When I was a very little kid, I liked to “play with fabric.” My mom was a teacher who, in the summers, supplemented her income as a professional seamstress, so we had a lot of scraps around. I had a big tub of loose bits unsuitable for sewing that I loved to open and dig through. I loved the colors, the feel of the fabric. I would put the pieces together, lay them out on the floor like a puzzle, and make pretend patchwork dresses for pretend fancy occasions. My favorites were the shimmery strips of multicolored eyelash fabric, which I would lay out as trim, and imagine a dress for princess.
Dressmaker is taking me right back to those days in just the few swift hours I’ve tooled around with it. In my journey to adulthood, I have gained very little in terms of fashion expertise, and even less sewing knowledge. But Dressmaker lets me be childish, just for little while. It’s fun to put colors together, and shapes. Even in a video game, it’s nice to imagine textures, how they might look in the light or feel in your hands. And in Dressmaker, it’s easy to proceed through the story without making anything that looks nice whatsoever. You can make atrocious dresses, if you want, and your clients will happily praise them as long as they meet their specific needs for style, color, and fabric.
At first, all the ladies in town are visiting to purchase new attire for a Duke’s funeral, either to suitably mourn or to catch the eye of the Duke’s only son, single and attractive. One will want something black and intimidating, another something glamorous and deeply inappropriate for a funeral. Later, requests become more complex: one wants a dress that’s warm and professional, cute but not too cute. You’ll make dresses for sporting events, balls, weddings, pet shows, and more: there are so many commissions, and I’m nowhere near through with all of them, not least because I keep getting distracted just making dresses for fun. Every new commission you complete unlocks new cuts and styles, and as you gain renown, you gain access to more fabrics and accessories. There are so many little toys I want to play with and piece together, and the only thing limiting me is (as in life) money to buy more fabric.
Dressmaker is a game for people who spend most of their time in character creators on clothing. Character creators increasingly offer minute breakdowns of everything from nose shape to mouth position, but rarely go farther in the clothing department than letting players select from certain preset outfits. Understandable! Customizable outfits are a ridiculous ask in most games! But in Dressmaker, that is the game. It’s glorious, extraneous detail. You have to measure, with a tape measure, all of your clients, and then ensure the mannequin you mock up the dress on is set to the correct proportions (you can also choose its skin tone!). Then, you build the dress pattern. You choose sleeves, collar, bodice, and skirt from a range of options that grows as you play, with each style contributing to how romantic or gothic or workwear-y or cute the dress will be. You can optionally use colored pencils to set a rough idea of how you want to assign different fabrics, and I love the little touch of being able to pick swatches of fabrics and stick them to your sketch, letting you see how they look against one another.
Then it’s time to commit to those fabrics. You can purchase new ones with what funds you have or select from rolls you’ve already bought, and you spread those fabrics out on a table and place your pattern pieces down to cut them out. This is the game bit: you don’t want to waste fabric. If you buy five yards, you have five yards to work with, and no more. If you want to use that roll on another dress later, you’ll be less whatever you cut out here. So be economical! Squish those patterns together! But also, you want to cut pieces correctly, either straight or on the bias depending on what the piece is. Dressmaker doesn’t force you to know what any of that means, but for a good-quality dress it does make you rotate and line up arrows to cut it correctly. Fortunately, there’s infinite grace for messing up. At any time you can return the pieces to your scrap basket and, unrealistic but welcome, those pieces fuse back with the roll of fabric as if they were never cut.
Finally, you place all the pieces on your mannequin in their correct spots and run them through a sewing machine to stitch them all together, being careful to sew along the guidelines and not zigzag all over the dang place. There’s a little seam ripper you can use if you screw up or want to change your fabric pieces somehow: everything is undoable until you complete the dress. You can pin on lace or buttons or broaches or ribbons. A dress, at last, takes shape.
Dressmaker has a cute, fluffy story with some funny writing, lovely character art, and enough video-gamey reasons to “progress.” It has a few minor technical blips that annoyed me, too, like how the lace never wants to pin where I want it to pin. I also wish that restarting a dress would let me undo all the fabric I bought; I quickly ran out of money on a commission early on that I just couldn’t get right because I bought the wrong stuff, and the final dress didn’t come out well as a result.
But none of that really stands in the way of what I like about Dressmaker, which is…dressmaking. I’ve paused writing this piece about three or four times to reopen the game and make another one. I’ve made some gothic lace-covered monstrosities and a lot of cute little peasant-style frocks. Every time I finish another commission and unlock more stuff, I’m floored yet again by the level of detail and love for craft this game exemplifies. Elevated scoop ruffle bodices! Gathered ballgown skirts! Butterfly sleeves! Plum silk, meadow green cotton, ebony lace, ecru wool. I just love thinking about all these things, how they must feel and move. I didn’t realize until now that this was a fantasy I wanted to indulge: to plunge my hands back into that childhood fabric basket and pretend, for a bit, that even my most bizarre dress creations were glamorous.
