Take a sneak peek at the DAR Museum's upcoming exhibit, Sewn in America: Making - Meaning - Memory, which "will examine dressmaking innovations from 1770 to the 1920s."

From the DAR Museum:

"Professional dressmakers were hired not only by the elite, but by many middle class women, to get the snug fit over the corset that propriety and fashion demanded. But after 1870, paper patterns were available to the home sewer, making home dressmaking somewhat easier (they came with hardly any directions, and you still had to customize the fit to your own body!).

So from the outside, can you tell which of these mid-1890s dresses was probably made by a dressmaker, and which was almost certainly made at home? They both are pretty nicely made and fashionable for their time (the purple and white even has the slightly modified leg of mutton of 1896, after the peak of the style you see in the green wool).