Ensuring Women’s Dress Pants Fit Properly

 

Dress Pants
Image: glamour.com

For eight years, Eva Lea Klein worked as a tailor at a Banana Republic retail store in Boca Raton, Florida. In this position, Eva Lea Klein altered garments for customers and created new pieces from patterns.

Many professional women wear dress pants to work, but unfortunately, many women don’t wear properly fitting pants. You can tell when dress pants are a poor fit by checking where the waistband and crotch rest.

Ideally, the waistline should rest around the belly button and be loose enough to comfortably fit in two fingers. The crotch should not hang too low or rise too high.

When you pinch the fabric at the thighs, you should be able to get about one inch of extra fabric between your fingers. This ensures the pants are neither too loose nor too tight.

The length of pants is also important. Wide-legged trousers should have hems about a fourth of an inch off the ground since they are designed to skim the floor. However, other styles should have hems about an inch from the ground.

Gap Inc. and Banana Republic Protecting Worlds’ Forests

 

Gap Inc
Image: Gapinc.com

An accomplished retail professional, Eva Lea Klein spent more than 40 years in the retail industry as a manager, salesperson, and tailor. Most recently, Eva Lea Klein served as a tailor with Gap Inc.’s Banana Republic brand at a store in Boca Raton, Florida.

Founded by Doris and Don Fisher in 1969, Gap Inc. began as a single clothing outlet in San Francisco. The company grew rapidly, and in 1983 acquired Banana Republic, a popular fashion retailer which itself had been founded just five years earlier. Since then, the company has expanded to include popular chains such as Old Navy while forging a corporate philosophy that includes a commitment to social responsibility.

Gap Inc. maintains a particular interest in promoting sustainable manufacturing practices in the clothing industry. To better fulfill this commitment, in 2017 the company announced a new policy that would eliminate the use of wood-derived fabrics harvested from endangered forests. The policy was developed in partnership with the nonprofit group Canopy, which works with companies across a range of industries to eliminate the use of raw materials from endangered and old-growth forests.

Many common fabrics, such as rayon, use cellulose as a primary ingredient. For years, much of this cellulose was harvested from arboreal regions without consideration for sustainability. This has led to endangerment not only of the forests themselves but also of the many species that rely on them as habitat.

Seams That Offer Superior Strength

 

Seams
Image: sewguide.com

Based in Boca Raton, Florida, Eva Lea Klein has an extensive retail background and most recently held responsibilities as a tailor with Banana Republic. In this rolle, Eva Lea Klein was tasked with reinforcing, sewing, and joining cloth when creating new garments and performing alterations.

Beyond the plain seam, there are numerous sewing techniques that offer durability, strength, and flexibility when joining two pieces of cloth together. Among these are welt seams, which are often employed for thicker fabrics such as denim.

A welt seam requires sewing a stitching line 5/8″ from the edge and cutting off half of the seam allowance on one side of the seam. The uncut edge is stitched in a zigzag or overlocking pattern and, with the seam pushed away, positioned so as to cover the cut edge. Another stitch is then added a quarter inch from the seam stitching, which ensures that the seam holds fast.

Another method that results in an even stronger binding is the flat-felled seam, which hides the raw edges completely and thus will not fray. The flat-felled seam is one of the strongest of seams and is often used on the heaviest fabrics.

Tips for Choosing a Good Tailor

Tailor
Image: lifehacker.org

A longtime Florida resident and frequent traveler, Eva Lea Klein enjoys visiting locations around the United States and in her native Brazil. Also a former retail professional with experience in sales and management, Eva Lea Klein spent nearly a decade as a tailor with Banana Republic.

In the old days, the neighborhood tailor was as familiar a figure as the grocery store clerk and the postman. In recent years, though, the increase in off-the-rack clothing purchases from big box stores such as Walmart and Target has correlated with a drop in tailoring. However, tailors still play an important role in the fashion world, and it is likely that most people will need to visit a tailor at least once in their lives. Here are a few tips for choosing a good tailor.

– Get recommendations from stylish friends. Recommendations from trusted acquaintances are a great way to find new restaurants, doctors, or hairdressers, and it’s no different with tailors. Have friends or relatives whose fashion sense you admire? Ask them where they take their suits and dresses to be tailored.

– Find a busy tailor. Tailors rely heavily on word of mouth, and a skilled tailor will often have more work than he or she can handle. If the tailor has a good reputation and a serious backlog, it can be worth the wait to make sure the job is done right.

– Bring a test item. If you are visiting a tailor you’ve never been to before, make a test run by bringing a less valuable or less important piece of clothing. Once you trust that the tailor knows what he or she is doing, you will feel more comfortable bringing that expensive suit or evening dress.