Designer Knock Off

There is a RTW/Designer Knock Off contest in progress http://www.patternreview.com/ A couple weeks ago I spent some time on various websites selling designer clothes, looking for inspiration for a contest entry. At one site I was drawn to jackets by a company/designer called Akris. I had never heard of them before so I did some more web searching and learned they are a small Swiss design house. This is my knock off of a $1200 Akris jacket that was featured on the Bergdorf Goodman web site. I like the simplicity of the jacket, with it's hidden closure, and interesting tubular collar. I found a princess seamed, hidden closure jacket pattern with a narrow stand up collar, in the April 2004 issue of Burda World of Fashion. I shortened the jacket to upper hip length and shortened the sleeves to just below elbow length. The collar neck edge was 18 inches long.
To duplicate the designer collar, I basically made a length of large diameter piping the same length as my collar pattern. The 5/8 inch diameter cord was made by rolling up a 18 inch by 4 inch piece of fusible fleece jelly roll style. Fusible fleece is about 1/8th inch thick, made of polyester, and pretty dense. One side is coated with a fusible adhesive. I use it a lot to make my own shoulder pads. I rolled the fusible surface to the inside, but actually whip stitcheded the edge of the fleece to the roll to maintain the shape. A strip of bias cut fashion fabric 19.25 by 4 inches (which included seam allowances) was used to cover the cording. The ends were finished before the cording was inserted. I treated the collar like piping and inserted it on the jacket collar edge using a piping foot. The fabric is a woven wool with black grey and cream threads from Fabric Mart. The lining is a red and black silk twill print from the same source.

I think my jacket looks remarkably like the designer jacket. What you cannot see are the alterations I did to fit the back of the jacket to my rounded shoulders, and prominent shoulder blades. The last couple of jackets I have made had large circular wrinkles that started on the back where my shoulder blades stick out and came down under my arms and ended at my bust. Adding .75 inches of length to the upper center back seam and putting in small darts from shoulder seam to shoulder blade makes the back fit like a glove and eliminated all the wrinkles. Guess I will have to do this to all my jackets in the future. Getting old is not for sissies!