This ‘At Home’ event examines the research being done on women's tailored fashions of the long nineteenth century that will contribute to the Bloomsbury publicationTailoring for Women 1800 – 1930.

Between 1800 and 1930, a greater proportion of socioeconomic classes and a more global market gained access to tailored clothes for women. The production of women’s tailored clothing exploded in response to the growing demands from middle- and upper-class women consumers for more practical outerwear for sporting, travelling, walking, and shopping. Despite this, little is written on tailored clothing for women. Even less is written which illustrates the diffusion, design, manufacture, technology, products, material culture, retailing, trade, commerce, and the related sartorial etiquette of tailored clothes for women – specifically between 1800 and 1930. The Bloomsbury publicationTailoring for Women 1800 – 1930, due for publication late 2026 / early 2027, will present research from across the international spectrum which builds a picture of all these practices, their breadth and complexity, and offers new insights into tailored clothing for women by analysing their production, consumption and design evolution throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Please note that this event will start at the slightly later time of 3pm BST / 10am EDT.

Image Carte de Visit from the 1860 to 1900 period, illustrating a range of tailored fashions worn by women of the period. From the personal collection of Dr. Hannah Rumball-Croft.

Dr Marie Mcloughlin: “Royal influencers and English tailors”

This paper will examine two English tailors, Henry Creed and John Redfern. At the very start of their careers each met a woman about to start a very visible public life. In 1853 Eugenie, became Empress of the French on her marriage to Emperor Napoleon III. Creed made her tailored clothes. In 1863 Princess Alexandra married the Prince of Wales. She honeymooned at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, close to Redfern’s business in Cowes. Initially he specialised in sailing clothes. This paper will illustrate how both tailors were pioneers of l’Style Anglais from their establishments in the heart of Paris.

Dr Marie McLoughlin is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Brighton. She taught there for many years specialising in twentieth century fashion. Her interest in the fashions of the 1940s culminated in an edited book with Professor Lou Taylor, Paris Fashion and World War 2: Global Diffusion and Nazi Controls (Bloomsbury 2020). Charles Creed, one of the WW2 Utility designers, was the grandson of Henry Creed.

Mary Charlton: "Sewing “Like an Engine”: Women in the tailoring industry in London’s East End; 1880 -1891"

The production of tailored garments for women initially fell to the male tailor. Prohibited for centuries from working as tailors in their own right, women nevertheless played an important but unseen role in the tailoring profession, working at home as support for their husbands, or for tailoring firms as finishers and buttonhole makers. Their presence and working roles are, by comparison to male tailors, elusive and largely undocumented.

Drawing on contemporary social surveys and political investigations that we researched to find evidence of tailored garments being made for women in 1880s Whitechapel, this paper presents a case study of female buttonhole makers to give a brief insight into the role and working conditions of women in the East End tailoring trade.

Mary Charlton is an independent researcher who has worked as a costume supervisor, maker and tailor for the museums and heritage industry, theatre, opera and fine art. She has taught tailoring, corsetry and period cutting and construction at Nottingham Trent University, and more recently studied at the University of Brighton on the MA course History of Design and Material Culture.

Dr Hannah Rumball-Croft: ""She could not see him put his arms around his female customers to take their measure and maintain her self-control” Tact, timidity, and touch in women's tailoring"

The measuring of the body upon which the tailored garment rests was, and has always been, of the utmost importance to the tailor. Careful measuring helped achieve the appeal of their close, structured fit. Tailoring manuals contained detailed directives for male cutters as to the most precise and thorough manner in which to measure a female customer. However, tailoring directives advocating close measuring of the female anatomy were in striking opposition to the extreme prudishness with which wider nineteenth century society regarded even the most basic of interactions between the opposite sexes. This paper examines the nature and politics of touch in the male tailor female customer relationship in the sociocultural context of the nineteenth century. Looking at directives in tailoring manuals alongside other period sources, this paper considers practices undertaken by male tailors to decorously accommodate, or even eluded entirely, the act of measuring a female customer.

Dr Hannah Rumball-Croft is an experienced Lecturer specialising in nineteenth and early twentieth century dress, women’s tailoring, Quakerism, material culture and women’s studies. She is currently producing the edited collection Tailoring for Women 1800-1930 with Bloomsbury, due for release in 2027, and has published on challenging outdated concepts of women’s nineteenth century fashion practices.

Dr Sarah Johnson: “The development of women’s ready-made tailored clothing in New York’s pre-department store dry goods firms, 1840-70”

Many New York City department stores manufactured women’s tailored clothing onsite by the late 1860s. This study examines retailers A.T. Stewart, Arnold Constable, and Lord and Taylor, evolving from dry goods firms founded in the 1820s, and their in-store production of women’s ready-made garments, 1840-1865. Data from period advertisements and business journals documented the capital used, the in-store manufacturing space to accommodate sewing machines, and the women to fit and make up tailored garments by at least 1847. High tariffs drove up costs of imported garments. Dry goods merchants created a new model of women’s garment production and consumption, and fortunes for themselves.

Dr. Sarah Johnson has evolved from designing costumes for theater and entertainment venues to the academic study of textile and dress history, the study and teaching of material culture and design history to the history of women and then women’s roles in the political and consumption economies of American industrialization, including women’s labor in American department stores.

At Home with C19th Dress and Textiles Reframed Network - 28 September 2025