By Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com
These Tailleur fashion plates are coat and costume (suits) trade plates from the Autumn of 1965. They show quite dressy, but timeless images which were very typical of clothing for more mature groomed women of the early sixties.
The suit was a fashionable all purpose elegant ensemble and it was often enhanced with a matching or toning three-quarter or full-length coat.
Collars were frequently trimmed with beaver lamb or mink and cuffs were often deep and plush. Buttons were also used as accents.
This semi-fitted, mink-trimmed coffee-coloured suit right, reminds me very much of a costume I recall my mother wearing to my elder sister's wedding in 1965.
In addition to trimming, ladies' suits and coats, mink was often used to make mink jewellery brooches. In the photograph left and circa 1964/5 this young woman wears a black cocktail dress trimmed with fur. Fur was also used on dress hemlines too.
The green suit in the header is also very much of the era. Notice how some of the suit jackets are boxier and straighter tapering to the hip rather than showing the more hourglass silhouette of c1950-1960.
1960s Fashion History Drawings - 1965
Use these Tailleur images below as inspiration for fashion designing and pattern cutting.
They have an early 1960s fashion feel for more mature women. All the images will expand to fit an A4 sheet when printed out. Click the thumbnails for those enlargements. The mini skirt length was not really an accepted mass fashion when these trade plates were designed for a more conservative mature market.
These trade fashion plates were probably directed at a more mature market. The Tailleur 1965 book cover they come from states that the patterns were available only in UK size16 (Europe 44) and 20 (48) only.
The larger size 20 would have been aimed at the plus size fashion market then known as the Outsize Retail Trade.
One major fashion store of the era and now called Evans used to be named Evans Outsizes. The suits and coats here do follow the general lines of the day, but should be regarded as more usually worn by groomed women rather than younger girls.
This photograph above was taken circa 1959/61 and you can see the suits and coats have very similar lines to the trade fashion plates above. We can therefore conclude that these fashions were probably 'classic' in styling and possibly lagging 2 or 3 years behind.
The drawings on the 1962 page are more reflective of clothes younger women might have worn in this time frame.
