can i alter a size 10 dress to a size 14?

Question

Hiya

I have an original 80's boned corset dress that is roughly a modern size 10 it is made of black acetate but i am roughly a 12-14 in a dress and was wondering if a dress alterations shop could make it bigger or would it be impossible???
Thanks

Answer 1

It's possible, but it's pretty difficult to do. In order to make it larger the tailor would either have to find fabric that matched identically to create panels or to let out the seams enough to go up in size.

The difficulty in this is that it is often hard to find fabric that matches the original dress & the panels are often very conspicuous & don't look very good. As far as letting the seams out, with some fabrics you can tell where the original seams were & some dresses don't have enough seam allowance to make it a bigger size, especially since you want to go from a size 10 to a size 14. Also, the older the dress is, the more fragile the fabric can be. Even though this dress was made in 1980, the fabric could still have weakened if the dress wasn't stored correctly.

Take it into a dress alterations or tailor shop & let them look at it. They'll give you their honest opinion on whether it is doable. I think that you would be better off getting them to sew a new dress that is similar looking to the original dress instead of altering the original one. It may be costly, but it'll look better on you than if you altered the original one. You can always keep the original as an "incentive" dress for if you want to lose weight.

Answer 2

Uusally not unless you have more material to add. most clothing only has 1/2" seams or less, so you are stuck with using that fabric. It is only recommended to go up or down one size without adding more material.

Answer 3

Unfortunuatly i dont think thats possible because it'll show the stitchen you undid and especialyl beucase its VERY hard to find material thats the exact same. Sorry :( Good lkuck though.