|
For the next few months, we’ve decided to dig into the CR4 archives and expand upon some blog posts from 2007. Back then, we published a series of lists of women inventors and now we will write full blog posts about those who have yet to be featured. Do you know of a great person to be a subject? Let us know!
Gabriele Knecht is the mind behind sleeves on many modern day clothing pieces. Her patented Forward Sleeve design was an idea that not only changed fashion but the way we move in our clothes.
She was born in Germany in 1938 and came to America at age 10 with her family. She always had an eye for style and fashion and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis in 1960.
She took courses in physics, cosmology and science which may have seemed irrelevant to her degree; however, they actually came in handy as she began to design.
In 10 years, she filled dozens of notebooks with sketches and began a fixation on sleeves specifically. She analyzed all the ways sleeves can fall and the angles that could be constructed by creating more than 300 patterns and garments.
Over the years, she worked for several clothing companies as a designer. But she was not keen on staying in one place for too long. Her first job was with Formfit Co. in Chicago as a bra designer. She designed dressed for Caryle Dress Co. for four years. She moved back to Germany for a job designing boy clothes. After only a few years of this, she moved back to New York. After all that job hopping, she decided she wanted to work for herself.
She wanted to run a mail order hand-knit kit company but needed to get some name recognition.
In all her years designing clothing, she noticed how there was a significant issue with the way sleeves moved with the body when one wore a garment.
Clothes often had armholes that were set to fit arms when they are placed at one’s side. But, that’s not how we are positioned most of the time. Knecht designed a sleeve that helps people move more freely, especially when the arms are in front of the body when working, driving or doing many other activities.
Her design allows the arm to move comfortably. According to the patent, filed in 1982, “Garments covering the arms and upper torso made of a one-piece or multi-piece pattern in which the central axis of the sleeves are naturally positioned forward of the lateral plane of the body…The low point of the armhole is advantageously at the side front in the center of the armpit when the arm is raised. The garment is fitted to accommodate arms positioned at an angle substantially forward of the lateral plane of the body.”
While the design was an obvious success, she had a hard time selling it. She met with a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue who loved the design. Clothing was soon made exclusively for the department store and it was very successful.
Many of her pieces are on display or in the collection at The Met.
The full patent can be viewed here.
| 
