People have been asking why the cutoff date for the Historical Sew Fortnightly is 1938, and I realised that while we discussed it in comments, and I’ve mentioned it in posts, I’ve never directly addressed why I picked 1938 as the cutoff date. The short answer is because it is 75 years ago, but that was really just a convenient bonus. The long answer is that I wanted to pick a date before which garments would really look distinctly different from what we wear today, and in which the sewing techniques used to make them would be distinctly different from modern sewing techniques.  I also really wanted to make myself sew historical garments for my work, not vintage-historical which I could wear in an everyday context. When I first conceived the idea of the Historical Sew Fortnightly I set the cuttoff date at pre-1920. The reasoning behind the 1920 cutoff was that anything after 1920 could easily be used in an everyday modern wardrobe, and I really did want this to focus on  really  historical …