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In the hundred years from 1450 to 1550, the great success enjoyed by the English woollen industry in continental markets was a result of clothiers organising the rural cloth industry in the West Country, Suffolk/Essex, the Kentish Weald and Newbury and its surrounds, to produce cloth that London merchants required. To do this they allocated extensive capital to cloth production: buying wools, sorting and dyeing them, organising their carding and spinning, putting the yarn out for weaving, and then in some cases owning the mills that fulled the cloth and finally shearing it in-house. The leading clothiers carried wool and cloth inventories, developed strong buying networks and offered merchants credit. Clothiers' control over production declined after 1550 as the government exercised greater control over cloth quality and clothiers' freedoms, and as price competition intensified from coarser cloths and new draperies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article unpacks the historical meanings of an important lace dress, one made for Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (1717–1780) and represented in two prominent paintings by her court portraitist Martin van Meytens. After examining the dress’s history and the circumstances of its production and reception, the article turns to the question of lace’s materiality, which it approaches through concepts derived from recent scholarship in material culture studies. This approach defines the dress less as a dazzling garment and more as a material product, as a thing with specific physical characteristics that interact with a range of conceptual ones. By examining how this dress was made and the implications of that making on its representation, the article seeks to enrich our interpretive results beyond what recent theories of fashion or identity alone would permit. Reaching those results requires thinking extensively about the making of lace, and indeed how lace’s materiality—its ontological status within the materiality of eighteenth-century society—can be theorized to generate meanings from it. The article then traces the lace’s post-garment history, locating at least three fragments that either repurpose parts of it or mimic the appearance of the original. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Slops-sellers provided poor men in northeastern American port cities with ready-made garments in a variety of materials, colors, and patterns. Slops, cut to fit a variety of body types, offered an inexpensive alternative to the bespoke garments worn by most men. Evidence from the period before 1820, pieced together from newspapers, city directories, and shipwreck assemblages, sheds light on this component of the American clothing trade, demonstrating that the manufacturing and display techniques of slop shops laid the groundwork for the ready-made clothing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the household account book of Giles Moore, rector of Horsted Keynes in Sussex from 1656 to 1679, to explore clothing production, supply and consumption in rural England in the second half of the seventeenth century. Moore’s detailed record-keeping provides an insight into the supply and acquisition of textiles and clothing, as well as the clothing choices of a well-to-do country parson. A careful analysis of this underused source reveals Moore’s attitudes to shopping and clothing through his selection of shops, trade and craftsmen, his concerns about excessive prices, and his cloth, clothing and accessory choices. The article examines the range of shopping opportunities that were available to Moore and which ones he made use of, arguing that he exercised a high degree of consumer choice, made possible by a well-developed shopping culture. As well as the costs of his own clothing, Moore’s book records expenditure on that of his teenage niece, Martha Mayhew. In contrast to Moore’s shopping choices, we can see that Martha’s were considerably more circumscribed. This is consistent with recent studies of seventeenth-century consumption which have identified men rather than women as primary shoppers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In about 1920, Miss Edith Hodson set up a draper's and haberdasher's shop at the family home in front of her brother Edgar's lock factory in the Midlands town of Willenhall. This article explains how the author became involved with the shop's remaining stock and looks at some of the customers' experiences of it. It goes on to describe the collection of clothes and related items, mostly comprising working-class women's and children's garments and accessories from 1920 to the early 1960s. The collection includes Utility pieces, quantities of haberdashery, and costume jewellery and cosmetics of the 1950s. A large archive has also been preserved of the shop's paperwork (bills, invoices, bank statements, correspondence), warehouse catalogues, advertising pamphlets and women's magazines. The ownership of the collection was passed to Walsall Museum in February 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 'Developments in Dress History' conference at the University of Brighton in December 2011. Based on research from the author's master's thesis, 'La mode en France durant la Première Guerre mondiale', written at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, this article examines the declining relationship between the Chambre syndicale de la couture parisienne, the couturiers and the seamstresses, which ignited an industry-wide labour strike in May 1917. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the nineteenth century, in France, the UK, and the USA, there was a rapid development of ready-to-wear clothing and of its consumption. In this context, one phenomenon allows us to understand more fully the overall changes in attitudes toward fashion, clothing, and the body: the craze for rubber clothing from the beginning of the 1840s. This material appeared to be miraculous, and proved to be equally useful in underwear and in rainwear. Manufacturers dreamt about seamless garments and about totally adjustable pieces of clothing. Moreover, rubber clothing was thought of as hygienic, as it could be easily cleaned. From the 1850s to the late 1870s, rubber cloth conquered both public streets and intimate private life. But rubber was not only used in clothing. From the beginning, rubber was a material not only for outdoor clothes but also for orthopedics and for the enhancement of comfort. Mackintosh (UK), Goodyear and Roxbury India Rubber (USA), and Hutchinson and Rattier & Guibal (France) were the major manufacturers that produced rubber shoes, raincoats, collars, and cuffs, while orthopedists made corsets in order to straighten bodies, as well as hernial bandages, pessaries, belts against onanism, and other medical appliances. Rubber cloth hugged the intimate bourgeois body: corsets, garters, socks, and braces initially, and in the early 1880s, rubber condoms. In this way, rubber became the material of unproductive sexual pleasure. Over time, rubber clothing came to be regarded as shameful and disturbing. Around 1890, after the unprecedented craze for rubber, the bourgeoisie gave up their rubber clothes in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1600 and 1850 Europe was reshaped economically, culturally, and materially-the secondhand clothing trade was a vital factor in these events. Cloth and clothing represented among the most important and costly purchases for generations, lying at the heart of household budgeting, intersecting routinely with markets. The secondhand trade was a unique micro-enterprise vehicle, as well as a growing commerce for entrepreneurs. It stimulated retailing and featured in international trade. Throughout these centuries, the scale of secondhand commerce, circulating in and beyond Europe, expanded enormously as economies were reshaped by industrial expansion and extra-European trade. During the past decades scholars have lifted the study of the secondhand trade from its previous obscurity, recognizing its organic connection to cultures and commerce. I now propose three stages in the evolution of the secondhand clothing trade, shaped by the underlying transformations of northwest Europe, suggesting the ways in which the patterns of economic and social change affected this sector over time. The three stages are: (1) transition from scarcity, (2) growing abundance, and (3) industrial plenty. By defining these tripartite divisions we can better understand the evolution of the secondhand clothing trade, its features, and relative significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of clothes in the survival strategies of the labouring poor in eighteenth-century Madrid, as well as the means of supply and distribution of these products, which included both mercantile (including buying and selling, pawning and payments in kind) and non-mercantile relations (including inheritance, charity and theft). This approach aims, firstly, at bringing to light the role of second-hand clothing trades and markets in the eighteenth-century European urban economy, together with the importance of non-mercantile methods of provision; secondly, at providing some clues to explain the increasing consumption of textiles in eighteenth-century towns whose populations were experiencing a loss of purchasing power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the history of fashion and the clothing trade in the early modern period in Florence, Italy. The high consumer demand for clothing in the mid-16th to early-17th centuries in the city is particularly highlighted. Details are given describing the rapid growth in the clothing production and trade sectors at the onset of the early modern period which led to highly complex fashion networks and social constructions relating to personal dress in the city's different classes. Additional mention is given to credit relationships, the diversity of clothing items between social groups, and commercial networking in the trade.

This article examines some of the purchases of personal clothing by Henry Temple, first Viscount Palmerston (1676–1757) recorded in his surviving account books, and goes on to discuss whether he could be said to have had separate town and country wardrobes. A version of this paper was presented at the Costume Society Symposium: Town and Country Style in 2007 and is based on the author's research for a doctoral thesis on the subject of Henry Temple's personal papers at the Broadlands Estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the evidence pertaining to and identify the six types of innovators and market leaders in the clothing industry in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. First, batch producers were advertisers who promoted a specialism in some simple but fashionable garment. Second, makers of standard clothing, most notably for the army, navy, charities, schools, mourning wear and emigrants' outfits. Third, merchants and wholesalers were involved in shirt making, hosiery and underwear. Fourth, manufacturers of patent clothing and accessories who used sophisticated or unfamiliar materials. Fifth, mercers and drapers who evolved into departmental stores. Sixth, clothing manufacturers from Leeds.

The author introduces this special edition of the journal featuring articles on the garment industry presented at a Pasold Research Fund workshop held on September 12, 2007 at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England. Articles include “Clothing the poor in early nineteenth-century England,” by Peter Jones, “Sartorial practices and autobiographies: British men, 1880-1939,” by Laura Ugolini and “The marketing of suits 1890-1970: Evidence from Business records,” by Katrina Honeyman.