Patterns

No one knows whether it was Ebenezer Butterick or his smart wife Ellen who invented the standardized paper pattern for clothes. Plodding, methodical Ebenezer, seventh son of a Sterling, Mass, carpenter, sat down in his tailor shop in June 1863 and snipped out of 'stiff paper the first commercial shirt patterns. They sold like hotcakes. But when the Buttericks moved to Fitchburg it was ambitious Ellen who got Ebenezer to double his market by making patterns for children's clothes. Because Giuseppe Garibaldi was then a world hero, Ellen and Ebenezer designed their children's patterns after the Italian Liberator's uniform, called them "Garibaldi suits." Within a year they had opened an office in New York and by 1869 had moved their shop from Fitchburg to Brooklyn and were making patterns for women's clothes as well. The patterns were sold through agents. One of these, John W. Wilder, an aggressive and imaginative hawker, joined the firm with a brilliant idea. He wanted Butterick to make the masses pattern-conscious with a fashion magazine. Result was Metropolitan, founded in 1869, later changed to Delineator. By 1871 the firm was selling 6,000,000 patterns annually. Ten years later aggressive Salesman Wilder reorganized the company with himself as president and Ebenezer Butterick as secretary.

Less than a generation ago mass production of clothes began to overtake the pattern business. Women who used to spend their evenings at the dining room table under the gas light cutting their clothes from Butterick patterns found it cheaper and easier to buy ready-made dresses. For the first time in history pattern sales did not go up during the Depression as they had done in every previous business collapse. Though Butterick is still one of the big four pattern makers,* its sales sloped off from a peak of $16,000,000 in 1921 to $6,000,000 in 1933. To add to Butterick's troubles, Delineator advertising began dropping late in 1930. Its circulation is now 1,700,000 against more than 2,400,000 in 1931. Last January hard-pressed Butterick, invoking Section 776 of the Bankruptcy Act, proposed a plan for reorganization which was last week the subject of acrimonious debate in a Federal Court in Manhattan.

The debate raged around a $1,374,000 ten-year debenture issue on which the company defaulted interest payments last March. A protective committee representing holders of one-third of the debentures proposed to settle the claims of debenture-holders with stock in a new company, and the claims of other creditors with stock and notes. This plan would give the two biggest creditors, Oxford Paper Co. and Cuneo Press, control of the company. Filled with violent and vociferous alarm, a minority committee of debenture-holders marched into court last week to decry the plan as a "squeeze out" which sabotaged their rights. They persuaded the Special Master to order an investigation of the protective committee's origin and motives.

* Others: Vogue, Pictorial Review, McCall's.

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