Peggy Sagers: Victor Costa is an American fashion designer best known for his glamorous, romantic, and often dramatic evening wear that gained popularity from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Victor Costa earned fame for creating affordable versions of high-end European couture designs.

He had a talent for interpreting the extravagant looks seen on runways in Paris and Milan and transforming them into dresses that American women could actually buy and wear.

Victor Costa and more, today on "Fit 2 Stitch."

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Peggy: So today we're just going to have fun.

We're going to learn the distinctions between haute couture, couture, and ready-to-wear.

And for us who are in the world of sewing, those distinctions are going to become very important to us, and I think they're going to really help us.

And first off, we're going to learn how to pronounce the word haute couture because it's spelled H-A-U-T-E but it's a French word and the H is silent.

The A-U has a long O sound like boat or coat.

It's a very long O and then we have the T so it's just oat.

Like everybody loves oatmeal, we can all say the word oat, it's oat couture.

So that will make it easier for us as we're talking about it, we just say oat couture, couture, and ready-to-wear.

And I think what's fascinating to me as I look at haute couture, I think over the years I always felt like it was attached to somehow a dollar amount.

So for instance, this jacket, this is an Armani, and this, it's a Giorgio Armani, which is a higher level.

It's a $15,000 jacket.

So I thought, oh, well, that must be haute couture.

No.

Well, that must be couture.

No.

This is ready-to-wear.

This was mass-produced, which means it was produced for no one in mind except for the end consumer.

When we look at haute couture, what we recognize is it's actually regulated by the country of France.

There actually is six qualifications that it has to fall under and those six qualifications are it actually has to have two Paris shows every year.

Now keep in mind, this is the country of France that makes the distinction but the city of Paris is involved.

So two Paris shows, those are January and July, you have to show those two fashion shows every year.

It's governed by the number of employees that actually work.

Some have to be divided into technical and some have to be divided into other things.

But the number of employees actually is on the register and is important.

It has to have a private clientele as well as these public shows.

They want these private clienteles to have X number of muslins made per year.

Like I say, these distinctions are very appropriate.

You also have to have a location in Paris.

You can have two locations, but if you're only gonna have one, it actually has to be in Paris.

It has to be approved by a committee called the FHCM.

It just covers the fashion house business and what it does and all those other things.

And what we start to recognize very quickly is not a lot of people in the world are going to have haute couture because of how it's limited and because of how it's governed.

However, quickly after that and those things which is why if you trace back the history of fashion, you see that's where Chanel came from.

Hanae Mori started as an Asian designer and yet moved to Paris simply because she wanted her brand to be under that haute couture label.

And you couldn't do it anywhere else except if you are in Paris.

So that's really the beginnings of where Paris became extremely famous and extremely the head of the fashion world in the whole entire world.

However, there's lots of room for couture.

And even if you think about us as home sewers, we are couture sewers.

Couture meaning basically one of a kind or a personal or exact for a particular person or maybe just a few of a kind, but it doesn't really have that much to do with the way it's sewn, which I find fascinating.

It's not like you have to hand do a certain percent.

It's simply that it's limited in its production and that it's not ready-to-wear.

And by ready-to-wear what we go to is there is-- it is a mass production.

The techniques that are used are mass production and so I think if we understand those differences where we fall as sewers is mostly in couture and I really want to stress to you what that does is it gives us an ability to do so much with our home sewing because we don't-- we're not in Paris so we get out that we're not going to be haute couture but other than that and we're not ready-to-wear.

We've got so much and in this world I want to kind of help you go through this process.

And there's really three things we're going to focus on.

The first being the design, the second being the process of fitting, and the third being the construction.

And there's, again, lots of variables.

I'm going to bring your attention to a gentleman named Victor Costa.

And Victor Costa was born in poverty.

He was born in Houston, Texas, in the Fifth Ward, which if you're familiar with Houston or even if you're not, it's a very impoverished part of Houston, Texas.

He was born in Fifth Ward.

His family owned a grocery store in that area, and he simply grew up doing sketches, fascinated with work, loved everything about fashion and watched the women come in, and just really, really enjoyed it.

And he made his living off copying haute couture.

Now I'm gonna take you back a little bit because he actually wrote a book and I've read this book cover to cover because it's fascinating and I think what it says to me is for many of us, when we say the word "copy," we have a negative connotation like that's not okay.

But this gentleman back in the '80s and '90s grew a company to $50 million copying and it was called at the time "line for line."

Now in those days, and I'm going to go back, that's the '80s, '90s, right in that timeframe, you could buy a ticket to, let's say, a fashion show in Paris, and I'm going to use Givenchy as an example, you could buy a ticket and go watch his show and you were allowed to copy two pieces.

Now you couldn't copy the whole line but you could copy two pieces.

Now that's unheard of today.

You're not allowed to sketch, you're not allowed in with a sketch pad, it's invitation only, there's no tickets sold because simply the copying and the level of copying grew to such an extent that it was hurting the haute couture designers.

And they said, we don't want this anymore, we're done.

So now they're very privatized in all of this that they're doing.

However, this was a huge thing because as I've defined haute couture for you, you recognize very few women can even get into that ballpark.

So to bring it down and take that to couture and even one step down to ready-to-wear, which is what he did.

So he brought if a gown were to cost say 30,000, it's an original concept, he brought it down to a price tag of $1,500, $2,000, to where everybody-- not everybody, many women could now afford that.

So there was really a hole in what he had done.

And he actually started by selling drawings and he'd sketch sketches and sell it to Oleg Cassini.

In 1965, Suzy Perette hired him.

Suzy Perette was not a person.

Suzy Perette was a company in New York.

1965, they hired him.

And you can go back to some of the early tags inside of those garments, and it'll say Suzy Perette, but it'll say, "by Victor Costa."

And then in 1974, he actually launched his own company in Dallas, Texas, and like I say, he was a hit.

If you take that 50 million, which is what he made in those '80s and '90s, and fast forwarded to today, you're talking about 250 to 300 million dollars, and that's a sizable company.

So he clearly was successful.

The reason I bring this all up is because we can gain inspiration from designs we see.

We don't have to feel the burden of, I'm not creative enough, I'm not able to do that.

We can shop, and you guys know I'm a huge shopper and I'm a huge advocate of doing that because that's where I can get my inspiration and that's where I can go forward and really figure out what do I want and how do I want-- we can even try it on.

We can even measure it.

We can do all kinds of things to help in our creative process so that first design process, I don't want you to worry about that.

I want you to recognize that inspiration is everywhere, and we can certainly grasp it where we want it to be.

The second thing is actually the fit.

And what we know about fit is that we need muslins.

If I were to tell you that a muslin were, typically in an average show, in an average line, ready-to-wear now we're talking, they will make 12 to 15 muslins to get that garment just right.

Because I know many of us as home sewers, we say, "Oh, I don't wanna make a muslin.

It's too much work, it's too much time.

Can I just make the garment?"

And yes, of course you can.

But what we know is there's things that can't be changed after the garment is cut.

If I cut an armhole too low, I can't raise it up.

If I cut a neckline too low, you know, it's done.

So I want you to become more patient with this muslin process and how very, very important it is.

Muslins, none of us like to make muslins.

Well, maybe one person out there, but nobody likes to make muslins.

But again, when you see and recognize what that finished result will be, as the result of having the patience with muslins, I think we'll get to where we love muslins just a little bit more.

All right, then I want to talk about fabrics.

And what we need to understand about fabrics when we go to haute couture and couture is there's no question they use the finest of fabrics.

So I want to take a couple of words that are very limiting in our own worlds typically, and we're gonna take them away.

The first word is time, and the second word is money.

Because in haute couture, there is no limit of time.

They don't--no one walks in and says, "Gee, when can you have this made for me?"

And there's no limit of money, because nobody comes in and says, "Gee, what's it gonna cost me?"

So when we start to take away those two variables, you really start to see that, wow, it's a whole different world.

It's where art and fashion really come together, and we just don't put price tags on that.

However, when we're doing it on our own, we have to recognize that often we're concerned with the price of fabric.

And so if I look at two fabrics, I use these as an example, because they're perfect examples.

They're both linens and they're both Italian linens.

But in this first example, what you see is this fabric has been created.

It's a white linen, but then the pattern has been stamped on top.

And I can tell that because if I look at the back, there's no color penetration on the back.

So the fabric itself is not reversible.

So this linen is going to cost me less, for example, than this linen right here.

And this is what we call a jacquard.

And we can tell that because we look at the back and we can see that the pattern is actually woven through the fabric.

So this is simply going to cost more and if in my own personal wardrobe, as I learn about fabrics and how expensive they are and the better qualities, I can slowly upgrade to where I can have this full, beautiful closet of couture and yet a fraction, literally a fraction of the cost.

So watch for fabrics, watch for the drape that they have.

We recognize that when I pull up one particular fabric, I always pay attention to how wide it is when it drapes.

Because the wider it drapes, the wider it's gonna make me look.

Designers know this, designers know all of this.

You can see the difference between these two in drape, and which fabric ultimately do you want.

That's it.

And for different garments we want different things.

If I go back to this Victor Costa for just a minute, I want to bring in some details.

Again, remember this was ready-to-wear.

This was mass-produced.

Line for line.

He went in, he saw those garments and he copied them and mass produced them.

And I can tell when I look at the edges because that's not hand done, which couture, of course, would be hand done, it is machine done.

There is a percent of haute couture and couture both that has to be hand done.

Typically in ready-to-wear anything goes.

All right, one of the principles I want to talk about a little bit in our home sewing, there's two of them.

One is fusible interfacings, I kind of want to update you on this construction of fusible interfacing, and the other is bias.

And the two of them can really work hand in hand.

And the reason being is that if I take two pieces of fabric and these are both linens, and they're both beautiful linens, and they're both Italian linens.

And if I look at them, I can really see that this is a much looser weave.

So if I'm going to take a fabric like this and put it on the bias, already my little trouble meter goes up.

It's gonna give me trouble.

How much trouble?

I don't know.

But what I did is I cut a little sample for you and I put them both together and I took my pattern and I put it on top and when you do this, you always want to anticipate the problems you're going to have.

That will really help you through the process.

So in this particular case, I cut a rectangle and then what I did is I took them and I sewed them together.

It's the handling of this fabric that makes it go askew.

But it's not anything you can control.

You cannot control it.

And I think in bias, you need to really understand that because so many, I get so many questions in there, "What did I do wrong?"

"What, you know, what should I have done instead?"

Because after it's stretched, you can't put it back.

And so what we wanna do is if we cut a little sample of this and we know ahead of time, this is how much it's gonna stretch and this is what it's going to do, then I can start to say, okay, how can I prevent this?

So what I did is I went back to my original pieces.

I knew the problem I was going to have, and so what I decided was to use a lightweight fusible interfacing.

Now I'm going to talk to you about fusibles because it's important that we recognize that in our jackets today, and I'm going to actually sneak ahead a little bit and show you this particular jacket because I know you'll recognize the name on this jacket.

And my job was to go around and shopping and buy and show you examples of what I was talking about.

Beautiful jacket, beautiful everything, except I want you to understand that the whole entire jacket is fusibly fused.

I mean, it's fusible.

I don't think I would expect to pay $4,000 or $5,000 and have a jacket that's completely fused, but it is.

I can go inside, I can look at the back of the fabric and see that the whole thing was fused.

And why was it fused?

Mainly because it needed the stability throughout the construction, throughout the wearing process.

They wanted to make sure that it had the stability that it needed for the job it was going to take on.

So I'm backing up to the pocket but there you can start to see that fusible interfacing.

Some is even starting to come off.

But remember, fusible interfacing, to do its role, just has to be fused long enough to be sewn together, and then it does its job.

So it's important that we recognize that fusible interfacing today is a very common and very acceptable practice that is done in lots and lots of clothing.

What we have to recognize is what are the problems we're gonna have and then how are we gonna fuse it.

So there's another example I wanna show you.

This is a beautiful-- that was linen.

And linen I can actually look at and say this loosely woven linen is going to give me more problems than this tightly woven linen.

But if I take a silk for example, this is a Pucci which-- designer Pucci silk.

It's a beautiful piece of silk, again Italian 100% silk.

I would never have known the problems that this was gonna cause me.

So what I did is I took a pattern and I wanted to do a cowl and we know cowls on the bias always look the best.

So I wanted to do a bias cowl, and so I laid this out, I cut it exactly according to the pattern.

I took my pattern away, I held it up, beautiful bias example, except the problem is the minute I put it back down to the table, what I had recognized is everything had shifted.

And when I put my pattern back on, it's not even close to the same size as my original pattern.

So what that means is, how can I sew something that's moveable?

It's like hitting a moving target.

I can't do it.

So then what I did, again, I didn't have to cut the whole front.

I could have cut my two little sample pieces and had a warning of that.

The minute you go to bias you should say I'm possibly going to have a problem, so I'm going to watch out.

So in this case, what I did, I fused the fabric.

I actually fused the fabric first because I knew it was going to grow.

I couldn't fuse it after the fact.

Then once I folded it in half, then I laid my pattern on top, and you can see it hasn't changed a bit.

So, fusible is a current contemporary way to get my garment to have the stability I needed to have without the shifting.

Another way is to do bias is designers, this is an Armani skirt, ready-to-wear again.

You can see the front is straight, but the back has that beautiful little kick to it.

And so if you remember that fullness equals bias, so whenever I see those little full kicks, those are done on bias.

But you can see that there's a stable seam in between each of them to hold that bias in place so that it doesn't go kind of cattywonkers on me.

So then what I want to do is now that we know a little bit about bias and I know that it can potentially be a problem, I wanna use it to my benefit.

So this is--we're gonna go back to this Chanel jacket I used a little bit, and I'm gonna call your attention to that little underarm gusset.

Look at that.

A bias underarm gusset.

So what we know about bias is bias moves and helps us move more than straight of grain.

So to use it underneath an arm is like genius.

And that's where I say we don't have to create the stuff, but we do have to have the ability to shop and to look for it.

And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna mimic this.

And so what I started with is my upper sleeve and my under sleeve because this is a two-piece sleeve.

All right, easy enough, just a pattern for my upper sleeve and my under sleeve.

The upper sleeve isn't even touched.

But what I am going to do is I'm going to measure this to figure out how wide.

And I went ahead and realized it was the width of my underarm pattern already.

And I don't think the exact measurements on this would even be that important.

I think more importantly would be just the way that once it's straight of grain here and the positioning would have been what's happened.

And then how long it was and how wide, just to get a general idea.

And what I did is I went ahead and put little marks on my pattern to know what that was going to look like.

And so I'm just gonna connect those here.

And you can see that that's what that little underarm piece is going to look like.

Except if you notice, it's a straight of grain here, and I'm gonna draw it on the bias.

I'm actually gonna place it on the bias on my fabric so that it gives me that additional movement.

What we know about bias is when we have a straight line, if we take a 1 inch and put it at a square, so the bottom of that 1 inch and the top of that 1 inch, I can draw a true bias.

So I'm going to take that and I'm going to transfer that same exact way, except I'm going to turn it this way this time, and I'm going to make this piece bias.

Once I cut it apart, I need to make sure that I have seam allowances added back in.

So, and a lot of times when I'm doing this, I'll actually put seam allowance here, seam allowance here, so that when I go to cut it out, I won't forget that I need a seam allowance because we've probably all done that in the past.

Seam allowance, seam allowance.

And I'm going to cut those together and now what I do is when I go to put this on my fabric I'm going to make sure that it's on the bias.

It's like genius but the beautiful thing about getting inspiration from everything around us is there's been so many geniuses before us we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

We just need to copy it, know it goes around, and implement it into our clothing.

So one of my jobs is to go around and buy high-end and turn it inside out so that we really get to see.

I've walked into so many consignment shops over the last several years, and every time I walk in, I say, "Okay, what I'm looking for is an inexpensive Chanel."

And every time, they laugh at me.

They just laugh at me.

They just think that's ridiculously funny.

And it is.

It is.

There's just, you can't touch anything.

So I did want to open up some of these garments for you, this one in particular, because we could inside out the whole entire thing and what we see in this Chanel, we can see the beautiful chain and so many people want to make sure they have that beautiful chain.

There's no interfacing in this entire garment.

I just found that fascinating.

The whole entire thing can be insided out, and there's no interfacing.

And so often when I say to people, there's just not any interfacing and that means there's no sewing interfacing, there's no fusible interfacing.

There's no interfacing in this entire garment.

So I know that when we-- over the years, just because we don't know, we think that it has to be better.

It has to be done haute couture level.

It has to be more.

But when we start to recognize why it's called one thing and why it's called couture and why it's called ready-to-wear, we really can start to discover that we can actually create a lot of couture for ourselves.

And we can copy those little gussets at the bottom because that to me, I can't wait to try that.

Like this is magical to me.

And honestly, I hadn't noticed this jacket until I really started to point it out.

In fact, somebody said to me, "What's that?"

And I had to go, "Oh yeah, what's that?"

Also, as we go ahead and work with bias, don't be afraid to slice up those pieces and add the fullness.

You can see that that fullness is just at the very bottom, but what a difference that makes in that skirt and how beautiful that hangs.

So the goal is to give you confidence, recognize you too can have couture garments because they're one of a kind and they're just made for a few people.

When trying to figure out why garments cost what they do, a good place to start is by looking closely at the parts.

Take lace for example, some of the finest lace in the world comes from France.

When you know what to look for you can recognize its French origin and begin to understand its value.

Join me next time on "Fit 2 Stitch" as we learn all about lace from the master himself, Francois.

You won't want to miss it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: "Fit 2 Stitch" is made possible by Kai Scissors.

Reliable Corporation.

Bennos Buttons.

Plano Sewing Center.

Elliott Berman Textiles.

And WAWAK Sewing Supplies.

To order a 4-DVD set of "Fit 2 Stitch," Series 14, please visit our website at fit2stitch.com.

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