What in the world is a dart??- Apparel design 1

Hello everyone!

*See disclaimer!

I usually don't start off my posts with pictures, but I decided I would today. Because I am going to talk about darts! No, not the throwing game- which I am very good at by the way, but I digress- but the fitting element in a garment. So you see those triangles in the picture above that look cut away from the bodice and skirt? Those are darts. They are strategically placed on the body where it curves or moves, in order to let the garment move with the body and still maintain fit, because nobody wants to feel like they have no shape, or they are a rectangle, because nobody is a rectangle. Every person on God's green earth has a shape, and it deserves to be dressed with the best fit possible. So you fold those triangles over each other and stitch the triangle closed. The bottom picture shows this. *Disclaimer! In my fashion class, backstitching is a very big NO-NO. When ending a seam line in our class, we drop the feed dogs and stitch in place for just a few stitches, which makes a little knot. This makes a little less bulk than backstitching does.       Okay now that I said that, I can go on. Both men and women's clothing have darts, because all garments need to fit somehow. Or else we would all be wearing paper sacks. So darts can be moved around, so they won't always be in the same spots in every garment. That would be boring. Dart manipulation is when you either make many darts out of the one, or combine more than one to make a huge one. It really depends on what you're making, if you want a lot of darts or just one, but a key thing to remember is they just can't go away. No matter how much you want them to disappear, they can't. You have to do something with it. So there are other options than just darts, you can do pleats or tucks, or gathers or things like that. You'd do gathers for example, if you were doing something really flowy and airy. You wouldn't want a random line just sticking out from nowhere. Darts are cool that way, you can pretty much do whatever with them and they will still give you that fitted element into your garment. Okay so now you know what a dart is, I will find some pictures to show you what I am talking about.

So they converted that one triangle that we
saw in the first image to 3, for their desired
effect.

Looks like they converted the waist and bust
darts to gathers, to make it more flirty and girly

With men's slim fit shirts, the darts
can go in the front- because they need that
extra fitting

Aren't darts cool? :) yay for fitted things! So I think that is good for the basics on darts, perhaps I'll do another post later that goes more in depth about things :)

Vivre la mode, tout le monde!