Michelle's Vintage Pledge Project: To Infinity, and Beyond!

Michelle from Tres Bien Ensemble is a vintage fan who loves classic style and isn't afraid to try patterns from a range of decades. Her pick for today perfectly sums up her style - a 70s pattern that is elegant and timeless:

Pattern Details 

McCall’s 5360 Infinite Dress from 1976 is one dress that can be worn many ways! The dress is sewn using a single pattern piece. It can be worn forward or backward and tied in different combinations to create a variety of looks.

What attracted you to this pattern?
Everything old is new again, particularly where fashion is concerned. This is exactly why I love sewing from vintage sewing patterns. It’s fun to see recycled trends in design over a period of decades. I bought this McCall’s pattern a couple years ago when I first started to get curious about sewing with knit fabrics. I loved the concept of a dress that could be converted and worn in different ways. At the time I bought it, I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Of course, after my initial discovery, I had a new awareness to this style dress and started seeing variations and versions of it all around. 

 Detail of two back views

Several of the “Big Four” continue to create and recreated iterations of this dress in their recent pattern releases. Mainstream media has picked up on this dress too! You may recognize this as the bridesmaids dresses worn during Marnie’s wedding in the series “Girls”, and this style dress is most certainly Kahleesi chic. After being fully inundated with inspiration, I knew I needed to take this pattern off the shelf and put it to work. 

Fabric and Notions

Fabric and thread are the only materials needed for this project. Most versions of this type dress I’ve seen are sewn using a solid fabric, so I felt a little bit against the grain choosing a print. However, the instant I saw this tie-dye rayon jersey, I imagined it as a maxi dress.

Sewing it Up

This dress is wildly simple to sew! There is one pattern piece and one seam. The only challenging portion of this dress comes in sewing the hems around the perimeter of the dress. It’s not so much a challenge as it is an endeavor, because there’s a lot of distance to cover. 
 
Final Verdict

I will absolutely sew this dress again! A black version is high on my priority list. And, I absolutely recommend this pattern to others. This is a project that delivers a lot of return in relationship to the amount of effort that it takes to make! 

Thanks Michelle! I love the classic style and versatility of your maxi dress, and what a great choice of fabric

K x