Textile History

ISSN: 0040-4969 (Print) 1743-2952 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ytex20

The Development of the Clothing Industry:

Technology and Fashion

Andrew Godley

To cite this article: Andrew Godley (1997) The Development of the Clothing Industry: Technology
and Fashion, Textile History, 28:1, 3-10, DOI: 10.1179/004049697793711067

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/004049697793711067

Published online: 19 Jul 2013.

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Textile History, 28 (1),3-10, 1997

INTRODUCTION
The Development of the Clothing Industry:
Technology and Fashion 1
ANDREW GODLEY

The ready-made clothing industry is, perhaps, the single most important industry in the
economic history of the western world which has not yet yielded to a comprehensive
academic investigation of its development. In Britain, for example, the clothing trades
were for many decades during the Industrial Revolution one of the largest sources of
employment; in 1851 the dress trades were the second most important source of non-
agricultural employment for women, after domestic service.2 This gap in our knowledge
seems all the greater when the relationship between the clothing and the textiles industries
is remembered. That clothes manufacturers were the principal purchasers of finished
textiles has rarely led textiles industry researchers to examine the methods of transforming
the cottons, woollens and worsteds into finished consumer goods. The reasons for this gap
in the history of industrialisation in Britain - and, indeed, in the United States - are
perhaps related to the typically small size of firm and the relative ease of both entry and
exit into the industry. This has left the legacy of a poorly recorded industrial development
with few company archives to supplement the paltry official statistics. Moreover the
enormous variety of products included in the industry makes it a difficult industry for
historians to master. Yet, despite the problems, the industry merits investigation - as
much for a greater understanding of the social impact of the developments in clothes
manufacturing and purchasing as the economic development. Moreover, in recent years
clothing manufacturers have been the focus of renewed attention as proponents of the
flexible specialisation, or historical alternatives, thesis have sought to understand where
the balance between craft-skills and mass-production technology lies in the modern
clothing industry, and, indeed, how it may have developed in the past.3
It is worth reviewing what has been written about the clothing industry's development
in Britain. The conventional historiography can be divided into four groups. The first and
the largest group is that which has focused on the clothing industry as one of the sources
of the 'evil of sweating'. There were at least three periods before the First World War when
respectable society was outraged at the exploitative behaviour of the sweaters. In the 1840S
and 1850Sthe Christian Socialists wrote pamphlets and booklets to raise awareness of the
plight of female dressmakers and seamstresses. In the mid-1880s to the early 1890Sthe
outcry surrounding the discovery of poverty in London's East End and the concerns for
the 'submerged tenth' led to similar calls to investigate the evils of sweating; this time
leading to a Parliamentary Select Committee as well as a number of unofficial
investigations. Finally, in the troubled years immediately preceding the 1914 war, there
were renewed concerns at the low level of payments for most workers in the clothing
industry, concerns which eventually led to the first minimum wage legislation in Britain in

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The Development of the Clothing Industry
I9I2.4 With such a wealth of primary sources historians have been able to produce a
number of works concerned with the social consequences of 'sweating' and which have
used the clothing industry as a case study. 5
The second category of research has come from the perspective of the history of the
Jewish immigrants and their involvement in the clothing industry. Here authors are also
primarily concerned with the social impact of clothing industry development, in particular
with how this either constrained or fostered immigrant assimilation and integration. 6
Third, there are those detailed case studies of individual businesses or regions; 7 and finally,
a handful of studies concerned with economic development in general which touch on the
clothing industry, albeit briefly.8
The value of the research in the first two groups is of limited importance in the analysis
of the long-term development of the clothing industry. The detailed case studies are of
importance but second to the more general picture of the industry presented by the
historians in the latter group. Here, however, the story of the development of the clothing
industry is presented as little more than the result of the invention of the sewing machine.
It was the 'astonishing velocity' of the sewing machine, according to the Economist in I85I,
which was to transform the working life of the tailors and seamstresses all over the world.9
This was because the functions of clothing workers had not 'been even touched by
machinery since the dawn of civilisation'. 10 So, the line of argument went, the tailors and
seamstresses of I50 years ago would have been more familiar with the construction of the
first garments in the Garden of Eden than with the methods of assembly in the factories
and workshops of ready-made clothing industry in Leeds and London by the tum of the
century. II This is the first obvious myth surrounding the development of the ready-made
clothing industry. Its origins lie much further back than the invention of the sewing
machine, and the innovation which prompted its development was not new machinery,
but the development of standard sizes. Indeed, the assumption of a relationship between
technological change and industrial development has bedevilled analysis of the garment
industry, one of the few manufacturing sectors which appears to have little structural
responsiveness to technological changes.
It is now apparent that the ready-made clothing industry developed first in the United
I<ingdom, especially in southern England. Beverly Lemire has been able to trace its origins
as far back as the end of the seventeenth century, when the contracting out of the
manufacturing of military uniforms first began. This practice grew in the eighteenth
century and was particularly prominent during the Napoleonic Wars.12 Outside the
military, however, demand for ready-made garments was still fairly limited before the
I840s. This was partly because of the restricted demand that these early ready-made
garments could meet ..Most of these early ready-made garments were only able to be very
loose fitting, where the cut gave little shape. Smocks, for example, were very quickly
turned into a ready-made garment, well before mechanisation. The collection of smocks
held at the Rural History Centre, the University of Reading (the largest such collection in
the world), shows how the staple garment of the agricultural workforce had succumbed to
the regular, standardised shape and stitch of the ready-made garment before
mechanisation.
Christina Fowler, however, shows how consumer demand for ready-mades was
beginning to become more sophisticated, with a detailed analysis of expenditure patterns

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 ANDREW GODLEY

FIGS I and 2. Nineteenth-century smocks, early ready-made garments.

Copyright the Rural History Centre) the University of Reading

among the everyday working population in rural Hampshire before 1820. Her evidence
suggests that clothing expenditure represented a rather higher proportion of family income
than has hitherto been recognised. It was, apparently, not uncommon for families to spend
between 10-20 per cent of their income on garments even at this time. Much of this was
spent on ready-made items. Often they were functional, like smocks, but, as Fowler shows,
garments like waistcoats and breeches were sold at least as much for their fashion content
as functional. The presence of a significant fashion-oriented consumer demand in the
rural south rather adds weight to the idea that consumer demand may have been one of
the most important elements in the Industrial Revolution. 13
Fashion was also an element in the growing demand for ready-made hosiery in the early
nineteenth century, as Stanley Chapman shows. I<.nitted stockings were made in the fast
developing hosiery centres of Leicester and Nottingham and sold throughout the land.
Once again, the development of this branch of the ready-made clothing industry predated
any significant mechanisation. The industry was organised by those merchants and
wholesalers in control of the putting out process, and, in Chapman's analysis of the records

5
The Development of the Clothing Industry
of the largest wholesalers, I. & R. Morley, it is clear that the eventual concentration of
hosiery manufacturing into large factories owned by big firms in the second half of the
nineteenth century was driven rather more by demand features, such as Morleys' insistence
on quality control, rather than the logic of technical economies of scale.
The same was true of the development of the rest of ready-made clothing industry,
which took place after 1840. Here the most significant development was the recognition
by some innovating entrepreneurs that demand for cheap, new garments might be
considerable. These entrepreneurs started as sellers of second-hand clothing, and by the
1840S had begun to invest in ever larger retail outlets in the main consumer centres selling
now, not second hand but new clothes, which were pre-assembled, or ready-made. The
most successful was Elias Moses and his son Isaac Moses Marsden, who as E. Moses &
Son of Aldgate, created the world's first clothing emporium. E. Moses, Hyams, Nicholls
and other firms such as Henry Moses, Moses Son and Davis, and Abraham Lyon Moses
(many of whom were related to Elias Moses, each other and, indeed, the Hyams family)
all invested massively in the marketing of ready-made clothing in the large population
centres.14 In the early 1850S E. Moses & Son spent the huge amount of £10,000 annually
on advertising, Nicholls spent £5,000. These were among the largest of advertising
spenders in Britain in the period.15 Their reward was the creation of a huge demand for
increasingly sophisticated and well-cut ready-made garments among the urban classes,
which enabled business empires to be created and fortunes to be made. Thousands of
tailors and tailoresses were employed in the ready-made industry in London. Nicholl's, for
example, employed 1,200 outworkers in 1850, E. Moses and Hyams operated on a similar
scale.16
The key innovation which allowed demand to grow on such a scale was, as has been
noted, not technology but standard sizing. The earliest practical sewing machines were
developed in the 1850S, but the first to be successfully applied on a commercial basis were
not developed until the 1860s, considerably later than the development of a large ready-
made industry. Rather, as Godley explains, the trigger was the development of standard
sizing. This was introduced on any significant scale first probably in London. Similar
developments were also taking place elsewhere. In Paris, for example, the first retailer of
ready-made garments was one Pierre Parissot. He was a mercer and opened a store near
the Temple in 1824. Initially he sold loosely cut pre-assembled garments but began to
diversify into suits. Around 1830 he began to expand, buying adjoining buildings, and by
1856 he had created an Emporium similar in scale to Moses of Aldgate.17 The Paris
clothing industry was probably even larger than in London, employing around 100,000 to
80,000. But the ready-made sector was almost certainly larger in London. By 1847 Paris
had 233 ready-made clothing manufacturers and over 7,000 workers. IS In London by
1851 there were 7,000 tailoresses, almost certainly all of whom were employed in the
ready-made sector, along with many others of the thousands of tailors, seamstresses, and
so on.19
If the development of the ready-made clothing industry owes more to standard sizing
than technology, the same cannot be said for sweating. The persistence of sweating in the
clothing industry, or the exploitation of the workforce through low wages, compulsory and
unpaid overtime and poor conditions, has puzzled many commentators; yet it need not.
The second myth concerning the history of the clothing industry is that it was 'the

6
 ANDREW GODLEY

multiplication of small masters that was the taproot of sweating' .20Many of these small
masters were Jews and the complacent conclusion of academics and investigators has often
been that Jewish entrepreneurs caused sweating, this because of 'the Jewish temperament
[with] its desire to be independent'.21 This is simply just not true. Sweating was caused
rather by the nature of production of ready-made clothing, especially the high labour
content. Whenever competition has pushed down garment prices, labour costs have
always been the first to be put under pressure. Well before the first explosion of indignation
in the 1840s, wages had been falling in the clothing trades. 22It is worth thinking about why
this should be the case specifically in the clothing industry. The reason is technology, or
rather its absence. Cloth is limp and tailored shapes complex, and there has been and
remains no machinery which is able to replicate the dexterity of the human hand in
manoeuvring cloth through a sewing machine, especially the lighter fabrics. Thus, capital
investment in the clothing industry has been limited to the sewing machine and not much
more. The benefits of increasing capital investment, in terms of higher labour productivity
and so higher wages, have thus been similarly limited. As Godley shows, in his comparison
of American and British labour productivity in the clothing industries, higher labour
productivity in the American industry was typically caused by a more efficient use of
technology rather than greater investment.
The limitations to technology-led productivity growth has had important consequences
for the clothing industry. In particular, for manufacturers' wages have always represented
the highest single cost. In high-wage countries clothing producers have continually
attempted to drive down wages one way or another. As Katrina Honeyman shows in a
powerful critique of the gender divisions of the Leeds-based manufacturers, factory owners
and managers were happy to pay reasonably high wages to the few male workers as long as
these men were able to keep downward pressure on the women's wages. This they happily
did, increasingly recognising the vulnerability of their own position in the hierarchy, and
so dedicating union resources to maintaining the gender division and keeping women's
pay low. Ian Taplin, in his assessment of post-war trends in the United States' clothing
industry, demonstrates how most of industry using mass-production techniques left New
York shortly after the end of the war to move to states in the south-east, where wages were
so much lower. Evidence such as this poses a question for the continued presence of the
clothing industry in high-wage countries. If wages are the single most important cost and
low-wage countries can perform the assembly tasks, how can clothing producers remain in
Europe and North America, and other high-wage regions?
The only solution to this conundrum is not technology but fashion. The third myth
current in academic debate on the development of the clothing industry is that flexible
manufacturing systems, with their utilisation of new computer controlled technology, will
have a significant impact on the industry in high-wage countries, enabling firms to retain
their competitiveness.23 This is a myth because the most successful strategy open to
clothing firms in high-wage countries is not to pursue cutting costs but rather to increase
revenue. Of course some firms have been able to adopt ever greater economies of scale in
some product lines, the most obvious being overalls and workclothing, exploiting ever
larger batch sizes and so able to enjoy falling unit costs. But, for the vast majority of
garments, producers face falling batch sizes and so are unable to increase the scale of
production and invest in ever greater capital intensity. The prospect then of being able to

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The Development of the Clothing Industry
reduce unit costs whilst pursuing smaller batch sizes - the promise of flexible
manufacturing systems - is enticing. But simply applying flexible manufacturing systems
in the United States and the United Kingdom, or, as Imao suggests, in Japan, is not going
to allow western firms to compete with producers based in low-wage countries in similar
product ranges. Rather, western firms have to increase their prices, and are only able to do
so by targeting higher margin market niches. This, however, is easier said than done. Imao
shows how producers in the Japanese provincial city of Gifu, far away from the main
consumer centres of Tokyo and Osaka, recognised this problem early. Their solution was
to build in ever more sophisticated design and fashion content. But pursuing higher
fashion content is not such a simple strategy. Fashion is, by definition, unpredictable;
fashion-dominated demand is extremely volatile.
Fashion-dominated demand in Britain is, by and large, confined to womenswear. This
was mostly a product of the Jewish East End around the turn of the century. There was, of
course, a great deal of ready-made clothing for women produced in the nineteenth century,
but it was typically restricted to middle-class demand and did not reach a mass market. As
Anne Kershen shows in her description of one of the leading immigrant entrepreneurs in
the Jewish East End, the creation of the East End as a fashion centre had something of the
nature of good fortune. Most women's ready-made coats were imported from Germany or
France before the I890s, but the Jewish immigrant mantle-making industry began to take
back market share. By the end of the interwar period the East End had developed into an
extraordinarily successful and profitable district, targeting the fashionable, but still mass
market, demand.
The womenswear industry left the Jewish East End and dispersed throughout the
country after the Second World War, when it began to lose competitiveness. This is almost
certainly no coincidence, for it is this strong association between success in a fashion-
sensitive market and industry location within high-wage nations that introduces a
fascinating complexity into the analysis of the garment industry. Fashion is dominated by
time. To be a successful fashion producer implies selling garments within a specified
period of the year, the season. Selling few garments at peak prices and most at discounted
end-of-season-sale prices condemns producers barely to cover their variable costs. Time is
the key to success in fashion-dominated industries; and if time is important then so is
distance. The further the distance from the principal fashion centre, the longer the time
lag between responding to a successful design. For clothing firms to remain competitive in
high-wage countries they have to turn to the fashion-dominated market segment. Thus,
their location is of crucial importance.
This introduces a fascinating spatial element into the analysis of the development of the
clothing industry that is, as yet, not fully appreciated. Moreover, the growing importance
of fashion in the organisation of the clothing industry in high-wage economies today is
likely to provide an impetus to review the historical evidence for the impact of fashion-
dominated demand in the organisation of a number of industries, clothing being the most
obvious one among them. Agglomeration economies were apparently important to the
fashion trades in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, interwar London, and post-war New
York.25 The contributions in this special issue are, therefore, contributing further to this
relatively new debate in economic history by providing the beginnings of a systematic
analysis of the development of this neglected industry for the first time.
8
 ANDREW GODLEY

REFERENCES
I All the articles in this special issue were originally contributions to a conference on the Development
of the Clothing Industry held at the University of Reading, on 31 May 1996. In addition to the authors
included here, Beverly Lemire presented a paper which, unfortunately, could not be included in this
special issue. I would like to record my thanks to all the participants and the audience for contributing to
such a successful day.
2 Andrew Godley, 'The Development of the UK Clothing Industry, 1850-1950: Output and
Productivity Growth', Business History, XXXVII (1995).
3 J. Zeitlin, 'The clothing industry in transition: international trends and British response', Textile
History, XIX (1988); I. Taplin and J. Winterton (eds), Rethinking Global Production: a comparative analysis
of restructuring in the clothing industry (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997).
4 For a review of this literature see A. Godley, 'Enterprise and Culture: Jewish immigrants in London
and New York, 1880-1914', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, LSE, 1993.
5 The most recent being J. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour: The London clothing
trades, I86o-I9I4 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984).
6 R. Wechsler, 'The Jewish Garment Trade in East London, 1875-1914: A study of conditions and
responses', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, NY, 1979; A. Godley, 'Jewish Soft Loan
Societies in New York and London and Immigrant Entrepreneurship', Business History, XXXVIII (1996).
7 For example, D. Munby, Industry and Planning in Stepney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951); J.
Thomas, A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry (Hull, 1955).
8 J. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, three
vols., 1926-38); J. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, I850-I950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1954)·
9 Economist, 26 June 1851, cited in Clapham, Economic History, II, p. 92.
10 Clapham, Economic History, II, p. 92.
II Genesis 3:21; D. Landes, Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969),
PP·294-95·
12 Beverly Lemire, Culture and Commerce: the English Clothing Trade before the Factory, I66o-I8oo
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); J. Styles, 'Clothing the North: the supply of non-elite clothing in the
eighteenth century north of England', Textile History, xxv (1994); S. Levitt, 'Cheap mass-produced men's
clothing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries', Textile History, XXII (1991).
13 For the view that the Industrial Revolution is best seen as a consumer revolution see Neil
McKendrick's contributions in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society:
the commercialisation of eighteenth century England (London: Europa, 1982).
14 S. Chapman, 'The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British ready made clothing industry', Textile
History, XXIV (1993); P. Sharpe, '''Cheapness and Economy": manufacturing and retailing ready-made
clothing in London and Essex 1830-50', Textile History, XXVI (1995). For the Moses families' geneologies
I am indebted to George Rigal, and for Hyams to Pam Sharpe.
15 lowe this reference to Tony Corley, Quarterly Review, LXLVII (1855), pp. 211-12.
16 D. Green, 'The nineteenth century metropolitan economy: a revisionist interpretation', London
Journal, XXI (1996), p. 18.
17 P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A history of clothing in the nineteenth century (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 52-53.
18 Perrot, Fashioning, p. 54; B. Ratcliff, 'Manufacturing in the Metropolis: the dynamism and dynamics
of Parisian industry in the mid-nineteenth century', Journal of European Economic History,. XXIII (1994),
appendixB.
19 The data comes from the 1851 population census and are discussed in A. Godley, 'The Development
of the Clothing Industry in the long run, 1850-1950: a review of the data. I the censuses of population',
University of Reading Discussion Paper in Economics, No. 290 (1994). The classification oftailoresses
was restricted to the ready-made sector in 1851 and almost entirely confined to London.
20 C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, IV (London, 1893), p. 339.
21 Munby, Stepney, p. 168.
22 P. Newman, 'The Early London Clothing Trades', Oxford Economic Papers, IV (1952), pp. 43-51.

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The Development of the Clothing Industry
23 P. Hirst and J. Zeitlin, 'Flexible Specialisation versus Post Fordism: Theory Evidence and Policy
Implications', Economy and Society, xx (1991).
24 A. Godley, 'Immigrant entrepreneurs and the emergence of London's East End as an Industrial
District' , London Journal, XXI (1996).
25 Ratcliff, 'Parisian industry'; Godley, 'Industrial District'; and E. Hoover and R. Vernon, Anatomy of
a Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1962).

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