Dressmaker Guide
How Style Scores Work in Dressmaker
Learn how patterns, fabrics and accessories contribute to Style Scores, why some garment parts matter more than others, and how to raise the style your commission needs.
What a style score is made of
Three sources, three different rules
- Pattern
- Fabric
- Accessories
One score per style, all at once
- Gothic
- Cute
- Glamour
- Romantic
There is no single Style rating. A dress carries a separate score in every one of the 22 styles, and a brief asks for the ones it wants.
The part that decides most of a dress's cloth voice is the Skirt — and the shares are fixed per part, not measured off the pattern.
The three sources
What actually adds to a style score?
Patterns, cloth and decorations all move a style score, and none of them move it the same way. Reading them as one group is the first reason a dress scores less than its parts suggest it should.
Pattern
A pattern carries its own style weights, and they are added straight to the score. A pattern that declares Cute 25 adds twenty-five points of Cute, no matter which slot it fills and no matter how much cloth that slot cuts.
This is the source that surprises players most. Nothing multiplies a pattern's bonus down: a bodice pattern and a collar pattern with the same declared weight are worth the same.
Fabric
A cloth declares style weights too, but only a fraction of each one reaches the dress. The fraction is the share of the cloth's voice held by the part the cloth is cut from.
The same cloth on a skirt and on a collar contributes very different amounts, because the skirt holds four times the collar's share.
Accessories
Decorations declare style weights as well, and they are the only source that gets discounted. A style's placements are ranked strongest first and each one after the first counts for less.
This is why the second bow adds less than the first, and why a different decoration that carries the style beats a fourth copy of the one already on the dress.
Garment parts
Which part of the dress carries the score?
Every dress that cuts cloth divides one fixed total between its parts. The bodice and the skirt hold three quarters of it between them, which is why a skirt swap moves a score further than a collar swap ever will.
- Collar10%
- Sleeve15%
- Bodice35%
- Skirt40%
Read in the garment's own order, top to bottom. The two parts in ink are the two that decide most of the cloth's say; the sleeve and the collar are measured, not dismissed.
The engine's own weights
- Collarweight 2
- Sleeveweight 3
- Bodiceweight 7
- Skirtweight 8
Bodice and Skirt hold 75% of the cloth's voice between them. A collar is worth having, but it cannot carry a score on its own.
What sets a part's share is the part, not its size. A peter-pan collar whose panel measures a fraction of a coat skirt's area still speaks with the collar's own weight — panel area only decides how one part's cloth is split between two fabrics inside it.
Reweighting
What if my dress has no sleeves or collar?
The game does not throw a missing part's share away. The parts that do cut cloth are re-divided so that their cloth contributions still make up the whole active share.
Fabric influence
Bodice, skirt, sleeves and collar
Dividing by 20 this time
- Bodice35%
- Skirt40%
- Sleeve15%
- Collar10%
Shares are re-divided over the parts that cut cloth: Bodice 35% · Skirt 40% · Sleeve 15% · Collar 10%
Cloth
How fabric contributes to a Style Score
A cloth's style weight is not added to your final score at full value. How much of it lands depends on which part the cloth is cut from, because that is the part whose share it borrows.
The rule, in one line
A cloth contributes its declared weight multiplied by the share of the part it is cut from. Nothing else scales it: not the price of the cloth, not how much of it you bought, and not the size of the panel it lands on.
Why didn't this fabric give me its full Style value?
Because a cloth's printed weight is what it declares, not what a dress receives. A cloth that declares Cute 50 on the skirt is worth half of that on the sleeve, and the same cloth split across two fabrics inside one part gives up a further share to whichever cloth covers the rest.
Worked example, from the catalogue
Aqua Blue Cotton declares Cute +50
Cut for the Skirt, which holds 40% of the dress's cloth voice.
The cloth covers the whole skirt
20 Cute
Half the skirt is a second cloth (50% of the part)
10 Cute
Two cloths on one part is the ordinary case, not a special one: the dress's cloth area is split between them and each one only speaks for the share it covers.
Show the exact calculation
The share is the part's weight over the total weight of the parts cutting cloth, multiplied by the fraction of the part's panels this cloth covers. The scoring engine publishes that as one function, and the number above is its output rather than a second implementation of it.
cloth weight × (part weight / cutting parts) × (covered area / part area)
Patterns
Pattern Style bonuses are added directly
A pattern's style tags and a cloth's style tags are not the same kind of number, even though the game shows them side by side. Cloth is scaled by its part; a pattern's bonus is not scaled at all.
Cloth, scaled
Declared weight, multiplied by the share of the part the cloth is cut from, and by how much of that part the cloth covers.
Pattern, unscaled
Added to the style total as it is written. No part share, no coverage, no fraction of anything.
A pattern declaring Cute 25 contributes exactly 25.
A pattern speaks whether or not it cuts cloth
The two optional slots each fall back to a pattern that cuts nothing at all. They still land their own tags on the score, which is the clearest proof that a pattern's contribution never depended on area.
- Sleeve0 panels
No Sleeves
- Cool +10
- Simple +10
- Collar0 panels
No Collar
- Cool +5
- Simple +5
So leaving the collar off is not neutral. It costs the collar's cloth share, and it buys whatever the zero-panel pattern declares — and the parts that remain are re-divided around it.
Decorations
Accessories have diminishing returns
The strongest decoration for a style keeps its whole weight. Every placement after it is discounted again, so a tray of similar decorations cannot add up the way its weights suggest.
The discount, placement by placement
Placements are ranked by how strongly they contribute to that one style, strongest first, and the k-th placement counts for 0.85 of the one before it. The weights themselves never change — what shrinks is how much of each one is counted.
- 1100%
- 285%
- 372.2%
- 461.4%
- 552.2%
- 644.4%
Ranking is per style, not per decoration. The same two decorations can order differently for Cute and for Formal, because each style ranks its own list.
Three real decorations, declared against counted
- Black Ruffle Madness Trim10 declared → 10
- Gold Deco Chain10 declared → 8.5
- Scale Mail Chain10 declared → 7.23
- Added up as declared
- 30
- What the dress is scored
- 25.73
- Withheld by the discount
- 4.27
These are the three strongest Gothic decorations in the catalogue. Their own weights are not lowered — the dress simply does not count all of each one.
Signed weights
Can a contribution reduce a Style Score?
Yes, and the model carries the sign rather than clipping it. A weight that reads minus ten takes ten points off the style instead of being treated as nothing.
27
cloths carrying at least one negative weight
78
patterns carrying at least one negative weight
0
decorations carrying a negative weight
A decoration that carried a negative would take its place in that style's ranked sequence exactly like a positive one, and it would be discounted for its rank on the way in. That code path is live for every decoration; in this build none of them declares a negative, so the signed corner of the catalogue is cloth and patterns.
The practical consequence is that a dress can be taken apart by what is on it. If a style is high and you need it low — a brief that pays for a style to stay under a ceiling — the cloth and the pattern are what to change, because they are what can subtract.
Elaborate
Why does Elaborate keep increasing?
Almost every other style is a sum of declared weights. Elaborate carries a second rule on top of that, and it is the one that catches players out.
Every placement adds one
Each decoration placed on the dress adds 1 to Elaborate, whatever it is and whichever style it was chosen for. A dress wearing nine decorations has an Elaborate of nine from that rule alone, before a single declared weight is counted. Length does not matter here: a metre of lace and a ten-centimetre strip of it are each one placement.
And some of them carry their own weight
76 decorations, 93 patterns and 80 cloths also declare a weight for Elaborate itself. Both land on the same score, which is why a decorated dress climbs it so quickly.
Rounding
How a style score is turned into a number
Every contribution above is added up as a decimal, and the number you are shown is that total rounded. The number a brief is checked against is the one before rounding.
What you see
Rounded to the nearest whole number, so 64.5 Cute displays as 65. Only positive styles are published; a style a dress does not carry reads as nothing rather than as a negative.
What the brief checks
The requirement is compared against the exact total, not the rounded one. A dress showing 65 Cute can still miss a Cute 65 floor if its raw total was 64.5 — which is worth knowing before assuming a brief is bugged.
Nothing is lost by this: the calculator reports the total and the rounded figure side by side, so the gap is visible rather than inferred.
Diagnosis
Why is my Style Score lower than I expected?
Nearly every disappointing style score comes from one of six things, and the fix is different for each of them. Find the description that matches your dress before changing anything.
| What you are seeing | What is actually happening |
|---|---|
| The fabric looks perfect for the style and barely moved the score | Check which part it is on. Cloth on a sleeve or a collar contributes a fraction of what the same cloth contributes on a skirt or a bodice, because the part's share is what scales it. |
| The cloth is on the right part and still gave less than its printed weight | It probably covers part of that part rather than all of it. When one part is split between two cloths, each cloth only speaks for the share of the part it covers. |
| I added several decorations and each one gained less than the last | That is the ranked discount working as intended. A different decoration carrying the style is worth more than another copy of the one already on the dress. |
| Changing the skirt moved the score a long way | The skirt holds the largest share of the dress's cloth voice, so a cloth swap there is the biggest single lever the cloth source offers. |
| A pattern declaring a small bonus had an outsized effect | Pattern bonuses are not scaled by a part's share. A declared plus five is five points, wherever the pattern sits. |
| Every decoration I add raises Elaborate, even the plain ones | Each placement adds one to Elaborate regardless of what it carries. A brief that asks for Elaborate to stay low is asking you to decorate less. |
Strategy
How to raise a Style Score
Work down the list in order. The top of it moves more points for the same effort, and the bottom of it is where a dress stops being worth rebuilding.
- 1Look at the bodice and the skirt first — between them they hold three quarters of the cloth's voice.
- 2Put the target style's strongest cloth on those two parts, and check the cloth covers the whole part rather than half of it.
- 3Then check the patterns. A pattern's bonus is not divided by anything, so a pattern carrying the style is often the cheapest points on the dress.
- 4Add the strongest decoration that carries the target style, rather than the first one you find.
- 5Stop stacking copies. The fifth copy of one decoration is worth a fraction of the first, and a different decoration with the same style is worth more.
- 6Recalculate before you rebuild. A dress that is two points short usually needs one change, not a new sketch.
For a large improvement
Change cloth on the bodice and the skirt. Nothing else on the dress carries that much of the cloth's voice, and a single swap there can move a style by more than a tray of decorations will.
For the last few points
Look at pattern bonuses and at one strong decoration. Both add points that are not divided by a part's share, which makes them the right tools for closing a small gap without touching the dress's construction.
Close but not there
Only a few points short?
A dress that misses by four points is a different problem from one that misses by forty. Four points is a change; forty is a plan. These are the four things worth checking, in order of how little they cost.
- Required
- Cute 65
- Current
- Cute 61
- Missing
- 4
- 1Is there a stronger cloth for the target style that you already own? The fabric finder sorts the catalogue by exactly that weight.
- 2Can a bodice or a skirt panel take more of the cloth you are already using? Coverage inside a part is worth points, and it costs nothing.
- 3Does another pattern add the target style directly? A declared bonus is not scaled, so a small number can be exactly the size of the gap.
- 4Would one strong decoration be enough? One placement keeps its whole weight — it is the second and third that lose theirs.
Let the fixer find the smallest change
It reads the dress you have, knows what the brief needs, and ranks the one or two edits that close the gap. That is a different question from this page's, and it is the one worth asking now.
Two systems
Style Score vs Quality
Both numbers appear on the same commission card and they are made by entirely different parts of the game. Raising one does nothing for the other.
| Aspect | Style Score | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Design and aesthetic | Construction |
| Decided by | Pattern tags, cloth tags, decorations | Grain, fit and sewing accuracy |
| Changed by | Swapping what the dress is made of | Cutting and sewing it differently |
| How many numbers | One per style, up to 22 of them | One, for the whole dress |
| What a brief does with it | Asks for a floor, or a ceiling, on a named style | Asks for one minimum, or one target |
High Style does not mean high Quality, and high Quality does not guarantee the style a brief asks for. A dress can be beautifully made in the wrong cloth for the job and fail on style alone.
Commissions
Style requirements in commissions
A brief can ask for one style score or for several at once, and it can ask for a style to be high as easily as it can ask for one to stay low.
Floors
The common case: reach at least this much of a named style. 85 briefs in this build state a floor on at least one style, and it is the number your dress has to beat before the rest of the brief is even read.
Ceilings
The rare case, and the one that catches players out: keep a named style at or below a target. 4 briefs state a ceiling, and for those a higher score is a failure rather than a bonus. Decorating is the wrong instinct there.
22 styles are scored on every dress, and 20 of them are named by at least one brief in this build. The other two are still carried by the catalogue and still counted — no brief simply happens to ask for them.
Where next
Want to build a specific style?
This page explains the mechanism. Each of the 22 styles has its own page for the other question — what to pick, in what order, and which briefs ask for it. The number beside each one is how many patterns carry it.
- Casual
- Cool
- Cute
- Daywear
- Eclectic
- Elaborate
- Elegant
- Eveningwear
- Flowers
- Formal
- Glamour
- Gothic
- Patterned
- Playful
- Professional
- Risqué
- Romantic
- Shimmering
- Simple
- Uncomfortable
- Warm
- Workwear
Counts are the catalogue's own contributors, read from the same snapshot as every other figure on this page.
FAQ
Style score questions
How are Style Scores calculated in Dressmaker?
Three sources are added up per style. Pattern tags are added whole. Cloth tags are multiplied by the share of the part the cloth is cut from. Decoration tags are ranked strongest first and discounted for each placement after the first. Every placement also adds one to Elaborate.
Which dress part affects Style most?
The skirt and the bodice. Their fixed shares are 40% and 35% of the cloth's voice when all four parts cut cloth, so between them they decide three quarters of what the dress's cloth contributes.
Do patterns affect Style Score?
Yes, and more directly than anything else. A pattern's declared style weight is added to the total unscaled, so a pattern carrying a style is often worth more than a much heavier cloth on a small part.
Do accessories have diminishing returns?
They are the only source that does. A style's placements are ranked by how strongly they contribute to that style, and each placement after the strongest counts for 85% of the one before it. The declared weights never change; how much of each is counted does.
Does every accessory increase Elaborate?
Yes. Every placement adds 1 to Elaborate whatever it is and whichever style it was chosen for, on top of any weight it declares for Elaborate itself. A metre of trim and a ten-centimetre strip each count as one placement.
Can an accessory reduce a Style Score?
It would be counted with its sign if it declared a negative weight, in the same ranked sequence as everything else — but no decoration in this build declares one. The negatives in the catalogue are in cloth and patterns, and there are plenty of them.
Why did my Style Score round up?
Contributions are added as decimals and the displayed score is that total rounded to the nearest whole number. The brief is checked against the total before rounding, so a score that displays as 65 can still miss a floor of 65.
Does Quality affect Style Score?
No. They are separate systems with separate inputs. Quality is decided by grain, fit and sewing accuracy; Style is decided by what the dress is made of and decorated with. Sewing a dress better will not move its style.
Contributors
Everything that carries a style weight
Three catalogues hold the weights this page explains, and each one can be sorted or filtered by them.
Patterns
Every pattern's declared style tags, filterable by the style they carry. These are the weights that are added whole.
Fabrics
Every cloth's declared tags, sortable by style weight. Remember that what the dress receives depends on the part the cloth is cut from.
Accessories
Every decoration's declared tags, ranked by weight. The strongest one for a style is the placement that keeps its whole value.
Style Calculator
Put a whole dress in and see every style it scores, with each contribution itemised. It is the tool this page explains the arithmetic behind.
Notes
Every figure on this page is computed from the recovered scoring engine the site's workbench, fixer and calculator already score dresses with — the same functions, not a second copy of the arithmetic. Build 25482629.
The four part weights are the catalogue's own numbers, and the shares beside them are those weights divided by 20. The reweighted shares in the interactive block are the same division over whichever parts are left.
The discount is the engine's own constant of 85%, applied per style by rank. The ladder above is generated from it, so a change to the constant moves the table with it.
- Build
- Game data: 25482629
- Current public build
- 25508059
- Last patch check
- 2026-09-27
This page is arithmetic, so it is only as current as the extracted snapshot. A balance patch can move the public build before it moves a single weight here.
The Dressmaker guide holds this page and the rest of the walkthrough in one place.