A block is a pattern without any style features. It maps the body shape plus the ease needed to move, and serves as the base every style pattern is developed from.
No collar, no pockets, no seam lines beyond what the shaping needs. A block holds the minimum: the body measurements, the ease, and the darts required to turn a flat surface into a fitting shell. It is deliberately dull, because everything interesting is added later.
Either it is drafted to a standard size chart, which is how industry works, or it is drafted to one person's measurements, which is how made to measure works. Some workrooms keep both: a house block for the collection and individual blocks for regular clients.
Darts get rotated to other positions, seam lines are cut through the piece, width is added or taken away, details are attached. The fit stays put through all of it, which is the point: once a block fits, every style built on it starts from a known quantity instead of from scratch.
A block is the piece worth digitizing first. It gets reused for every style that follows, so the effort pays back more often than with any single style pattern.
Digitize sewing patterns without tracing.
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