Who makes fashion? Reframing the creative labour of fashion production
The boundaries between art and fashion have blurred. Fashion objects are increasingly celebrated in museums, fashion has grown in prominence in art schools, designers are described as artists, and increasing numbers of fashion designers are transitioning mid-career into fine art mediums.
But popular culture’s acceptance of fashion as an art form only applies to certain types of fashion, and it only recognises creativity in certain types of fashion labour. Individuals employed in bespoke fashion manufacture and elite design may be championed for their creative and skilled work, but machinists or pressers making mass-manufactured ready-to-wear are not. This has implications for both what is understood to be creative labour and who is understood to perform it. While the fields of fashion design have long been dominated by middle-class professionals, fashion manufacture is largely undertaken by women, the working classes, and migrants. Their voices are routinely excluded from fashion narratives.
This session presents research that provides new perspectives on the creative labour of making fashion, challenging assumptions about where creative labour is found in the fashion industry from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It recognises that the fashion system is global, and it seeks to decolonise and diversify our understanding of fashion by foregrounding narratives that represent migrant, working class, and women workers across the international fashion supply chain and that reframe our understanding of what it means to make fashion.
Session Convenors:
Bethan Bide, University of York
Jade Halbert, University of Leeds
Speakers:
Mónica Bueno Ortega, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Women’s Role in Craftsmanship and Fashion in Late 17th Century Spain
In Early Modern Spain, the guild system that dominated the fashion industry was predominantly structured around men. Despite this male-centric framework, there were some female figures who worked as artisans. These women often found themselves operating on the fringes of the guild system—working in trades wheretheir labor was not officially recognized or in roles deemed traditionally feminine, such as embroidery and lace-making. This presentation will explore the role assigned to female artisans in late 17th-century Spain and the reality of their contributions.
During this period, women’s involvement in crafts and fashion was often overlooked or undervalued due to societal norms and the restrictive nature of guild regulations. Nevertheless, many women managed to carve out spaces for themselves within the industry. Some worked alongside their male relatives in family-run workshops, while others pursued their crafts independently, often facing significant obstacles. In trades like embroidery and lace-making, which were seen as extensions of domestic skills, women were able to gain a degree of professional recognition, even if it was limited compared to their male counterparts.
By examining the lives and work of these women, this presentation aims to shed light on the complexities of their roles. It will consider the disparity between the prescribed roles for women and the actual contributions they made to the craftsmanship and fashion of the era. Ultimately, this analysis will contribute to a broader understanding of women’s agency and labour in the context of Early Modern Spain.
Suchitra Choudhury, University of Glasgow
The Fashion for Shawls in Art: A Hidden History
A vast number of Kashmiri shawls from the Indian subcontinent were imported into Britain in the nineteenth century. These were popular with wealthy women, who could afford to buy such expensive accessories. Ordinary, women, however, were happy to wear the cashmere’s cheaper, and more readily available, imitations made in centres at Edinburgh, Norwich and Paisley. Of course, as Paisley dominated the market, all British–made imitation Indian shawls came to be known as Paisley shawls.
Textile and art historians have rigorously studied Oriental shawls in terms of their manufacture and design, and also sometimes, in relation to artistic works. In this paper, however, I consult a series of images to show how the famed “India shawl” was, in part, a satiric icon. Indeed, as shawls were important diplomatic gifts in the subcontinent, their aesthetic representation in Britain sometimes overtly and surreptitiously referred to specific contexts of the British empire. Using a series of artistic images my aim will be to provide a new narrative of the fashion for Kashmiri shawls in the heyday of its use.
How do we define creative labour? Does visual/graphic satire come into its purview as it seeks to both emphasize and reimagine established stereotypes? As a discipline, art history has begun to invest considerably in literary studies; contributing to this trend, I hope to use postcolonial, literary and cultural theory to reimagine the vogue for Oriental shawls in imperial Britain.
Abigail Jubb, University of York
Who Made ‘Tailor-mades?’ The Labour Behind the Labelling of Women’s Fashionable ‘Tailor-made’ Garments in Britain circa 1880-1930
The ‘tailor-made’ label was used for fashionable garments, including coats, costumes, jackets and skirts, that were all tailored in style. These were produced for and consumed by increasingly widespread markets of women consumers in Britain from the late nineteenth-century. Not only masculinised by design they were also considered to be the legacy of a history of functional tailoring for upper-class ladies that was cut and constructed by gentlemen tailors. As such, much scholarship has uncritically, and quite literally, interpreted ‘tailor-made’ as labelling garments made by a tailor, and a traditionalist bespoke tailor at that.
However, contemporaneous stakeholders, from the popular press to trade boards, discourse on not just consumer but industry confusion about the very labour behind this label. My paper therefore reiterates them in asking the research question: who was making ‘tailor-mades’? My exploratory answer applies extensive primary research to reconstruct their supply chains, from production by manufacturers to retail consumption, innovatively bringing together my study of the latter’s’ trade literature, the former’s archival records and museum’s extent garments. In doing so, I reveal the modern practices behind the increasingly standardised production of ‘tailor-mades’ and the diversity of producers responsible for this – labourers whose contributions were and have arguably continued to be hidden behind this label’s appropriation of a historical trade and its associated cultural capital. I therefore argue that we should beware of interpreting the (mis-)labelling of historic garment production at face value and undervaluing the existence, besides the knowledge, skills and experience, of its makers. Beyond this, my research also resonates with the ambiguity of our fashion industry supply chains today, reminding us to continue asking the question: who makes our clothes?
Bethan Bide, University of York, Jade Halbert, University of Leeds
Making Modern Fashion: Creative Labour and British Manufacturing in Context Since 1950
During the post-war period, fashion manufacturing was one of the United Kingdom’s most profitable and vibrant industries. During the 1960s it was, as an industry, worth more to the economy than all other manufacturing industries combined, providing skilled, creative, and well-paid work across the country from the biggest cities to the smallest villages. By the 1980s, however, the industry entered into a steep decline which led to its eventual deterioration by the end of the century, resulting in the loss of thousands of skilled jobs and the dispersal of a uniquely vibrant and creative making culture. Today, British fashion manufacturing is mostly restricted to small-scale and specialist production, and represents only the residue of what went before.
This is a problem because there is new and urgent demand for the re-establishment of a skilled manufacturing sector to serve British fashion, but little knowledge or understanding of how to actually go about re-establishing it or how to present its creative value. This paper introduces a new research project that seeks to record the histories of the few people surviving who have knowledge of sector at its peak and produce a new history of post-war British fashion making from the perspective of makers. The project will foreground the overlooked contribution of manufacturers to Britain’s international reputation as a fashion powerhouse and supersede previous accounts by also resolving longstanding misconceptions about the sector and its value, viability, and creativity.