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A Ready-Made Business: The Birth of the Clothing Industry in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Michael Zakim
Michael Zakim
Affiliation:
MICHAEL ZAKIM teaches history atTel Aviv University.
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Abstract

This article recounts the birth of the clothing industry in the United States after 1815. It contends, in contrast to recent historical literature, that the clothing business was at the center of the American experience of industrialization. This was not because ready-made clothing was a novel commodity. Nor was it because of new production technologies, social innovations, or legal structures adopted by the industry. Rather, clothing entrepreneurs were significant because they integrated several important markets—a trans-Atlantic trade in cloth, an urban trade in labor, and a market for manufactured goods in the interior regions of the United States. This helped to make the ready-made clothing business among the country's largest industries by 1850.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 61 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1999

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40 “Negro cloth” was an inexpensive fabric, akin to kerseys and satinets.

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45 This is to be distinguished from “Negro” clothing, which could include “suits” of “blue jackets and trowsers, well lined.” The Georgian, 27 Nov. 1823. Baumgarten, Linda, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Va., 1986), 204Google Scholar; DuPont, Ann, “Textile and Apparel Management Functions Performed by Women in the Nineteenth Century Plantation South,” Ars Textrina 18 (Dec. 1992): 55–6Google Scholar; Jensen, Joan M., “Needlework as Art, Craft, and Livelihood before 1900,” in A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needleworkers in America, eds. Jensen, and Davidson, Sue (Philadelphia, 1984), 9Google Scholar; Ordonez, “A Frontier Reflected in Costume,” 180–3; New York Herald, 3 Sept. 1836.

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50 Edney to Cooke, 22 June 1835; 30 Apr. 1836; 21 Mar. 1836; 29 Aug. 1836; 17 Sept. 1836; 26 Mar. 1836.

51 Cost estimations based on Trautman, Patricia Anne, “Captain Edward Marrett, a Gentleman Tailor” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1982)Google Scholar; John Shepherd of New York, N.Y. Merchant Tailoring Accounts. Ac. 861 and 1721 (Ruters University Special Collections); James M. Edney, New York, N.Y., 1835–7, Letter Book to F. H. Cooke of Augusta (Rutgers University Special Collections), 13 Feb. 1836; United States, Seventh Census (1850), Manufactures Schedule, raw data, New York County, N.Y. On fluctuation in cloth prices, see National Archives, RG 92, entry no. 2118, 1830–3: special items, check lists, and indices.

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60 Feldman, Fit for Men, 103; Penny, Employments of Women, 111–5; Stansell, City of Women, 111–2, 114.

61 Edney to Cooke, 13 Feb. 1836; 31 Dec. 1836; 6 Jan. 1838; 11 Jan. 1838.

62 Rosenbloom, Richard S., “A Conjecture about Fashion and Vertical Process Integration,” Business History Review 37 (Spring/Summer 1963): 94–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Edney to Cooke, 1 Mar. 1837; 7 Oct. 1836. On F.J. Conant's buying strategy see Feldman, “New York's Men's Clothing Trade,” 25. New York Herald, 18 Feb. 1836; 7 July 1836; Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, 24 May 1836.

63 Working Man's Advocate, 10 June 1831. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 21 Sept. 1837.

64 Edney to Cooke, 22 Apr. 1837. Dewey, Davis Rich, Financial History of the United States (New York, 1907), 225.Google Scholar Atherton, Southern Country Store, 21–2. On these strategems see Greene, Perils of Pearl Street. On the easiness of New York credit for commercial neophytes from the South see Baldwin, Joseph G., The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (New York, 1957).Google Scholar

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