Almost every time a client asks me why a certain dress “should” cost less than it does or more uncomfortably, every time I see a beautifully cut garment online priced at a number that makes the true cost of its construction impossible to believe. I think about the overlooked hours of labour that goes into making a garment. Historically, clothes were expensive, for a reason.
In May 1906, at the Queen’s Hall in London, an exhibition catalogue sold five thousand copies in ten days. It documented, in unsparing detail, the lives of the women who finished the exquisite garments Edwardian society wore to the opera and Ascot. One widow, trimming shawl fringes for seventeen hours a day in two rented rooms, earned five shillings a week. It took sixteen yards of fringing, worked twice over, to complete a single large shawl.
The exclusive dressmaking houses of 1900s Paris and London relied heavily on outworkers; home-based, piecework labourers, unregulated, uninsured, and almost entirely invisible to the women who wore the finished garments. The exquisite hand-finishing on a Worth or Paquin gown didn’t happen only inside the grand ateliers on the Rue de la Paix; a great deal of it happened in cramped tenement rooms, for wages that barely covered subsistence, sometimes carrying contagious disease along with the thread. The sweated-industries exhibitions in Berlin and London were an attempt to make that invisible labour visible. When it worked, in the sense that they shocked the public. It still took years of union pressure and legislation before conditions genuinely improved.
The parallel to today’s fast-fashion supply chains barely needs spelling out, but I think it’s worth spelling out anyway, because we’ve become fluent at looking past it. Garment workers in Dhaka, Phnom Penh, or Tirupur today face conditions that echo the Edwardian outworker with uncomfortable precision: piecework rates, unsafe or unregulated premises, and a final product sold at a price that only makes sense if someone, somewhere along the chain, was paid far too little for far too much skill. We have our own version of the Sweated Industries catalogue now. It arrive as a documentary, an investigative report, a factory collapse that briefly leads the news cycle before the feed moves on. I urge you to watch ‘The True Cost’ by Andrew Morgan.
What the Edwardian exhibition understood, and what I think fashion media still under-uses, is the specific power of making the labour visible and personal, not just a “garment workers,” as an abstract, but a named person with four dependents, a precise wage, a precise number of hours. Statistics are forgettable. A shawl fringer ‘Mary’ working seventeen hours a day for five shillings is not.
Couture’s glamour has never existed independently of the hands that built it. The dress on the mannequin and the woman in the two rented rooms are not two separate stories. They are, and have always been, the same story told from opposite ends of the same seam, you cannot have one without the other.