Fashion

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Fashion

New Technologies. The most significant changes in the way Americans dressed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century came about because of improvements in technology. Though various types of sewing machines had been invented during the 1830s and 1840s, the first practical, workable machine for the home sewer was invented by Isaac Merrit Singer in 1850. By the middle of that decade sewing machines were selling at the rate of one hundred thousand per year. In 1871 manufacturers made seven times that number. While a woman might have spent days sewing a man’s shirt by hand, she could make one in an afternoon with her sewing machine. New technologies also changed textile production, making it possible for manufacturers to mass-produce printed cottons that were both cheap and pretty. Aniline dyes, invented in the 1850s, permitted silks and wools to be dyed in astonishingly bright, sharp colors such as fuchsia, magenta, and violet. A fashionable Civil War-era theater or dinner party was often a colorful sight. With these fabrics and her new sewing machine the average middle-class housewife could make dresses that would have been too expensive and too time-consuming for her to tackle in the past. Sewing machines also permitted greater ornamentation of clothing. As women’s fashions became more elaborate in the 1860s, sewing-machine manufacturers produced attachments such as binders, tuckers, rufflers, shirrers, puffers, braiders, quilters, hemstitchers, and embroiders that allowed the middle-class woman to copy these styles at home. Some commentators, mostly men, noted that the sewing machine did not seem to be such a labor-saving device after all. Commercial printed-paper patterns also helped middle-class women dress like their upper-class counterparts. Fashion designer Madame Demorest—who despite her French-sounding name was Ellen Curtis Demorest, the American-born wife of New York publisher William Demorest—began marketing paper patterns for her versions of Paris fashions in her own magazine, Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashion, in 1865. Ebenezer Butterick, who started manufacturing patterns for boys’ and men’s clothing in 1863, began making patterns for women’s clothes in 1867 and also marketed them in his own magazines.

The Seamstress. Some clothing could be bought ready-made, but most clothing was made expressly for the wearer. Wealthy women in cities such as New York or Philadelphia had their clothes custom-made by exclusive dressmakers who copied designs from magazines

such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s. These magazines pirated French fashion plates in their monthly issues. Studies of photographs from this period show, however, that American women did not wear line-for-line copies of these styles. Their gowns were usually three or even four years out of date. Middle-class women usually had a seamstress come in to cut and fit clothing which they would later finish themselves. Sometimes, the seamstress would stay with the family in a separate “sewing room,” producing dresses, shirts, and clothing for the children. Respectable women still did a great deal of fine hand sewing in public or at gatherings with friends. On southern plantations the mistresses were responsible for all the clothing worn by family and

workers alike. One of their most important chores was to cut out the cloth, which they would then give to slaves to sew. Most women also did charity sewing in addition to making clothes for their families (at least the family’s underwear and shirts). People of all ages and social classes wore cotton underwear, which they washed as often as they could afford.

Men’s Clothing. Men working on the farm wore simple calico shirts, often flowered or checked, trousers, waistcoats, coats with full sleeves, and a straw or felt hat. In public a man always wore a white or black neck cloth, or “stock.” For town he wore a checked or black coat, and a black waistcoat. Black wool, summer or winter, was the respectable businessman’s uniform. The most favored headgear for men in the city was the tall, narrow “stovepipe hat” like the one often seen in photographs of President Abraham Lincoln. In the South a broad-brimmed felt or straw hat was more popular than the stovepipe. By the 1870s the skirted frock coat favored by gentlemen for dress occasions had mainly been replaced by the shorter sack coat. Before the Civil War only work clothes for slaves and sailors were mass-produced in the United States. During the Civil War, however, manufacturers met the demand for hundreds of thousands of uniforms by gearing up production and developing a system of standard sizing. After the war they applied this new technology to manufacturing civilian clothing for men.

Women’s Clothing. In the 1850s middle-class and upper-class women wore voluminous full-skirted cotton or silk dresses for day. All women wore several petticoats. By mid-decade they had begun wearing crinoline petticoats, originally made of stiffened horsehair, to hold the skirt away from the body. About 1858 hoop petticoats, with large circles of flexible watch-spring steel sewn into them, began to serve a similar purpose. A woman who wore one of these garments had to learn not to sit on one of the hoops because if she did so, her skirt would fly up in front, exposing her ankle-length pantalets. During the second half of the century these drawers gradually became shorter. These full-skirted fashions with narrow waists were popularized by the beautiful Empress Eugénie of France. Corsets, which had been worn since colonial days, became more heavily boned to give a woman the neat, small-waisted look she desired. Critics pointed out that women who wore tight corsets were injuring their health. The worst excesses in such “tight lacing,” however, did not occur until the 1880s and 1890s. During the Civil War women wore closely fitted bodices and dropped shoulders, with full skirts pleated into a corseted waist. After the war skirts became relatively flat in front with a full train in back. By the early 1870s the hoop skirt had disappeared and was replaced with a bustle made of wire or crinoline to create fullness at the back of the skirt. Full skirts, especially with hoops, were impractical, and sometimes dangerous, for farm work. Rural women and poor women wore less-elaborate clothing made of simpler, less expensive fabrics, including homespun cloth. Like more-affluent women, farm women wore several petticoats, but their skirts were not as full because they seldom wore hoops or crinolines. Instead of the feather-and-ribbon-trimmed hats favored by city women, rural women, particularly in the West and the South, often wore simple sun bonnets.

Dress Reform. Often linked to the women’s rights movement, dress reformers, and some doctors, charged that the heavy skirts and tight bodices were unhealthy and unsanitary. In 1851 abolitionist and social reformer Amelia Bloomer became one of the first American women to wear a “Turkish trouser” suit, loose trousers, worn under a fitted tunic. Because it “exposed” a lady’s legs, this garment, which quickly became known as the “bloomer costume,” caused a scandal. While some people praised it as a practical garment for overland travel, a woman who wore “bloomers” was more often than not criticized by other women and ridiculed by men. The fact that variations of this style were worn by many Mormon women during their cross-country trek to Utah and by women in the Oneida colony in upstate New York did not help to spread this new style. Both groups were heavily criticized during the 1850s for their advocacy of marriages involving more than two partners. Most women kept on wearing their corsets and petticoats.

Children’s Clothing. As childhood increasingly became recognized as a separate and important phase of life, children were no longer dressed as miniature adults, but with some effort toward comfort and freedom of movement. Babies and toddlers of both sexes wore short hair and low-necked dresses. As in the past, small boys wore skirts at least until they were out of diapers. After they reached the age of five or six, boys began to wear short pants and tunics. Between the ages of ten and twelve a boy received his first pair of long pants, which was an unmistakable sign of maturity and approaching manhood.

Slave Clothing. What slaves wore depended a great deal on their owners. Some gave their slaves their own cast-off clothing, while on other plantations slaves wore nothing better than rags. Usually domestic slaves were better dressed than field workers. Their outfits consisted of simple cotton clothing. Few had real shoes, wearing instead “slops” or “slaps” on their feet. These shoes were crude sandals with one leather strap across the instep, manufactured in Lynn, Massachusetts.