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The technology, art, politics, and culture of the 19th century were strongly reflected in the styles and silhouettes of the era's clothing. For women, fashion was an extravagant and extroverted display of the female silhouette with corset pinched waistlines, bustling full-skirts that flowed in and out of trend and decoratively embellished gowns.
The French Revolution is largely responsible for altering the standard male dress. During the revolution, clothing symbolized the division between the upper classes and the working-class revolutionaries. French rebels earned the nickname sans-culottes, or "the people without breeches," because of the loose floppy trousers they popularized. [55]
During the Industrial Revolution, fabric production was mechanised with machines powered by waterwheels and steam-engines. Production shifted from small cottage based production to mass production based on assembly line organisation. Clothing production, on the other hand, continued to be made by hand.
By 1905, clothing was increasingly factory made and often sold in large, fixed-price department stores, spurring a new age of consumerism with the rising middle class who benefited from the industrial revolution. [1]
The main drivers of the Industrial Revolution were textile manufacturing, iron founding, steam power, oil drilling, the discovery of electricity and its many industrial applications, the telegraph and many others. Railroads, steamboats, the telegraph and other innovations massively increased worker productivity and raised standards of living by ...
Ideas of thrift and hard work characterised middle-class families as the Industrial Revolution swept Europe. These values were displayed in Samuel Smiles' book Self-Help, in which he states that the misery of the poorer classes was "voluntary and self-imposed—the results of idleness, thriftlessness, intemperance, and misconduct." [157]
In 1813, businessman Francis Cabot Lowell formed a company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, and built a textile mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts.. Unlike the earlier Rhode Island System, where only carding and spinning were done in a factory while the weaving was often put out to neighboring farms to be done by hand, the Waltham mill was the first integrated mill in ...
Guild-controlled systems of production and distribution and the sumptuary laws made clothing both expensive and difficult to acquire for the majority of people. However, by 1750 the consumer revolution brought about cheaper copies of fashionable styles, allowing members of all classes to partake in fashionable dress.