Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850–1990. By Katrina Honeyman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 336. £45.00.

Extract

Until the 1960s clothes were a barometer of social and economic status. An outfit's age, style, and method of production—bespoke, wholesale bespoke, or off-the-peg—offered a visible pronouncement on an individual's, particularly a male's, place in the social and economic order. In the decades that have followed, as style of dress has become increasingly informal and designer labels have overtaken design, this means of identification has become less reliable and the home-grown industry that provided the garments less economically viable. In Well Suited, Katrina Honeyman provides a volume that not only details the rise and demise of the Leeds men's and boys' wholesale tailored clothing industry but, in addition, compensates for the paucity of historiographical studies of “the industry that created garments from … cloth” (p. 1). As such, the work has impressive and scholarly depth; by following a thematic rather than simply chronological structure, it enables the reader to locate the micro study within a broader economic and labor-related framework that correlates with the meso and macro.