It's absolutely true that mail order "took off" in the US when the
postal system was improved in, if I recall correctly, the 1870s. For
that matter, mail order of a sort has been around for as long as people
have traveled. Before efficient national postal systems, people
routinely asked friends and relatives who lived elsewhere, or who were
traveling elsewhere, to choose and send them items they wanted. They
also made arrangements with retailers to send them merchandise.
On the other hand, mail order is by no means the same thing as
ready-to-wear. Ready-to-wear garments, when available, have always
been available in stores, as well as (or instead of) by mail.
Ready-to-wear also does not necessarily mean machine sewn. A certain
amount of ready-to-wear has been around for a very long time. Even the
Elizabethans sold some ready-made embroidered shirts. Men's
eighteenth-century ready-mades were called "slops," because the fit was
not very good. They were produced for markets with few resources for
making their own clothes. In colonial America, these included slaves,
Native Americans, and sailors. Most slops were imported. However,
high-quality ready-to-wear leather breeches were produced in America,
especially in Philadelphia. During the French and Indian War and the
American Revolution, some contracts were formed with local tailors and
seamstresses to produce soldiers' clothes. One of the first American
clothing factories was the United States Army Clothing Establishment,
set up to produce uniforms for the War of 1812, which operated till the
end of the 19th century.
By the early 1830s many American tailors kept a large stock of
ready-mades on hand. It was a good way to keep journeymen busy during
slack seasons and to use up excess cloth from their stocks, and even
remnants on things like vests. In areas that served as supply-buying
points for those emigrating westward, the RTW business thrived.
Women's ready-to-wear took longer to become acceptable, partly because
it was harder to produce a good fit, partly because the average woman
had better sewing skills than the average man. However, women's RTW
cloaks and wraps were available by the 1830s. In England, if I recall
correctly, RTW women's lingerie outfits were available as early as the
1840s, for those emigrating to a colony and those who wanted trousseaus
in a hurry.
The original question on this list, was when it became more usual for
most people to purchase clothing ready-made, than to have it custom made
by either themselves or a dressmaker. Or buy buying it second-hand, the
second-hand market having long fulfilled many of the functions of RTW.
That point is usually regarded as the 1920s, by which time a long
availability of an increasing amount of RTW had accustomed more and more
people to buying it. Manufacturers had been improving sizing over the
years, and the loose styles of many 1920s women's dresses made fit less
of an issue. And, perhaps, the relative affluence of the 1920s made
more people dismissive of second-hand clothes.
Fran
Lavolta Press
http://www.lavoltapress.com
Lloyd Mitchell wrote:
Re the time period of store bought clothing etc., I think that the
availability of items will be better dated by the long history of mail-order
companies which begins in the last quarter of the 19th C, and some items
were available before this. The effect of the Industrial Revolution on
mainstream life in general is probably the starting point.
Kathleen
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