Stephanie Brown and sewing: the discontinuity in canon skill
One of the points that is often brought up to contrast Bryan Q. Miller’s Batgirl 2009 run with pre-War Games Steph is BQM’s depiction of Steph as unable to sew in Batgirl #1 2009, in contrast with Chuck Dixon’s depiction of her sewing her first costume in Secret Origins 80-Page Giant #1 1998.
I think it’s interesting to contrast the default assumptions inherent in ‘Steph can/cannot sew’ for both periods, and also look at what the skill would say today about her as a character.
Dixon from her origin in 1992 portrays Steph as having sewn her own costume and as a member of Gen X. (Well, he doesn’t specify that she made it until he writes her Secret Origins in 1998, but it probably formed part of her origin story in his mind from the very start). In that time period, it’s not unlikely that Steph may still have been taught to sew at school and to be assumed by readers to have learnt at school; while sewing and home economics classes were in the process of being removed from the US school curriculums over the late 1970s and the 1980s, in 1992 that would still be very recent news and in particular, adult readers and writers would likely still have expected it to be a skill that a teenage girl would have learnt, either at school or from her mother. Dixon in particular was born in 1954 and probably finished school in the very early 1970s, before this change in curriculum occurred, so his default expectation would have been that Steph had the opportunity to learn.
On top of this, in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was still financially viable for lower middle class families to be sewing particularly children’s clothing and women’s dresses to save money; the cost of fabric v the cost of premade clothing was such that there were still savings to be made by running up simple clothes at home if you discounted the labour costs of the woman doing that work. In this context, Steph being able to sew her own costume is something that allows Dixon to portray Steph as thrifty and hardworking and the ‘good’ sort of lower middle class.
In this context, Steph sewing makes her look competent and well educated, but also pitches her in the position where she is visibly less well off and less well resourced than Tim is: she is able to solve the problem of needing a costume by creating her own at home (similar to how Barbara Gordon, in most origin stories, sews her first Batgirl costume AS a costume party outfit), rather than having one gifted to her by Bruce.
In contrast, by BQM’s Batgirl 2009 run, the likelihood of a teenage girl having the skill to sew a complete outfit has significantly dropped. My best estimate of BQM’s age is that he was likely born in the 1980s, a full generation later, and is writing a teenage girl who is similarly presented as an entire generation younger and a Millennial. For this version of Steph, sewing is an old fashioned, unfashionable skill that she would have been unlikely to learn at school. To learn how to sew she would either have required a special interest or an involved mother or other older relative who specifically wanted to teach her; and Crystal Brown is not portrayed as someone who had the free time to be teaching hobbies to her daughter. The economics of sewing have also flipped at this point. Buying clothing was cheaper and easier than sewing them personally, and it would be extremely unlikely to see a teenager wearing homemade clothing.
On top of that, we have BQM’s characterisation of Steph. His Steph is Not Like Other Girls ™ - she’s specifically shown to be cool and rebellious in ways that are depicted via things like looking down on clothing/behaviour that is ‘girly’, wearing male style clothing like combat fatigues as part of her university clothing to portray that she’s above caring about her appearance, but still having those ‘when she wears a dress she looks feminine/beautiful’ moments. It’s a very trendy portrayal of a teenager who is simultaneously trying to appear not to be trying too hard while actually privately overthinking everything.
Finally, both of these reads of what Steph being able to sew or not means have different interpretations in the present day.
From my current understanding, design and sewing classes have largely been out of the US school curriculum for decades at this point. The most common encounters that a modern member of fandom would have with sewing clothing is the in the context of cosplay, whether that be for fandom costuming (such as sewing your own Batgirl costume for a party like Barbara), or in terms of the Bernadette Banner style of elaborate historical recreations, where the hobby is both the recreation and in doing everything the hardest and most elaborate way possible. It is not something most people would do for actual pieces in their wardrobe (as the economics of sewing are still upsidedown in terms of materials to premade). A current teenage or early 20s Steph is a member of Gen Z, another generation on.
Because of this frequent lack of familiarity with the skill of sewing in the general audience, there is no longer an default expectation that Steph would be able to sew. If she was able to sew, it would be perceived as a particular hobby of hers for some purpose (probably cosplay, to give her a fandom-aligned hobby to seem ‘cool’), rather than an expected skill she acquired in the course of her education, whether at school or from her mother, for the purpose of running a household and general maintenance tasks. Particularly in terms of being able to put together an entire costume, or modify another costume to fit herself; those are higher skill levels than sewing on buttons or tacking a hem.
Interestingly, both portraying Steph as able to sew AND as unable to sew now have different readings to them compared to the two contemporaneous commentaries available in 1992 and 2009, when it was previously addressed in canon. It would be interesting to see it addressed again by a writer, to see which angle they take.
