God’s favor. Eventually the laws attempting to dictate dress in the American colonies proved unenforceable and were abandoned.

This meant that for New Englanders of means, plain and dull-colored dress was not among the hardships of the New World. Bills and inventories record “pinck hose,” “green sleeves,” “a Scarlet petticoat with Silver Lace.” One Massachusetts governor was noted for the gold-fringed gloves he wore, and another ordered several dozen scarlet coats to be sent to him from England.

Shipping lists, portraits, advertisements, court records, and tailors’ bills give evidence of the fashion ties that bound prosperous American colonists to their counterparts overseas. Norwich garters—decorative ornaments worn by Sir Walter Raleigh—came over on the Mayflower, and a Madame Padishal of Plymouth, Massachusetts, posed for her portrait in a low-necked black velvet gown with a lace whisk to cover her bare neck, the latest court fashion in France.

Class distinctions had not been left on Old World shores, and fashion was clear evidence of social standing. Affluent American settlers eagerly sought news of style changes in Europe.

Margaret Winthrop, the wife of the governor of Massachusetts, insisted on “the civilest fashion now in use” when she ordered gowns from John Smith, the family tailor in London. But at that distance even personal tailoring could not guarantee good fit, as Smith made clear in a letter accompanying a coat for the governor: “Good Mr. Winthrop, I have, by Mr. Downing’s directions sent you a coat. . . . For the fittness I am a little vncerteyne, but if it be too bigg or too little it is esie to amend, vnder the arme to take in or let out the lyning; the outside may be let out in the gathering or taken in also without any prejudice.”

Not all clothing in colonial America, however, was made by a tailor. Elegantly dressed ladies or gentlemen in silks and brocades from London were outnumbered by craftsmen in leather aprons, female servants in simple petticoats and jackets and the men in livery, seamen and farmers coming to market in homespun trousers, and, in the South, slaves in hand-me-downs. A person’s clothing indelibly marked an eighteenth-century man or woman.

Housewives made most of the clothing worn by average people. Using both imported and domestic fabrics, colonial women made their own clothes and their children’s, and such simply constructed men’s clothes as undergarments, shirts, and trousers. But a fashionably cut coat or smooth-fitting breeches were beyond their skills. By the second half of the eighteenth century, breeches were worn so skintight that—the story goes—in Alexandria, Virginia, they were hung on hooks and the wearer-to-be put them on by mounting three steps and letting himself into them from above. Small wonder, then, that the making of jacket, waistcoat, and breeches was left to the art of the tailor.

Preindustrial American clothing was mostly made to order. The well-to-do kept measurements on file with a London tailor,

ordering, perhaps, as one gentleman did, “A Suit of Lemmon Collour Brocaded or flowered Lustering the best that can be had for Ten Shillings pr yard made Fashionable and Genteel to the Inclosed measures. . . .” And Americans—even after the Revolution—announced their stations in life sartorially. High-hatting went to a ridiculous extreme. Martha Washington may have worn a modest and democratic mobcap, but hats worn by her contemporaries abounded with flowers, vegetables, windmills (that turned), shepherds with their sheep, and, in one case, a naval battle featuring a spun-glass French ship of war. Feathers as much as a yard and a half high topped turbans and other hats. At a New Year’s Assembly in 1814, according to a news account of the day, Dolley Madison’s “towering feathers above the excessive throng distinctly pointed out her station wherever she moved.”

“Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds,” George Washington advised his nephew Bushrod. But Washington himself loved fine clothes and believed that the dignity of a new nation depended to a degree on the outward appearance of its leaders. Records show that John Hancock owned a scarlet velvet suit. And on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence wasn’t even mentioned in Thomas Jefferson’s daybook. He made only one entry that day: “For Seven pair of Womens Gloves, 20 shillings.”

Not all Americans followed the latest fashions. Benjamin Franklin, a plain dresser himself, urged his wife and daughter to eschew their feathers and silks for honest calico. And at Harvard College a dress code prohibited “Schollars” from wearing “strange, ruffianlike, or new-fangled fashions.” But it is doubtful whether the “Schollars” abandoned their “lavish dress” any more than the Franklin women turned in their silks or the young Puritan Hannah Lyman gave up her hood.

By the end of the eighteenth century, class distinctions in dress were beginning to be threatened by new developments in technology. On December 20, 1791, Samuel Slater harnessed the waterwheel at Carpenter’s Clothier Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to the falls of the Blackstone River and thereby brought the Industrial Revolution to this country. Slater, a young English immigrant, combined waterpower and a superior system of cotton yarn manufacture to produce the first power-spun yarn in America. A few years later Eli Whitney’s cotton gin pulled the fibers away from the cotton seeds—a technique that made the mass cultivation of cotton economically feasible. By 1814 the Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell had collaborated with the machinist Paul Moody to perfect a power loom superior to the English models. At Lowell’s Boston Manufacturing Company of Waltham, for the first time in history, every process of clothmaking was performed under one roof by power machinery.

An ample supply of fabric encouraged an emerging ready-to-wear industry. Early in the nineteenth century clothing manufacture also began to move to the factory, where, as the century progressed, steadily improved machinery was to make much shorter

work of what hands alone could do.

One of the earliest clothing manufactories was the United States Army Clothing Establishment, begun in Philadelphia at the start of the War of 1812 to meet the need for enlisted men’s uniforms. It organized production into several key operations. The uniform was cut from a standardized pattern; the pieces were packaged with buttons, padding, lining, facing cloth, and thread and then sent out for sewing to “widows and other meritorious females,” who could by “close application . . . make twelve shirts pr week and the same number of pants.” Civilian manufacturers followed the model of inside and outside labor division provided by this “immense Government Tailor’s Shop.”

Military organization may have been precise, but the fit of the uniforms was not. The real hero of the ready-to-wear revolution was the custom tailor. This specialist, who had once sewn only for those able to afford his individualized services, rescued ready-made clothing from the realm of “slops”—cheap, coarse, and ill-fitting garments that marked their wearers as second-class citizens. Early in the nineteenth century custom tailors began to modify their techniques in order to manufacture ready-made clothing that was cheaper than custom, yet fashionable and reasonably well fitting. The tailor had a new weapon: the tape measure. “Scientific principles” helped tailors establish standardized rules for measurement that meant they could make not only styles for individuals but apparel for everybody. By 1832 most tailors carried a large stock of ready-made clothing.

“Clothing is created out of motivation,” says Claudia Kidwell. “The wealthy wanted to maintain distinctions. Everyone else wanted to close the gap. When the working man took off his apron, he wanted to be part of the gentry. He wore frockcoat, vest and trousers to work, then took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves.”

By mid-century the editor Horace Greeley could write, “No distinction of clothing between gentlemen and otherwise can be seen in the United States.” Men—but not women—could purchase in a range of prices a great variety of garments manufactured in Baltimore, Newark, Albany, Rochester, Philadelphia, and New York.

Representative of the Eastern manufactories was the New York retail clothing shop founded in 1818 by Henry Sands Brooks as a “gentlemen’s store run by gentlemen” and by 1850 known as Brooks Bros. Before the widespread use of the sewing machine in clothing manufacture, cloth was inspected and cut, and trimmings for garments provided, by a small number of people in the shop. A pool of more than a thousand seamstresses on the outside sewed the pieces together by hand and added the finishing touches. Returned and found satisfactory, the garments then went to the sales department. In 1859 Brooks Bros, advertised a “large and complete assortment of Ready-Made Clothing and Furnishings/Goods of superior style and make.”

Thanks to

ready-made clothes, a common style of dressing found favor across the land. Clothes made on the Eastern seaboard were available across the country. In Philadelphia the Clothing Palace offered “the most extensive assortment and the finest quality of READY-MADE GARMENTS for the lowest cash price in plain figures.” Alfred Munroe of New Orleans challenged anyone to match his twenty-three hundred coats, nineteen hundred pantaloons, fifteen hundred vests, and eight thousand shirts. San Francisco’s Keyes & Co. advertised "$100,000 stock in the very latest styles.”

For promotional vigor, however, it was hard to top Boston’s George Simmons, who described his store, Oak Hall, as a “Spacious Magnificent & Inviting TEMPLE , the Centre of Trade, the Wonder of an Admiring World.” In pursuit of “large sales, small profits and quick returns,” Simmons sent up balloons announcing bargains and threw free overcoats from his roof. Simmons boasted of the “largest and best assortment of Ready-Made Clothing and Furnishing Goods to be found in the United States.” Here “the Man of Fashion, the Professional, Gentlemen Clerks with moderate salaries, Merchants, Mechanics and Farmers, Military and Naval Officers” could find “any article from a pair of Gloves to a superfine Dress or Frock coat.” In short, Oak Hall and its counterparts had something for everybody—as long as everybody was male. Women would have to wait several decades to participate in the democracy of dress.

Ready-made clothing for women at midcentury consisted of the one-size-fits-all cloak, worn since the seventeenth century, and the corset. Blouses, skirts, and dresses that were complexly constructed, individually fitted, and subject to changes in style were still too formidable a challenge for clothing manufacturers before the Civil War. Women depended on their own sewing skills or on dressmakers, who were numerous and charged little, for the better part of their wardrobes.

“A Victorian lady stayed at home and stuck to her needlework,” according to Pamela Puryear, the author of Dressing Victorian (1987). Puryear became interested in historical clothing when she moved into her great-grandparents’ home in Navasota, Texas, and found her great-grandmother’s 1873 wedding dress. A cousin then gave her twenty-two trunks of clothes belonging to his grandparents and great-grandparents. Puryear discovered that in Texas Victorian women in a reasonably comfortable economic position dressed the same way as women in Boston or New York. “Clothing revealed a Victorian woman’s station in life,” Puryear writes. “Women wearing a tight corset, at least four petticoats, dresses with tight elbows and gloves inside the house, didn’t do the cleaning and the washing. What you wore was you.”

Hallie Gudger of Old Washington, Texas, wore for her portrait a dress with a satin bodice, double ruffled organdy at the neck, satin rosettes on the skirt and on the sleeves, a draped overskirt, an underskirt, and a bustle. Mary Frances Wickes of Houston was photographed in the late 1850s in a dress of “black silk with gathers in the bodice and

triangular black gimp edging. The sleeves were sewn with a geometric interlace of a lighter-colored braid,” probably done with the new sewing machine.

Between 1842 and 1895 the United States issued more than seven thousand patents for sewing machines and their accessories. Elias Howe and Isaac Sineer fought for the right to be called the machine’s inventor. But it was Allen B. Wilson who created the machine first adopted by the clothing manufacturers. A shirt that had taken fourteen hours and twenty-six minutes to sew by hand could be sewn on the “Wheeler and Wilson” in one hour and sixteen minutes. In the 1860s Brooks Bros, reported that a good overcoat, which had once required six days of sewing, could be done in half that time by machine.

Mechanization revolutionized the garment industry in the late nineteenth century. Powerful machines that were able to slice through a hundred layers of cloth at a time brought the speed of cutting clothes in line with the sewing operation. Completely automatic looms meant one weaver could produce four hundred yards of fabric an hour. Improved cylinder presses had the capability of printing from two to twelve colors simultaneously. As calico florals rolled off the cylinders, one of the most expensive fabrics of the eighteenth century became one of the cheapest of the nineteenth.

Almost all the processes of clothing manufacture had moved into the machine age. Only pressing was still done by hand. The heavy tailor’s iron held its own until the early twentieth century, when Adon J. Huffman of Syracuse dislocated his shoulder and invented a steam pressing machine operated by a foot pedal.

Foot power and hand power were needed in ever-greater quantity as production in the garment industry accelerated. New Americans, by and large, did the job. In the 1840s Irish tailors, cutters, and seamstresses came to America in unprecedented numbers. Later in the decade German tailors arrived and with their wives and children produced clothing at home. But it was the great migration from eastern and southern Europe—Poland, Russia, and Italy—beginning in 1880 that provided the garment industry with the cheap labor that permitted mass production in this country. Beryl Fried, a founder of the Cloakmaker’s Union, described working conditions as he knew them in 1885 and as they continued to be until immigrant clothing workers formed their own union in 1914: “Eighteen men and women were crowded into a small dark room: operators, pressers and finishers. During the season there was no time limit. We started working at dawn and stopped at ten or eleven at night. If a worker happened to be an hour late he was met by the others with ridicule, ‘Here comes the doctor.’ In their conception only a doctor could permit himself the luxury of sleeping so late.”