Ready To Wear.

Racks of ready to wear clothing, Lord & Taylor, New York.  1948.

We recently had a big item on sewing.

Well, sort of. We had this item:

"Government Housewives". Sewing, sewing and seamstresses.

American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.

That entry, concluded with this:

So here we have an interesting trend, or rather several trends.  

And one of them again has to do with the division of labor.  Back in an era when clothes were more expensive, mending them was more common, and while both sexes did it, it fell more to women than men.  This wasn't part of the "patrimony", it had to do with the tightness of resources.

But more than that was going on, and to we really need to take a look back even further to really appreciate the change.

Which we'll do next. . . 

Which brings us to this.

Prior to the early 19th Century, pre manufactured clothing didn't exist at all.

This is something that's difficult for us to really imagine now.  We don't think of our daily clothing being homemade, or anything of the type.  Indeed, this is so much the case that we pass right over the references to it on the rare instances in which they occur. For instance, in the song House of the Rising Sun, which we discussed here recently.  In the classic Eric Burdon version, we hear:

My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new blue jeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans

And as we know from the lengthy discussion the other day, in the original version we find:

My mother she's a tailor

Sews those new blue jeans

My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God

He drinks down in New Orleans

What?  Sew blue jeans?

Now, in fairness, my mother, who had learned to sew and wasn't bad at it (although she doesn't compare in that category to my mother-in-law, who is a true and very talented seamstress) actually did sew some trousers in the 70s that I can recall, right about the time that women started to wear trousers.  As we've also discussed here in the past, women didn't really wear trousers until the 20th Century, or didn't wear them much, and it was the combined impact of the First and Second World Wars that really started to open that up.  Contrary to popular myth, the Second World War did really move women into the workplace, but it did certainly help move them into trousers.  As part of that my mother sewed some jeans, and they truly had really long wear as I can remember her wearing them into the 90s. They weren't blue jeans, however.

And they were bell-bottoms.

But I digress.

Royal Navy sailors, 1850s.

Bell-bottoms are a good place to start this discussion, in fact, as before the American Civil War the only pre-made ready to wear clothing of any kind for civilians was made for sailors.  Sailors were their own rootless class, and they didn't often have wives and sisters at home to make clothes for them, particularly if they shipped out of an English port and wore their clothes out prior to returning to it, but they stopped in an American port, or any version of that you might imagine.

Interestingly, the only other group for whom ready to wear clothing were made, at least in North America, was for slaves.

Port towns had ready to wear clothing made in a single size.  Most sailors were pretty good with a needle and thread as it was necessary knowledge for the age of sail, and they or a member of the crew had to tailor what they bought to fit after they bought it.

This, by the way, was a pretty common male role.  In addition to civilian sailors, and slaves, soldiers also had ready to wear clothing issued to them, and it too tended to be altered by a member of the company, which in the case of cavalrymen at any rate, was usually a saddler, who had to be particularly adept with needle and thread.  Interestingly, this role carried through all the way to the end of the horse cavalry and artillery and was picked up by parachute riggers for the airborne during World War Two, who likewise were good with needle and thread and who heavily altered the uniforms issued to U.S. paratroopers.  Modern riggers should be envious of their Second World War predecessors skills.

Clothing for slaves was advertised as "Negro Clothing", for what it's worth.  It was produced by seamstresses working for low pay, better than that for slaves, which was nonexistent, but hardly a wealthy class.  Singer, the sewing machine company, actually noted in its advertisements that its sewing machine was particularly suitable for making "Negro clothing".

As an example of the operation of Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, it was the Civil War itself that really got ready to wear clothing rolling.  Military clothing, unlike that for sailors and slaves, was sized.  What it wasn't, prior to the war, was massed produced. The war took care of that.

While we don't tend to think of military clothing of being readily adaptable to civilian wear, in facts it's an old maxim, which had broad truth to it, that all men's clothing comes from war or farming, although in recent years some of it seems to have come from toddler departments.  While the uniforms of Civil War ear soldiers don't look immediately close to civilian wear, particularly as the war went on, they were much closer than we might at first imagine.  In terms of clothing, the soldier wore wool undergarments (an unpleasant thought) wool trousers, a cotton shirt, and a wool coat year around, unless for some reason he chose to strip himself of the coat in hot weather, which was rare, or to equip himself with some civilian clothing that could be worn under the wool trousers and coat.

Mass production of Army uniforms lead to post-war mass production of clothing in general.  The entire industry exploded after the war, as clothing was really expensive in general, and this offered a cheaper way to obtain this basic need.  By the 1920s, ready to wear clothing had so expanded that it had taken over the female clothing market in addition to the male.  

As mass production clothing rose, it had a leveling effect.  Finely tailored bespoke clothing had a much different appearance than "home spun".  It was easy to tell the difference from a wealthy person, or an in town professional, and a farmer or rural person simply by this fact.  When mass-produced clothing came in, it not only represented a cheaper option, it was frankly also generally better looking than homespun was likely to be.  That upgraded the appearance of people of more modest means, and over time it also caused those of middle class income to opt for the cheaper option as well, and even some wealthy individuals did.  It's no wonder then that when we look at scenes of the 1920s through the early 60s that so many people we know to be of modest means were "well-dressed". While still a significant expenditure, they were able to "dress up" to a higher standard, while those of middle class and even wealthy means would "dress down" to it.  There were, of course, exceptions.

This didn't mean that everything was off the rack, and particularly with more dress wear, some tailoring was needed.  If a person bought a suit, for example, it would often need alternation by a tailor. The same was true for dresses, with it often being the case that more was required for women's wear.  Still, there's a big difference between going into Brooks Brothers, for example, and buying a suit that's finished by a tailor, and going into a tailor to have a suit made.

For much in the way of daily wear, however, ready to wear really took over by the early 20th Century.  People generally don't have, for examples, shirts made, J. Gatsby not with standing.  Most sizing problems, even with suits, have long been adjusted with belts and suspenders.  Nobody has their "new blue jeans" sewn by a seamstress, and only a few would ever have them tailored.

Which gets us to a claim I saw the other day that "everything now is poorly made".  Is it?  We'll take a look at that.

Sources:

Much of this entry relies upon the excellent:

A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing

Sofi Thanhauser on the Early Days of Ready-to-Wear

By Sofi Thanhauser