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 Price of Beauty

In an essay entitled, "A Lady of Fashion", historian Herbert Asbury looked at the price of keeping couture in the decade following the American Civil War. He detailed the usually painful trends in garment construction and cosmetics, and the price thereof.

"The butterfly of the eighteen-sixties and the early eighteen-seventies staggered forth under the burden of an infinite variety of beautifying apparatus constructed of steel, iron, wire, cotton, wood horsehair, and wool, all attached to her person by straps, tape, and mucilage."

The exaggerated hourglass figure was a must-have for dames of postbellum New York: a small, rounded head, full chest, tiny waist, voluminous skirt, and diminutive feet. The dentist of the day went far above simple teeth-whitening when it came to cosmetic procedures, and would regularly "provide plump cheeks...by filling them out with hard composition pads running upward along each side of the mouth. These were called 'plumpers,' and some were so large as to give the appearance of mumps. They often shifted position, so that a woman wearing them was apt to speak in a sort of whispering mumble."

False calves, cotton or wool padding for the arms, foot wrapping, and pads for "sharp and angular knees" all contributed to the desired effect. Wigs, false curls, and "ratting" were popular, and once the hair was piled, knotted, or braided into place, it was topped with powder, flour, glitter, or gold dust. The "widow's peak" was so vogue that women clipped or shaved their head around the hairstyle.

While tattooing was still improper, it was all the rage to paint the palms of a woman's hands in a vivid color, either solidly or with shapes or patterns, and to delicately trace the veins on the back of the hand with blue ink. Women painted their eyes with India ink and dropped or rubbed Belladonna to dilate their pupils. Not surprisingly, most society women eventually went blind.

The crème de la crème in New York didn't just paint their faces, they had the makeup set with a plastic enamel. Shops advertised the ability to keep the face and bosom enameled for up to a year (this cost $1000, almost $15,000 now), but there are no records to indicate that any woman had this done. Arsenic and white lead were the bases to these skin enamels, and if properly applied it did not interfere with muscle movement. "It was eventually abandoned because the flashier branches of society carried it to ludicrous extremes."

In The Women of New York, George Ellington gives us a very long, very detailed price list of what it took per annum to keep a fashionable woman in New York: approximately $20,000 a year. That's $300,000 of our US dollars. Can you imagine? If you want to check out Mr. Ellington's views of New York's women (and the infamous price list), you can read The Women of New York online.

reference: Herbert Asbury, "A Lady of Fashion", All Around the Town, 1929

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