Ready-to-wear or Made-to-measure? Consumer Choice in the British Menswear Trade, 1900–1939

References

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• See for example Honeyman, Well Suited, p. 42; A. Godley, ‘Comparative Labour Productivity in the British and American Clothing Industries, 1850–1950’, Special Issue on the History of the Readymade Clothing Industry, Textile History, XXVILL (1997), p. 72; Levitt, ‘Cheap Mass-produced Men’s Clothing’.
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• And of course shoes.
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• Although for convenience the term ‘tailor’ will be used in this article, it should be noted that by 1900 the tailoring trade (including the bespoke trade) was characterized by a sometimes minute subdivision of labour. In reality, therefore, the measuring of the customer would be undertaken by a cutter (who would also be responsible for cutting the cloth, but would normally not be involved in sewing the clothes) or, increasingly, by a shop assistant without knowledge of the tailoring trade. The making, pressing and finishing of the garments, themselves subject to different degrees of subdivision, would then be the responsibility of other workers, who could be employed in a workshop attached to the shop, in a separate workshop or factory, or indeed in their own homes as outworkers. A useful contemporary introduction to the tailoring trade is B. W. Poole, The Clothing Trades Industry (London: Pitman, 1920). See also A. J. Kershen, Uniting the Tailors: Trade Unionism Among the Tailors in London and Leeds, 1870–1939 (Ilford: Frank Cass, 1995); J. A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
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• See for example the humour on which television comedies such as Are You Being Served? or the more recent The Fast Show sketch, ‘The Two Tailors’, were based. Although see C. Breward, ‘Manliness, Modernity and Male Clothing’, in J. Entwistle and E. Wilson eds, Body Dressing (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 169–71, for a different perspective.
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• For an analysis of the interplay between masculinity, health and sexuality, see L. Hall, Hidden
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• Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). See also Breward, ‘Manliness, Modernity and Male Clothing’, pp. 165–81; J. Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); M. Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996); A. Easthope, What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1992, first published 1990), especially pp. 50–54; A. Warren, ‘Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 199–219; B. Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
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• The Tailor and Cutter, 10 May 1900, reproduced from Sketch, 25 April 1900. See also Comic Cuts,
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• December 1893. The importance of the relationship between body and dress is discussed in J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), especially chapter 1.
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• Tregenza, Harbour Village, p. 162.
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• The Tailor and Cutter, 23 May 1930.
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• The Tailor and Cutter, 11 November 1920.
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• The Outfitter, 24 January 1925. It should be noted that the trade journal The Outfitter was strongly supportive of the ready-to-wear trade.
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• Men’s Wear, 24 March 1923. For the development of menswear chain stores, see Honeyman, Well Suited. See also J. B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 292–321. Similarly, independent retailers of ready-to-wear garments were also frequently exhorted to provide that personal service which multiples could not supposedly emulate. See for example Men’s Wear, 26 March 1927.
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• Men’s Wear, 8 January 1938.
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• Men’s Wear, 15 January 1938. This particular retailer stocked between 50 and 100 suits, at an average price of 5 guineas. For the problem of the large range of sizes offered by manufacturers, and their lack of standardization, see also Men’s Wear, 10 August 1935.
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• M. V. Hughes, A London Home in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, first published 1946), pp. 149–50. For high-class tailors’ roles as sartorial advisers, see also F. Anderson, ‘Fashioning the Gentleman: A Study of Henry Poole and Co., Savile Row Tailors 1861–1900’, Special Issue on Masculinities, Fashion Theory, iv (2000), 405–26, especially 420.
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• Poole, The Clothing Trades Industry, pp. 30–1. See also The Tailor and Cutter, 19 February 1920. For a different perspective, see also Francis Place’s complaints of early nineteenth-century men’s rude and offensive behaviour towards their tailor and their barber, which he ascribed to the latter’s ‘attendance about the persons of their customers’. M. Thale ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 216–17.
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• Men’s Wear, 12 February 1927. For a more positive perspective on female shoppers, see The Outfitter, 25 January 1930.
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• For the relationship between shopping and femininity, see for example E. D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 ); C. Hosgood, ‘Mrs Pooter’s Purchase: Lower Middle-class Consumerism and the Sales, 1870–1914’, in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls eds, Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 146–63; C. Hosgood, ‘ “Doing the shops” at Christmas: Women, Men, and the Department Store in England, c. 1880–1914’, in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain eds, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 97–115. The relationship between such images and women’s ‘real’ experiences and attitudes towards shopping, especially away from London’s department stores, still remains largely unexplored.
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• Comic Cuts, 4 April 1903.
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• W. Pett Ridge, A Story Teller: Forty Years in London (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), p. 296.
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• Men’s Wear, 9 April 1927. But see also The Outfitter, 8 February 1930, for a more positive assessment of department stores’ popularity with men. As Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain have pointed out, ‘The [pre-1939] department store was a deeply gendered world, but it was never the overwhelmingly feminine one that the literature might at times lead us to believe’. G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, ‘The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change’, in Crossick and Jaumain eds, Cathedrals of Consumption, p. 34. See also for example S. Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), especially pp. 99–114.
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• The exceptions of course were those shops specializing in ladies’ tailoring. For a discussion of pre- 1914 menswear shops, see Breward, The Hidden Consumer, chapter 4. See also K. Honeyman, ‘Men Shopping? A Load of Billiard Balls’, THES, 8 February 2002, pp. 22–23.
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• Punch, 30 April 1913. See also The Sphere, 1 April 1911.
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• See The Tailor and Cutter, 6 May 1920, for a useful description of the ‘normal’ process of ordering and ‘trying-on’ a suit.
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• The London Tailor, May 1907; May 1912; The Master Tailor, November and December 1910.
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• On interiors, and ‘modern’ shop fitting practices in the inter-war period, see for example Men’s Wear, 22 January 1927; The Outfitter, 11 July 1925.
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• S. Callery, Harrods Knightsbridge: The Story of Society’s Favourite Store (London: Ebury Press, London, 1991), p. 129.
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• Men’s Wear, 6 August 1938.
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• Men’s Wear, 30 July 1938. Revealing is also the practice in Montague Burton’s shops of marking the staff room as ‘cutters’ room’, although no part of the making of garments was actually undertaken on the premises. Honeyman, ‘Following Suit’, p. 436.
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• A. S. Bridgland ed., The Modern Tailor Outfitter and Clothier (London: Caxton Publishing, n.d., c. 1930 ), vol. 2, plate 1; The Tailor and Cutter, 28 April 1910.
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• This is not of course to suggest that all men were either able or willing to buy a tailored, made-to- measure suit on reaching adulthood, or indeed that all children wore shop-bought ready-to-wear clothes.
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• Men’s Wear, 31 August 1935.
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• West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds, Montague Burton Archives, item 250, Anon., ‘Scientific selling’ (Montague Burton, 1927), p. 14. But see also the presence of billiard halls in most Burton’s buildings. Honeyman, ‘Following Suit’, p. 440.
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• Although for a different period, shopping as a ‘social’ activity is explored for example in C. Walsh, ‘Social Meaning and Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern London’, in J. Benson and L. Ugolini (eds), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Retailing in Britain, 1550–2000 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 52–79.
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• Men’s Wear, 25 April 1931. The judge ordered that Dr. Power, who had just written another play, should pay £3 a month until the bill was settled.
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• Men’s Wear, 22 August 1931.
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