Working Costumes Images Project

This post will serve as a direction for Pinterest boards with source images for each decade. I'll be coming back here to edit and add links as I begin each board. I will also try to use this post as a Directory of other posts on this Project.

Links

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Commentary

I'm calling this project the Working Costumes Images Project.

Working - the women I am interesting in researching about, were working women. Some worked in the home, others outside. Some were primarily care-givers and household managers. That is still work! They, however, were not women with vast amounts of leisure time, nor ones who wore multiple outfits per day. Their clothing was practical, often home-made or home-finished, and valued durability and comfort over fashion and image. That said, they weren't dead to fashion, and would have made efforts to at least have the appropriate silhouette, and to not look "dowdy". We can still date ordinary women's photo images by the clothing they're wearing, but perhaps not as precisely as for High Fashionistas, but usually within a year or two. That said, the older a woman got, the less likely she was to care about how up-to-date she was, as happens still today. Why get a new, more fashionable dress, if the old one still fits and looks fine? Waste not, Want not... Using "Working", but not "class", I feel can be used to encompass all these women.

All this said, I'm not focusing on those at the absolute bottom. I am hoping to focus on women who were able to buy shoes for their children, ensure adequate food, and have non-ragged clothing. They may have held down jobs, but they were mostly focused on the job of the home. Unlike the upper middle classes, however, they were often one step away from disaster, and would probably not have had much, if any, assistance at home. Their husbands (because marriage was a career at this time) would have worked 6-7 days a week, and often long hours. Holidays would have been rare outside of religious festivals, until the mid19thC rise of leisure time. Single women would have worked, and many would have remained at home or lived with a (married) sibling. The workhouse would have been a real threat to them, and a genuine fear. 

Key words:

• Practical
• Durable
• Worker
• Domestic
• Appropriate-to-task (i.e. not a ball dress while washing up in the scullery)
• Comfortable
• Economical

Other points

Fabrics. Wool, linen, cotton more than silks and other high status fabrics. Cotton only once the prices became affordable. Wool remained desirable for its fire-retardant qualities as women were frequently around open flames.

Piecing. Piecing is period for almost all classes, but for those at the lower end of the social scale, economy was an essential virtue.

Colours. High fashion colours may still have been worn by working women if they had access to dyes to over-dye things at home, or if they could purchase a second-hand item in the desired colour.

Re-use. Buying new shoes or gloves when your old ones were still good were wasteful, and therefore less likely to happen. Buying new gloves for Sunday Best, and gradually rotating them into general use before buying new ones for Sundays, however, wasn't unlikely, especially for middle class women. For those at the bottom, gloves would probably have remained optional outside of the need and desire for warmth. The same for shoes and boots.

Re-fashioning. Making the same item over to line up with newer fashions was also common among all classes. Whether that was changing a belt, collar, or bonnet to match newer fashions, or setting entirely new sleeves into an older dress to match current fashions.

Practicality. A dress which had multiple potential uses was far more use to a non-elite woman, than a dress that could only be used in one context. Re-wearability was also essential. 

Durability. A dress, shoes, bonnet, or gloves that could last multiple years was a good thing. Making over your one winter dress to update it to a new fashion was far more desirable than buying a multiple cheaper but flimsy constructed items that didn't last. An item that could stand up to being adjusted, taken in / out, and having minor changes to update it, was a good item.   

Economy. While a dress might be made of cheaper types of fabric, or better value options, there was no reason why small parts couldn't be made of more expensive things. Ribbons and trimmings were common on clothing for all women, and a working woman might wear an expensive ribbon belt with her best dress, or have a carefully trimmed bonnet with silk flowers. While she might not have been able to afford a lot of luxuries, than as now, people sort out small things to make themselves smile. Life wasn't all drudgery, and small things could make big differences, in life and in fashion.