Ready-To-Wear Fashion

From shop to store: prêt-a-porter sales have been a long time coming. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, clothiers' guilds limited the mass production of clothes, but by the 1700s, the US, China, and Europe could all boast flourishing clothing industries.

In 1820, the measuring tape was invented, which helped make consistent sizing methods. And in 1846, Elias Howe's sewing machine further increased the availability of clothes made en masse.

During the American Civil War, the demand for mass-produced uniforms was high. Sizes became standardized so that soldiers order uniforms to fit without much, if any, tailoring. After the war, men's clothes retained the standard sizing, making it easy to buy ready-made clothes.

Department stores grew in popularity. The first of these stores, Le Bon Marche ("the good deal"), opened in Paris in 1838. In New York, Alexander Turney Stewart opened his own store, aptly named AT Stewart, also called The Marble Palace, on Broadway (pictured). The Marble Palace officially became a department store in 1858, and by 182, it was linked with Macy's, B. Altman, and Lord & Taylor to form "The Ladies' Mile" on Broadway. In 1869, Stewart became a millionaire.

Other stores followed. In 1872, Bloomingdale's opened, and Bergdorf-Goodman opened its swanky doors in 1906.

Isaac Singer's electric sewing machine, which had come out in 1889, was another catalyst for ready-made clothing. Clothing factories popped up all over the world, since garment making had never been easier. Using an electric machines in an assembly line, even the most unskilled seamstresses could be of use, as they only had to learn how to make a single piece of clothing. This also created a way for clothing manufacturers to branch out into women's clothing, starting with shirtwaists, which are long, tapered blouses worn with flowing skirts.

Sears, Roebuck & Co., which had begun as a mail-order service in 1839, took on clothing manufacturer Julius Rosenwald as part owner in 1895. With the addition of ready-to-wear clothing available in standard sizes, the catalog grew from 320 pages, to more than 530. In 1925, Sears opened its first retail store. By the end of 1929, 319 stores had popped across America.

Ready-to-wear clothing had found a place in the middle-class, where people were too busy to make their own clothes but not wealthy enough to hire someone to custom-sew them. After World War II, haute couture ready-to-wear began to pop up in Europe from designers like Dior and Givenchy, names still expensive today.

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The Grand Street School

School isn't just for good little boys and girls.

In the 1870s, there thrived in the Lower East Side of New York City, a school open to children of all colors and creeds. Located near the intersection of Grand and Clinton Streets in a dry good shop owned by Prussian immigrant Wolfe Mandelbaum, The Grand Street School became the most highly esteemed school for young criminals in the United States.

By the time the school was established, Wolfe's wife, Fredericka, had become New York City's most well-respected receiver of stolen goods. She employed expert pickpockets and thieves who not only helped fill two large Manhattan warehouses with items that once belonged to the city's finest families, but took in children aged ten and younger to learn how to scam, cutpurse, and rob. Even the adanced classes in safe cracking, burglary, blackmail and con artistry were free of initial charge for astute students.

The best and brightest graduates of the Grand Street School were offered salaried positions, but they had to surrender anything they stole. This offering didn't last long: "Marm" Mandelbaum found several of these employees were double dealing by turning in their better finds to her rivals.

The Grand Street School only operated for six years, when, in an act of rebellion, a well-known police officer's son applied for training. Marm Mandelbaum realized the educational venture was too common and bad for her other businesses. In 1884, Marm Mandelbaum--New York's own Fagin--was captured in a sting operation led by the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

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The Children's Aid Society

For kids without families in Victorian New York City, orphanages and almshouses were the only alternatives to life on the streets. In 1853, Charles Loring Brace changed the future for the city's least fortunate when he founded the Children's Aid Society.

A minister working in Manhattan's notorious Five Points district, Brace was appalled by the slum's widespread abuse and neglect. Taking advantage of the Westward push, Brace and his reformers would place nearly 100,000 children with frontier-bound families. While many of these stories ended well, as Brace hoped, some of the children in the Orphan Trains found themselves in situations similar to or worse than the ones they'd left in the East.

Brace and the Children's Aid Society (CAS) continued their outreach programs within the city, by founding and sponsoring industrial schools for boys, girls, and young women, offering free out-of-city camps and excursions, providing free lunches for children enrolled in schools, and opening the first free dental clinics in New York.

The CAS set up several lodging houses in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, designated for the abandoned, homeless, and orphaned children. These houses offered part-time schooling, but their occupants worked during the day, often as newsies, delivery or messenger boys, in factories or shops. The children in these lodging-houses often did well for themselves later in life. Having created their own family units comprised of other urchins, former CAS kids held reunions, stayed in touch, and became successful business partners.

Today, the Children's Aid Society continues its work as a privately funded organization, helping more than 150,000 children annually through camps, after-school and weekend care, foster care, legal advocacy, health and counseling, and cultural development.

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Thursday Thirteen: The Gangs of New York

In New York City, the gangs of the 19th and early 20th century had some "killer" names--even though historically not all gangs were violent, and worked instead as racial, religious, or vocational unions.

1. Daybreak Boys
2. Dead Rabbits
3. Old Slippers*
4. Cherry Hill
5. Bowery Boys
6. Five Points
7. Midnight Terrors
8. Plug Uglies
9. Gophers (as well as the Lady Gophers and Little Gophers)
10. Roach Guard
11. Hudson Dusters
12. Whyos
13. Swamp Angels**

* Great name, huh? They were a bunch of angry kids--bookbinders apprentices--who made life heck for residents around the Manhattan street Old Slip, according to Luc Sante in Low Life.

** Wouldn't think about a New Yorker relating much to the swamp, eh? Consider that much of Lower Manhattan was more or less wetland and eventually drained and filled in.

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