslan Dresscutting Book No. 5 as the basis for this project. It had the right kind of sleeve, and I liked how the pleated insets in the skirt allow for ease of motion while preserving the smooth line of the front. By changing the self-fabric collar to a detachable white collar, I was able to make it closer to the reference: I thought this dress's collar shape looked a lot like the one worn by Nellie Davidson (front row, third from right) in the photograph above. I also changed the front buttons to hooks-and-eyes, omitted the belt, lengthened the skirt, and drafted a simple trapezoidal white cuff to baste onto the sleeves' self-fabric cuffs. While I drafted the dress, my colleague made the frill and apron (we split the dress construction).

Again, a dress I can't light.