CHAPTER ONE

Part One

Women

Then

The Beginnings of the Fashion Industry

The American Influence

In the late 1850s, Ellen Demorest, known as Nell to her family, carefully laid out two dozen patterns in her Philadelphia living room so that women customers could touch them and see for themselves how the sleeves, collar, skirt, and other parts of a garment looked on paper forms. Demorest had been a successful milliner and now her new venture was selling patterns of women's and children's clothing, in specific sizes. Nell, with help from her sister, Kate Curtis, was eager to explain how the thin paper patterns would enable a sewer to transform a piece of cloth into a fashionable, well-fitted dress. Both women had apprenticed in traditional dressmaking for seven years. Along the way, they had developed a more precise dress-cutting system and their children's dress charts had won two medals for their accuracy in 1853 in an international exhibit at the Crystal Palace, a huge hall referred to as the Temple of National Industry.

Nell and Kate were taking risks in this new venture. Would women really be interested in trying these patterns? Some advance publicity had been sent out for the opening day, and Demorest was gambling on a hunch. Clothing patterns weren't new, but a sewing machine that could be used in the home had just been invented, and Nell reasoned that the time was right to offer sized paper patterns that were inexpensive, uncomplicated to use, current with fashion details, and compatible with the new sewing machine. She wanted to make them available to women all over the country. It was a first because patterns hadn't been mass marketed before.

If Demorest was nervous, reassurance came quickly. A large crowd of women dressed in the bell-shaped skirts of the day had gathered outside the front door, down the stairs, and well along the sidewalk, waiting to enter and eager to see her new patterns in specific sizes.

By 1875, Nell Demorest's business had distributed 3 million paper patterns internationally. A working mother with four children, she was building a business empire. She traveled overseas to report on the fashion world and ran a huge fashion emporium on East Fourteenth Street in New York City that sold her patterns as well as custom-made clothing. Among her diverse ventures were also a cosmetics business and a tea business that she had specifically established for poor women, to enable them to earn commissions.

The key marketing vehicle for the patterns was a fashion quarterly launched by her husband, William Demorest. Mme. Demorest's Mirror of Fashions first appeared in 1860, with advertisements for the patterns and a free sample attached. Popular even during the Civil War, when it reached a national circulation of 60,000, the fashion quarterly eventually became a monthly. The magazine staff included American designers who developed the fashions illustrated in each issue, and Nell's sister Kate, who adapted French designs to more sedate American tastes.

The saleswomen in the emporium showrooms were well paid and fairly treated; they included African-American women, who received the same wages as other workers and were encouraged to attend company functions. Nell Demorest also quietly crusaded for women's rights, and backed the formation of the first women's club.

From Clothing to Fashion

Although Nell Demorest was an important creative force in her time, the role American women played in developing fashion didn't begin with her or even with the women of the colonial period. The stage had been set centuries before. The concept of paper patterns had been around since the Middle Ages, when European tailors used them as measuring guides to cut cloth. During this period, society began to become stratified; social classes based on differences in wealth and position began to appear. The different groups wanted their clothing to reflect their status. They wanted to wear clothing that would set them apart. That's when fashion began to emerge.

The western part of the world is generally credited with being the area in which tailors and dressmakers produced most of their work, and medieval Europe is where the momentum began. Historical records show that some women were employed to work as tailors outside the home around this time. Tax rolls of 1379 and 1380 from two particular towns in England--Oxford and West Redding--list several women as seamstresses and shapesters, another term for tailor. Women also made silk and thread; they were working industriously at this craft in Florence, Italy; Paris, France; and London, England.

Women were also beginning to establish their own guilds. Paris had exclusively female silk- and thread-makers' guilds in the fourteenth century. Female guilds in the textile and clothing trades existed in other French towns, as well as in villages and cities in Germany, Italy, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. And by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the production of women's clothing was basically a female domain.

Guilds had first appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe, as informal groups of both women and men who worked at the same craft in the same area of a town or village. At first, the guilds used their power as a group to organize feast-day processions in honor of the patron saint of their craft, or they collected money for a guild member who was ill or experiencing difficult times. They became much more influential in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially the merchant guilds that lobbied their local rulers and won control of trading rights. With these rights, they were able to acquire wealth and establish a power base against any competition.

In time, these guilds regulated training in their craft, who could be admitted to the craft, the hours in their workday, quality standards, and prices. In predominantly male guilds, wives or daughters of craftsmen could be admitted. But some male guilds admitted women on their own merit.

Important changes appeared in the developing industrial landscape. Local village production began to shift to specialized regional production, with the goods sold for long-distance trade. New technologies undermined the painstaking artisanal work of the craft guilds. As male workers felt threatened economically, they protected themselves by excluding women and enforcing guild laws. In Lyon, France, a silk guild known as the Fabrique de Lyon, founded in 1545, restricted women from working as loom operators, an occupation that received better pay . Even in the all-female guilds, women were still restricted from making the most lucrative products. For example, in London, women silk weavers, no matter how skilled, could produce only piecework. Male silk weavers had the exclusive right to make the whole cloth. This privilege was sanctioned by the guild's rights that the men had won from their rulers.

Couturiers and Haute Couture

Two developments helped women make significant gains in the fashion world. In 1675, French seamstresses, angry that only master tailors had the right to create women's dresses, brought their own petition to the throne. They sought and won the privilege of designing women's dresses--previously reserved exclusively for men. After a three-year apprenticeship in cutting and dressmaking, women could open their own businesses as couturiers, or seamstresses. Gradually, rulers of neighboring countries followed France's lead, and granted the right to design dresses to women. Later, the term haute couture, which means "high sewing" in French, would be used for the work of designers who prepared new fashions each season.

About a hundred years later, a woman named Rose Bertin, a dressmaker, designer, and style adviser to the French queen Marie Antoinette, introduced what we call couture, or custom-made, design. Bertin was also a milliner and sold bonnets, fans, frills, and lace to clients including members of royal families from Paris, London, Madrid, and St. Petersburg. Because the shape of women's dresses was basically the same from year to year, milliners were in demand for the creative ways they could arrange accessories and make clothing look different and unique, and Bertin was skilled at this. Bertin visited the French queen and her court twice a week, listened to their requests, made suggestions, and then created new looks. Showing a flair for marketing, Bertin had her new styles recreated in miniature, as garments for dolls, then sent the dolls to courts throughout Europe. These dolls became enduring fashion staples that traveled across continents; colonial women in America relied on them for the latest European styles.

The Art of Homemade Clothing

Native Americans had already been living in North America for 20,000 years when the first European settlers arrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The North American Indian groups the settlers encountered were using weaving techniques in making their clothing. After the arrival of Spanish settlers, weaving workshops were set up in some of the Pueblo Christian missions in the valley of the Rio Grande. The cloth produced was so prized by the Spaniards that it served as a form of tax payment; thirty-three inches of cloth had to be provided by each family as a tax payment to the Spaniards. To escape Spanish rule, some of the Pueblo Indians fled to the Navajo region in the late seventeenth century. There, they taught the Navajo women some of their special weaving techniques. Some other Native American clothing makers were honored within their groups. Among the Plains Indians, the Lakota bead and quill specialists were prominent.

The European settlers moved into a land with trees that grew down to the water's edge, and with rocky areas, sand hills, and swamps. In the early days, they concentrated on survival. Colonial women worked along with men at what historians call "household manufactures," producing items they needed to survive in this wild, new place. Among their responsibilities was the making of clothing.

What did making clothing involve? Many garments were made from flax, a crop that was planted in May and then processed through a number of stages to make linen. Flax is a plant with a tough core and outer layer, and it takes perseverance to extract its fibers. The stalks were cut at the roots at the end of June or July and laid out to dry. Then they were combed with an iron wire comb, and bundled and stacked. The stacks were then piled under running water so the leaves would rot. After five days, the leaves were removed. The fibers were separated yet again by a heavy instrument.

The next step involved the spinning wheel, a common fixture in the early American household. With it, family-grown flax could be spun into fine linen thread. A low wheel propelled by a foot pedal enabled women to spin the flax. They could rock a baby and tend to other chores while spinning. After making the thread, there was yet another process before the thread could be woven into cloth. The women soaked the thread in hot water, then in ashes, and then in clean water, as a method of bleaching. The final product could then be woven into garments, towels, tablecloths, and other everyday goods.

Wool, from the coats sheared from sheep, was made in a separate process, which yielded a thread that could be knitted into stockings and mittens or woven into cloth. Wool was simpler to prepare than flax, but a different type of wheel was used to spin wool, and the process involved a lot of walking back and forth. A woman might walk a total of twelve miles in an ordinary day of spinning. Sometimes wool and linen were combined; wool provided warmth and linen, strength.

Colonial families were sometimes large, and a woman might need to spin and make clothes for ten children, herself, and her husband. The states of Massachusetts and Connecticut recognized the importance of spinning in a law enacted in 1640, which stated that every family had to spin a specific amount of flax each year or they would be fined. But spinning was not always solely labor--spinning competitions and matches became a common form of entertainment.

Because of the colonists' way of life, clothing was basically plain and functional. Homespun material was much more durable and economical than material that could be purchased. In the pre-Revolutionary period, making cloth also served as a political statement, as the colonists tried to avoid buying imported goods to protest taxes and import restrictions imposed by the British Parliament. Colonial women banded together and agreed to boycott British goods, rejecting imported tea for their own herbal teas, and wearing only clothing that they could spin or weave themselves.

Clothing that Won the War

Not much has been written about colonial women's contributions to the Revolutionary War effort, but it was significant. Wives of soldiers provided many of the army's support services, such as cooking, washing clothes, and nursing. Some became spies and couriers, and a few even fought. They also contributed clothing--clothing that provided protection and kept the troops warm. When the war began, and army supplies were scarce, a call was sent out for 13,000 warm coats for the Continental army, to be ready in time for a winter assault against the British. Colonial women filled the order. These warm, homemade coats were prized. Families of soldiers killed at Bunker Hill were given payments so that their coats could be passed on to other soldiers.

Late in the war, a national women's organization that became known as the Ladies Association raised money for the troops by going from house to house asking for contributions. A group of New Jersey women collected the substantial sum of $15,500.The women wanted a guarantee that the money collected would be directed specifically for the troops' needs, but General George Washington had other thoughts and there was a tug-of-war by letter over the money. Washington finally suggested that the women use the money to make shirts for the soldiers. Linen was in short supply, but the women completed more than 2,000 shirts in three months, and these were handed over to the deputy quartermaster general in Philadelphia in December of 1780. Each creator inscribed her name in the shirt as a sign of support.

After the Revolutionary War, the preference for homemade clothing continued. Importing clothing and fabrics meant relying on other countries, and Americans had fought so hard to be free that independence and self-sufficiency were valued in all areas of life. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton wrote that four-fifths of the American people, in some areas, made all their clothing at home. Also, to protect the newly developing American textile manufacturers, Congress instituted a tax on imported cloth, including cotton, wool, and linen.

In addition to making the thread and cloth, colonial women also worked at dying the cloth. They created colors for designs for their cloth by boiling blossoms, leaves, roots, berries, and bark. The colors that they created were surprisingly vibrant. From the indigo plant, they produced shades of blue. Red hues came from the madder root, or from ground-up cochineal insects. The colonial women experimented to develop recipes to make their dyes: hickory bark would produce a greenish yellow color when mixed with some alum, and walnut dye became more intense when a solution containing copper was added.

However, not everyone wore homespun, home-dyed clothing. Fashion did exist in the colonies, and Boston and New York were the major fashion cities. "Babies," descendants of Rose Bertin's dolls, were little mannequins dressed in the latest dresses, hats, coats, and accessories brought over from England and Europe. Their miniature garments were copied by milliners and dressmakers in major towns and cities. Luxurious fabrics were imported from Europe by prosperous merchants of the North and South.

Milliners were important people. Demand for their skills had begun in the Middle Ages, when Milan was the main source for fashion and accessories. The term milliner--a merchant who sold hats--evolved from the Italian word Milaners.

Hats were as significant as women's dresses; besides being an accessory, they shaded the face from the sun and kept the head warm in the blustery months. Although hat styles were said to have changed seventeen times between 1784 and 1786, most women couldn't afford the luxury of a new hat every year. A good milliner could make the latest hat, or she could also revive the previous year's version, using ribbons, flowers, and feathers to completely change its look.

In the young United States, retail millinery shops began to appear. These were small local shops, usually run by the owner--most often a woman--who dealt directly with the customer. Wholesale milliners emerged on a large scale by the mid-nineteenth century, making enough hats to supply shops and department stores.

Nell Demorest's career path provides a good example of how these retail and wholesale millinery enterprises developed. In 1843, at age eighteen, Demorest started her own millinery business, with an assistant, in her hometown of Saratoga, in upstate New York. It was a good location because Saratoga was a prosperous resort town that in the summer attracted a wealthy crowd of stylish women. Ambitious and creative, Demorest relocated to troy, New York, a year later. Troy was a leading millinery center then and Demorest eventually found a job as a supervisor for a millinery wholesaler with merchandising markets in New York and Philadelphia. Wholesale milliners employed women in local small towns to work on hats in their own homes, and it was one of the last businesses to transfer from the home to factory.

Copyright © 1996 Linda Leuzzi. All rights reserved.