Research: Women’s Ready-to-wear clothes

The history of ready-to-wear clothing for women has been one of my abiding passions. I’ve found documents from London merchants as early as 1740 advertising quilted petticoats sized to fit most customers (with adjustable drawstrings). I’ve looked at pricelists for warehouses where women travelling to Canada or Australia in the 1850s could buy a capsule wardrobe for the weeks-long voyage. I’ve seen how the boom in illustrated magazines from the 1870s onwards was underwritten by an increase in fashion advertising – especially for ready-to-wear. I’ve followed the path of clothing manufacturers who set up chains of fashion stores with branches throughout Victorian Britain. I’ve been comparison shopping in Victorian mail-order catalogues offering smart clothes for office workers at affordable prices. I’m currently investigating the Victorian women who worked as designers and commercial artists in the clothing industry, creating both garments and the images used to sell them – and who were promoted as role models by the magazines that published their work.

If all this sounds a familiar, it should – the more I learn, the more I become convinced that the period from 1890 to 1914 laid the foundation of many of the features that define the ready-to-wear clothing market today. The fashion designers whose names we recognise may have been giants, but they were standing on the shoulders of those who went before them.

• ‘Women’s Ready-to-Wear Multiples 1860–1914: H. J. Nicoll and Alfred Stedall’, Textile History vol.53 issue 1 (2023)
• ‘Looking Back to Look Forward: Lessons from the Archives?’. In Jacque Lynn Foltyn & Laura Petican (eds.) In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2021)
• ‘The Fashion Trade in First World War France’, The Journal of Dress History, 3:1, Spring 2019
• ‘Textiles and Texts: Sources for studying 18th Century Quilted Petticoats’ in Sabine de Günther & Phillipp Zitzlsperger (eds.) Signs and Symbols – Dress at the Intersection between Image and Realia (Munchen: De Gruyter, 2018)
• ‘”Rough Wolves in the Sheepcote”: the meanings of colour in fashion, 1908-14’, in Jonathan Faiers & Mary Westerman, Colors in Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
• Buying and Selling Clothes and Abuses and Reforms, vols. 1 and 2 of Clare Rose & Vivienne Richmond (eds.), Clothing, Society and Culture (London:Pickering & Chatto, 2011)