The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Stana Nenadic

The majority of businesses in the garment-making sector engaged in direct bespoke production for personal customers, but smaller firms also undertook work on a subcontracting basis for the ready-made trade, which was dominated by large retail clothiers and male-owned enterprises. The city of Edinburgh occupied an important place in the national distribution of bespoke garment production for women. London was the location of the most important dressmaking and millinery establishments, and any provincial dressmaker with aspirations to a business career was required to spend some part of her training in a London fashion house. Needless to say, a training in Paris was an even greater business asset. A handful of provincial centres, dominated by Edinburgh and Dublin, with long traditions of servicing a wealthy population, occupied a second level of fashion production and the major fashion houses in these cities played a role in the production of high quality garments, as well as trained dressmakers.(32)

The social investigator and journalist Henry Mayhew, describing independent dressmakers and milliners for readers of the Morning Chronicle, identified a number of distinct types of business and their associated market and employment strategies.(33) Though referring to London in 1850, such businesses and strategies were also typical of large provincial towns, and were characteristic of the sector throughout the century. A "first-rate house of business" had extensive showrooms, supplied every kind of ladies wearing apparel other than shoes, and employed five or six showroom women, six or seven first hands, and fifteen to twenty young women as second or third hands. Such businesses took few apprentices or "improvers" because they traded on the high quality of their output, which required a skilled workforce. First-rate houses specialised in court dresses and in the costume required by the very rich, and were largely concentrated in London. Second-rate houses had customers drawn from the middle rather than the upper classes, but engaged in a similarly high quality of output. Both types of business invested great energies into the cultivation of a fashionable image and focused their production on the skilled task of designing and making the bodice and sleeves to a garment. Skirt-making, a simple but laborious task before the wide use of sewing machines, was undertaken on an out-work basis by home-based seamstresses of limited skill.

Mayhew also identified third and fourth rate dressmaking houses, which were distinguished from one another mainly by the textiles used, the output from the former dominated by silk, and from the latter by cotton. These types of business were patronised by the wives of "tradesmen and mechanics" and the lower middle classes, and they made all parts of the garment, including the simple but labour-intensive skirt. These were the most numerous type of firm in the women's garment-making trades and they collectively employed the largest numbers of workers, generally in units of up to six young women. There was another very numerous class of dressmaker, the private or self-employed women who visited customers in their own homes and made all parts of the garment, but employed no assistance.