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

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: tbc

Dr Hannah Rumball-Croft: ""She could not see him put his arms around his female customers to take their measure and maintain her composure” 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”

Abstract and bio to follow.