The American Garment Cutter, written by Samuel Regal and published by the American Fashion Company in 1908 isn’t exactly a classic, it’s actually considered a Forgotten Book. Since the third edition was was released in 1914, the book and publisher appear to have fallen into obscurity. Reprints are generally presented only for historical interest, tending to be poor scans of the text, rather than efforts to make the book available as a practical drafting guide. This is unfortunate, the book has an excellent collection (it claims to be the most complete work) of then-popular men’s outerwear, making it an excellent resource for men’s costumes and classically styled garments. I originally found the book while looking for a good tailcoat pattern. This book is, as the author claims, a simple and concise guide with instructions on how to draft patterns that remain useful to this day.

In addition to having instructions on how to draft otherwise difficult to find patterns, it’s also hard to argue with the book’s price. Contemporary drafting guides for menswear can run up to hundreds of dollars. Being now in the public domain, The American Garment Cutter is freely available.

That said, despite the author’s claim that his system is so simple that anyone can master its techniques without any prior knowledge, his book is not perfectly straightforward. There are a number of unwritten assumptions and minor inconsistencies in phrasing throughout. It also uses slightly outdated terminology, which makes trying to look things up nowadays difficult. Worse, the the poor quality of available scans means that the diagrams, which the book depends on for its touted clarity, aren’t always legible. Sometimes even the accompanying instructions are difficult to read. All this can leave the reader flipping through pages trying to find a similar entry just to clarify what, exactly, one is supposed to be doing.

So, let’s go through this old drafting manual to see what it has to say and what we can gain from it today.

To start, we should consider the way that Regal handles measurements. After all, the whole point of drafting a pattern is that it gives us more control over the end product than commercial patterns. If we don’t know what measurements the instructions are using, how can we expect to get good results? This will also let us familiarize ourselves with the terms that Mr. Regal will be using throughout the rest of the book so we know what each diagram is actually telling us.

The book’s instructions for this section (pgs. 6 – 21) are fairly intricate, but really little more than explaining in detail what is being shown in the figures above. A brief glance demonstrates that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do this on yourself, so when attempting to draft a garment you are planning to wear, solicit help.

The first figure shows an extremely important set of points on the body that we’ll need, points A, B, C, and D are referenced throughout the text:

1. Base of the neck, right at the top of the collarbone or just under the C7 vertebra. Regal notes this as the rear collar button, something that has mostly gone out of style.
2. Just under the armpit. The book advises placing a square or straightedge under the arm to find this point and marking it with chalk.
3. The natural waist, the slimmest point on most people’s torsos.
4. The seat. Regal assumes this point is always 6″ below the waist. If we wanted to be more careful and actually look for the widest part of hips the way modern guides suggest we’d need to make careful note of that.

There’s actually a second set of measurements we should be grabbing here that Mr. Regal only very briefly mentions at the tail end of this section, with no corresponding figures. We’ll need to take back shoulder width at A, breast circumference at B, waist circumference at C, and hip/seat circumference at D. Almost every home sewing guide has detailed instructions about taking these measurements, so perhaps that’s why the author assumed he could leave it unsaid.

	Figure	Measurement
Back Shoulder	A
Breast	B
Waist	C
Hip/Seat	D

We also need to measure the distance from A to B and B to C, which give us the bottom of the armscye and the position of the body’s natural waist. These lengths are essential in getting the shoulder and sleeve of any vest or jacket to fit properly.

As mentioned before, the book assumes that point D is six inches below C at all times, though Mr. Regal points out that if you use a different measure you should simply record that you did so and be consistent in all future drawings. This is obviously a bit different from his method of measuring for trousers, which we’ll get to in a bit.

	Figure	Measurement
Scye Depth	A to B
Waist Length	A to C
Seat Length	C to D	6″
Full Length	A to E

These four points appear in all jacket, coat, and vest measurements throughout the book, along with a point E that represents the full length of the desired garment. This, as he notes, is subject to the prevailing fashion and he rarely supplies more detail than this. It’s rather unhelpful, I would argue, since part of the appeal of his book now is to properly cut garments that have since gone out of fashion. As we go through, I’ll try to add my best guess for this measurement when Regal doesn’t.

Figures 9, 10 and 11 show how to take other crucial measurements. These depend on a front mark which appears opposite the rear mark we used to find point B for the armscye. Regal suggests literally using chalk to mark the front and back of the armscye on the person whose measurements are being taken.

• Strap (fig 9) measures the distance from A to the front mark, or from the base of the neck to the front of the armpit.
• Overshoulder (fig 10) gives the distance over the shoulder from the back of the scye to front of the scye.
• Blade measures the shoulder blade, from the back center seam, or center of the spine, to the front scye mark.

	Figure	Measurement
Strap	Fig 9
Overshoulder	Fig 10
Blade	Fig 11

There’s one final measurement we should note for making vests, jackets, and coats; and that’s the back indentation. This tells us how much the lower back indents in compared to the upper back. Regal uses a yardstick braced against the upper back and a square or ruler to measure this. On average, he says, it should be about 1-1/2″ but provides instructions for how to draft jackets and vests for swaybacked individuals, that is people with excessive curvature or indentation, which he helpfully assumes to be 2-1/4″ deep later in the book.

Left unstated, but safe to assume, is that at some point we’ll also care about how long to cut sleeves. No diagram or explanation for how to do this shows up in the section on measurements. Thankfully, there’s only so many ways to measure arm length and, by skipping ahead to the section on sleeves, we can figure out how Regal does it. In this case he uses sleeve inseam for full length, which is measured from armpit (right around where we measured Strap above) to wrist.

	Figure	Measurement
Indentation	Fig 7
Sleeve

In an appendix, Regal also provides tables of typical measurements based on height and breast measure, though he’s quick to remind us that every body is different and we should prefer to take full measurements whenever possible.

The book also has instructions on cutting trousers and, since we’re spending all this time talking about measurements, we can take a look at that, too. Fortunately for us, not much has changed on the topic of measuring and cutting pants since 1914 and Regal’s method looks quite a bit like the current standard.

Later on, as we go through the book’s collection of outerwear, we’ll find that garments tend to be divided based on the frame of the gentleman they are being cut for. Already a “swayback” figure has come up, but Regal also classifies diagrams as being intended for “stout” or “corpulent” frames as well. Which is certainly one way of putting it.

In the standard proportions at the back of the book, “stout” doesn’t appear as a separate category, but is folded in with both the “normal” and “corpulent” tables. A quick comparison of the two tables suggests that Mr. Regal uses the term “normal” to mean that one’s breast measurement is larger than the waist, “stout” to mean that the two are about the same, and “corpulent” to mean that the waist measurement is larger than the breast. I realize I’m putting words in his mouth, of course.

Fully armed with most of the terminology and a table of all the measurements we’ll need, we can finally take on The American Garment Cutter.