In my studio space 1840s ladies’ fashion is having a bit of a moment. I am working on a painting that links the spectacular, voluminous women’s dresses and gowns fashionable in the 1840s with the women who made these dresses.
Why the 1840s? Well, if you are looking for exploitation and misery in historic fashion supply chains, the 1840s are a good place to start:
– Slavery in the cotton fields. Until the start of American civil in 1861, the rapidly expanding Lancashire cotton industry was much relying on the slave economy of the Southern United States: It is estimated that by the mid-1800s, over three quarters of the raw cotton used in British textile production came from the cotton slave plantations in the US. This was not something that was likely to be on the minds of retail customers of textiles and clothes, while within the industry the high quality of US cotton would invariable trump any concerns about its link to slave labour.
– The factory workforce. Meanwhile working and living conditions of workers in the Lancashire spinning and weaving mills were pretty terrible. Engels wrote his first influential book, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, in 1844/45, based on his observations in Manchester: overcrowded, damp and unsanitary housing, environmental pollution, and long hours of hard, monotonous, often dangerous work in noisy, dusty factories at mostly very low pay. NB: Men were paid more than women and got the better paid jobs (sound familiar?) and children’s pay was the lowest. Child labour was common in the 19th century and not regarded as wrong per se. However, the excessive use of child labour in factories did cause concern, which led to the gradual reduction of working hours for children (and eventually everyone else) in the Factory Acts of 1833, 1844 and 1847. The 1844 Act limited the work days of children 9-13 to 9 hours/day whilst the maximum hours for women and children 13-18 were 12 hours/day and 9 hours on Sundays. The 1847 Act effectively limited the work days of all workers to 10 hours/day.
– Distressed seamstresses: The stage in the production of our 1840s dress that was most in the consciousness of bourgeois society was the actual dressmaking – not surprising since it was closest to the ultimate retail consumers. Dressmakers were often self-employed women working from home, and the exploited, starving seamstress in the garret was a much-publicised moral outrage in the 1840s. Named the “white slaves of London” in an article in the Times of October 1843, these underpaid, overworked needlewomen also featured in Punch cartoons and were a favourite topic of melodramatic novels which today we would probably call “misery porn”. At the crosshairs of this sits Thomas Hood’s famous “Song of the Shirt”, published anonymously in the 1843 Christmas edition of Punch and inspiration for many paintings. NB: Ironically, the public attention to the plight of the needlewomen did little to improve their lot – self-employed , they did not benefit from the legislation that gradually improved working conditions of the factory workforce; unorganised, they could not increase their power by bargaining collectively for better pay. The parallels to today are striking. — For further reading on this topic I recommend Beth Harris’ “Famine and Fashion: needlewomen in the 19th century” (2005).
Having settled on the 1840s I then set out to find a suitable reproduction fabric that I could use as canvas for a painting. Not that easy…. The amount of patterns and colours used in printed dress fabrics just seemed to be overwhelming, and I felt very ill equipped to judge whether a reproduction claiming to be in the style of the late 1830s / 40s was any good. But help was at hand from Dr Philip Sykas, textile historian, pattern design specialist, and research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), who very kindly screened the images of some of the available reproduction fabrics I had found at reproductionfabrics.com and suggested a couple of patterns that appeared to look ok. One of them was this one, which is in the style of an English dress fabric from the late 1830s/early 40s.
This would have made a fairly easy ‘canvas’ to work with – a quiet, almost uniform background for a painting. Trouble was I didn’t find it very inspiring. And then came a revelation: When I visited Dr Sykas during one of my research trips to Manchester he showed me one of the London warehousemen’s pattern books from the Downing Collection held at MMU, Manchester. It honestly took my breath away – there is simply no substitute for seeing actual, original fabric swatches. The patterns were a trippy combination of ultra-modern looking/ abstract and more naturalistic, floral designs, and the colourways were bold and bright. I especially remember the combination of a deep blue with reds and yellows, and the overlaying of ombré stripes or ‘rainbowing’ with other patterns. The type of fabrics (delaines, ie. a cotton/wool mix) meant that the colours were particularly vivid. The combined effect was distinctly over the top – there seemed to be no such thing as “too much” in pattern design of that time. I was so mesmerised that I forgot to take any photographs of the sample book pages; however Dr Sykas kindly sent a couple through after my visit, and there’s also a nice example from the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester.
Inspired by these discoveries, I decided to use the ‘wildest’ reproduction fabric I could find (one of my studio colleagues commented: “Are you sure this is not a 1960s pattern?”):
Suddenly the project of painting on an 1840s-style patterned fabric had become a lot more challenging! Especially because I didn’t just want to use the pattern as a background, I wanted it to play an active role in the painting’s narrative, interwoven with paint layers that showed the wearer of the dress as well as the makers at different stages of the production chain, from cotton growing to dressmaking. I am still wrestling with it. To find out the result, come along the exhibition!
