Pattern History: Anabel Worthington

 I bought 7128 a few years ago on a whim--it was really cheap because the packet is destroyed.  I have no idea what size it is (I could figure this out by measuring the waistline but haven't done it yet) or if it's even complete.

 


It didn't have an obvious manufacturer name, which often means the pattern is a mail order pattern intended to be sold through different magazines or newspapers (or possibly it did have a name but it had crumbled away.  But I didn't think it had).

The style of it suggests that it's from around 1915--you see feet but not much else, and the skirt has not belled out the way it did in the late Teens.

Fast forward a few years and I now have a subscription to Newspapers.com, which is an incredible resource for dating mail-order patterns and is also completely addictive. 

A few pages into a search of "7128 dress pattern from 1912 to 1918" and . . . there it is.  And the ad is from the St. Joseph [Missouri] News-Press, April 10, 1915.  

And so now I know about Anabel Worthington patterns and have a new Newspapers quest. A lunch hour's buzz through suggests that it was a short-lived nameplate that ran from 1915 to 1918.  There are sometimes ads alongside it for Pictorial Review and May Manton patterns, which might just be good salesmanship but might also suggest that they had the same parent company.

Anabel Worthington set on Flickr.

Edits: McCall 8340 (available through Past Patterns) also appears as Anabel Worthington 8340 in 1917, which makes me wonder if Anabel Worthington wasn't produced by McCall for a specific group of vendors, the way Simplicity produced DuBarry patterns for Woolworth's.


 I also found that the nameplate was revived around 1927, both as Anabel Worthington and as Annabelle Worthington.




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