For years now, I have been eyeing these vintage dress forms or the antique dress forms.  These ones that were used by tailors to ensure clothing was fitted properly.

I love to use them for display – whether its jewelry, scarves, aprons and even hats.

This past Christmas I was fortunate enough to receive a vintage dress form from Mr. SLH. You can see a photo of her above. I’m going to name her Isabelle.

As a result of this gift, I started doing some research on dress forms.  Here is some of what I learned.  First, they are different than mannequins because the bodies were made for pins to inserted into them so that clothing could be tacked into place.

Living in New York has its perks, with Parson’s School of Design located in New York City and the fashion industry having such a strong presence here, we have better access than most people to vintage dress forms.

These dress form come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.  There are dress forms for children, men and women.  There are petite dress forms as well as large dress forms.

Meg Stively wrote a great blog post about these dress forms. She focuses on the benefits of using them for sewing and properly fitting clothing.  Dress Form USA also has a great blog post about the history of dress forms.

This vintage dress form is by Wolf Forms . They made dress forms for years, went out of business and then came back into business.

Anyway, I couldn’t wait to share all this information with you.

If you stop by Stone Soup Antiques or if you see us at a market, it’s entirely possibly Isabelle will be keeping us company.