Description

Fairchild Publishing Company, Published 1947. Hardcover, xx, 107 pp.; 23 cm; illustrated with line drawings by Belle Hoffman of Cleveland and a frontispiece portrait of the author. No dust jacket. In Good Plus condition. Gray cloth boards lettered in maroon, with a maroon block to spine. Mild shelf and edge wear with color loss along edges, light nicking and fraying to corner tips and to head and foot of spine. Scuffing with color loss to rear board. Binding tight. Previous owner's name in ink at upper front free endpaper, with a Cameron's Book Store label dated February 1970 at lower front free endpaper and a red crayon price. Endpapers toned, with a faint stain at upper margin of front free endpaper. Text block clean. Otherwise unmarked. Management manual for the alteration workroom of a women's ready-to-wear department, written out of a postwar shortage of skilled needle workers and a conviction that alteration departments need not run at a loss. Twenty chapters cover workroom layout, dress forms and equipment, the qualifications of an alteration manager, what makes a good buyer and a good salesperson, the "marker" system, basic principles of fitting a garment, the fitting of skirts, pin-up records, control forms, a model alteration ticket, purchase orders, alteration price lists and fitting charts, with diagrams of buttons, inlay pleats, slide fasteners, sleeve set and collar creasing. Lapick trained under his father, a tailor in Vieste, province of Foggia, worked on Fifth Avenue and ran his own establishment at 9 West 39th Street before joining the Printz-Biederman Company of Cleveland, where he became chief designer, style director and a director of the company. His earlier book was Scientific Designing of Women's Clothes. The conclusion argues that American designers earned world recognition during the war and should not cede it back to Paris, closing on a call for individual recognition of fashion creators. Chapter epigraphs quote Nicholas Murray Butler among others.