Masquerades, pageants, and make-believe! Long before costumes came in plastic bags from the party store, families sewed their own, and the pattern companies were happy to help. This limited-time exhibit gathers costume patterns for women, men, children, and even dolls, from the 1910s through the 1970s: 1920s Pierrots and Turkish masquerades, pageant angels, Civil War Centennial gowns, and plenty more.

Some are costumes through and through. Others are everyday patterns with a costume hiding inside, just waiting for a little imagination. A crisp white collar is halfway to Wednesday Addams or Alice in Wonderland. Add a necktie to a 1940s shirtwaist and you're the Boogie Woogie Bugle Girl, or add a Red Cross cap and a simple apron and you're a wartime nurse.

The exhibit closes on Halloween, so come take a look before the masks come off!

The Ladies' Home Journal began in 1883 as a women's supplement to a Philadelphia farm paper and grew into one of the most widely read magazines in America. Its patterns followed in the early 1900s, made by the Home Pattern Company and sold through the magazine, by mail, and over store counters across the country. For three decades, a woman who admired a frock in the Journal's pages could order the same design and sew it at home.

This collection centers on a remarkable survival: a group of Ladies' Home Journal patterns from 1921 to 1924, still factory folded and never used. Many can be traced to the exact magazine issue or seasonal fashion quarterly where they first appeared. Together they offer a rare look at a full season of the Journal's designs as they were sold, for every member of the family: dresses and coats, blouses and accessories, girls' frocks and boys' shirts, and the slips and undergarments that shaped the silhouettes above them.

The story does not end in the 1920s. According to pattern historian Joy Spanabel Emery, a group of designers broke away from Home Patterns in 1932 to form the New York Pattern Company. A Ladies' Home Journal Pattern envelope from the NRA years, 1933 to 1935, carries the New York Pattern Company's skyscraper "New York Styles" mark, and its pattern number falls within the New York Pattern Company's own series of the same years.

The New York Pattern Company went on to sell under its own name and, without its branding, as store house labels. That chapter continues in our exhibit In Name Only.

According to pattern historian Joy Spanabel Emery, 1932 was the worst year the pattern industry saw during the Depression. It was also the year a group of designers left the Home Pattern Company, maker of Ladies' Home Journal patterns, to start a company of their own. The New York Pattern Company set up at 160 Fifth Avenue, and by 1933 its patterns were on store counters, many printed with the Blue Eagle of the National Recovery Administration.

The company had many faces. Under its own name, it sold patterns marked with a skyscraper logo, along with lines such as New York Styles and Woman's World. But it also did something quieter. It sold patterns with its own name left off, so that a department or dry-goods store could offer them as its own house brand, under trade names like "Own Name" and "Our Own." The same design might reach one customer as a New York Pattern and another as the store's own label. That is where this exhibit gets its name: the patterns were different in name only.

The company's roots show, too. One envelope from the NRA years carries both identities at once: "Ladies' Home Journal Pattern" across the top, with the New York Styles skyscraper printed beside it.

Much of this exhibit comes from a single remarkable source: Own Name and Our Own patterns from Barron Bros., a small Texas dry-goods store, still factory folded and tucked in their original glassine sleeves stamped with the store's name. Glassine rarely survives decades of handling, and a group this size is rarer still. Together they show what one store offered its customers in 1933: dresses and blouses, coats and slips, clothes for girls, and a few for men.

The exhibit covers the company's 1930s output, from 1933 through 1939, with collections of lingerie and coats inside it. It is a portrait of a company that let its patterns travel under other people's names, and of the stores and sewers who made them their own.

In the early 1930s, with the Depression squeezing the pattern business, Condé Nast faced a problem. His Vogue patterns sold for 40 cents to $2, far beyond most household budgets, and he had no intention of cheapening Vogue to compete. His answer, launched in 1932, was a sister line with a very different price and a very different appeal: Hollywood Patterns, at 15 cents each. The idea is credited to Mary Lasker, who brought Nast a proposal for inexpensive patterns inspired by what the stars wore on screen.

The genius was in the envelope. Many carried a publicity photograph of a film star beside the illustration, letting a woman picture herself in clothes Betty Grable, Lucille Ball, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, or Carole Lombard might wear. The company promised designs inspired by the stars' wardrobes rather than copied from them, and the patterns themselves were simple, practical, and made to be sewn at home.

Hollywood patterns reached women where they actually shopped. Flyers in our own archive carry the imprints of variety stores such as J.J. Newberry, W.T. Grant, and McLellan, as well as hometown department stores like Schuster's in Milwaukee. Each new season brought fresh designs, including "Sew-Simple" styles for beginners. In 1939 Nast launched Glamour of Hollywood magazine, and by the war years Hollywood designs were being featured in its pages.

The war changed the tone without dimming the stars. Alongside party dresses and princesse frocks, the flyers of 1942 to 1944 offered overalls for work and play, a tailored slacks suit, coat-dresses to wear on the job, and a Red Cross home-nursing pinafore. Hollywood patterns stayed unprinted to the end, and production stopped in 1947. That short fifteen-year run is why they are so sought after today.

This exhibit gathers Hollywood's women's patterns from those years: a record of how the glamour of the silver screen reached the home sewing table for the price of a movie ticket.

Vogue began on December 17, 1892, as a New York society weekly, chronicling the dress and doings of Gilded Age society. In 1899 the magazine began printing a weekly pattern, and a reader who admired a style could now mail away for it. Condé Nast bought Vogue in 1909 and turned that feature into a business of its own, the Vogue Pattern Company, founded in 1914. Two short years later, Vogue patterns could be purchased on department store counters.

From the start, a Vogue pattern carried the magazine's authority. These were designs for women who sewed with skill and paid attention to fashion, and Vogue rarely waited for a trend to arrive before offering it. The line still ranged widely. Everyday dresses and suits sat beside Easy-to-Make patterns with simple construction and modest yardage, and beside Special Design patterns, issued under their own S-prefixed numbers.

What set Vogue apart was its relationship with the designers themselves. By the 1930s the Vogue Pattern Book was offering couturier patterns, and the Couturier Design line, sold in an oversized envelope, became the company's mark of distinction. In February 1949 Vogue went further, launching Paris Original patterns drafted from the couture houses' own models. The first collection drew on Balmain, Fath, Heim, Lanvin, Molyneux, Paquin, Piguet, and Schiaparelli. In the years that followed came Dior, Givenchy, Patou, Nina Ricci, Jacques Griffe, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, and more. Vogue was the first pattern company authorized to reproduce French couture, and the envelopes promised that each design had been chosen at the Paris openings and translated line for line for the home sewer.

The designer collaborations continued as fashion's center of gravity shifted. London's Belinda Bellville appeared in the Grand Couturier and Couturier Design lines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and American designers such as Bill Blass brought New York ready-to-wear to the pattern counter. Even after Condé Nast sold the pattern business to Butterick in 1961, the Vogue name kept its place at the top of the market.

This exhibit follows that story from the late 1930s through the 1970s, from wartime basics to Paris originals. Together, these patterns show how Vogue did more than report fashion: it put the newest silhouettes within reach of every woman willing to sew them.

Between the structured, nipped-waist silhouettes of the mid-1950s and the youth explosion of the mid-1960s came a brief and polished interlude. Pillbox and Polish follows women's fashion from roughly 1955 to 1964, as lines grew simpler, waistlines softened or disappeared, and the sheath dress became the defining silhouette of the well-dressed woman.

The look began at the top. Paris houses such as Dior, Givenchy, Patou, and Jacques Heim showed clean, controlled shapes, and the pattern companies brought them home: Vogue through its Paris Original line, and McCall's through designer collaborations with names like Givenchy and Pauline Trigère. By 1961 the style had a public face. Jacqueline Kennedy's tailored sheaths, short boxy jackets, and the Halston pillbox hat she wore to the inauguration carried the look far beyond the couture salons.

Home sewers took it up at every level. Alongside the designer adaptations, this exhibit gathers everyday versions from McCall's, Advance, Simplicity, and Butterick, as well as mail-order patterns from Anne Adams and Marian Martin that reached women through their newspapers. Sheaths, two-piece dresses, slim or full skirts, and short fitted jackets describe a wardrobe that was still ladylike and carefully finished, but lighter and younger than the decade before.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a woman who wanted to play tennis or ride a bicycle did it in a long skirt and a starched shirtwaist, with a corset underneath. Sporty Looks for Active Gals follows what happened next. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the clothes of girls, teens, and women loosened, shortened, and finally came apart into separates, keeping pace with lives that were moving faster and reaching farther from home.

The 1920s brought women onto tennis courts, golf courses, and beaches in growing numbers, in dresses cut short and loose enough to move in. By the 1930s, pattern companies were offering shorts, slacks, culottes, playsuits, and sun-back dresses with matching jackets. Many came as sets, with a blouse, a skirt, and shorts in a single envelope, meant to be worn in different combinations. One pattern could become a small wardrobe.

The war years pushed the change further. With women in factories and fabric in short supply, slacks became working clothes, and simple pieces that mixed and matched made the most of every yard. After the war, the habit stuck. American designers built a whole philosophy around sportswear, and the pattern counter followed with coordinated separates, teen-sized sets of blouses, skirts, and shorts, and beachwear for the new leisure years.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the transformation was complete. Bell bottoms, pullovers, wrap skirts, and jumpsuits filled the pattern books, and even tailored suits were sold as coordinates, pieces meant to be combined and recombined. What began as special clothing for sport had become the everyday wardrobe of the modern woman: practical and flexible, built from separates she could put together to suit her day.