Educating Rita

Recently, I was approached at a guild meeting in our area by someone wanting a Cinderella costume made for her granddaughter. She asked what our rate would be if she provided the fabric, and was told $100 (four hours' work at $20 an hour). She said thank you, she was collecting estimates, and moved on. The subtext, in her demeanour and tone was 'you charge too much. This is a kid's costume.' A similar gown was offered for sale by Ella Dynae Designs for $270 (see below).

I suspect that she was hoping for something in the range of $20 for the project, which would work out to $5 an hour. This may be the state minimum wage in Georgia, but in California it is $10 an hour and the median wage for a seamstress in the US is $11. Given our example, the costume would have cost $40-100 for labour, by a seamstress. I am at the high end of that scale because I am not a seamstress; I am a dressmaker, the median wage for which is $16 an hour.

So, what is the difference between the two?
A Seamstress is one who sews clothing from a pattern or alters clothing. Typically, they do not make their own patterns, work solely by machine, and do not do fine hand sewing. One would go to a seamstress for normal jobs, such as hemming, repairing zippers, making simple everyday clothing. Seamstresses formed the main labor force, outside tailoring, which fueled the expansion of clothing production and related trades from the seventeenth century onward. This expansion was not dependent initially on technological developments or the introduction of a factory system, but on the pool of women workers. Their expendability and cheapness to their employers was effectively guaranteed by the sheer number of available women able and willing to use a needle, their general lack of alternative employment, and by the fact they then worked outside the control of guilds and latterly have been under-unionized. These seamstresses sewed goods for the increasing market for ready-made basic clothes such as shirts, breeches, waistcoats, shifts, and petticoats for working people.

At the cheaper end of the trade, the work of seamstresses did not involve complex cutting, fitting, or designing, though there were no hard and fast rules. "Seamstress" has always been a flexible term, with the work involved dependent on local conditions and the agency of individuals. Some elaboration and finishing was involved, such as tucking or buttonholes. While work done in this style continued, seamstresses were generally distinguished from dressmakers, milliners, mantua-makers, stay-makers, embroiderers, and tailoresses by their lower levels of craft and skill, but at the top-end of the market fine sewing was valued. Their existence was precarious and exacerbated by layoffs due to seasonal demand and unpredictable changes of fashion. In the Victorian period, widespread demand for mourning clothes, short notice given for elaborate evening dresses, and fickle customers were commonly cited as causes of distress through overwork.

There were large numbers of seamstresses in a wide range of situations. They frequently worked as outworkers, on per-piece pay, in small workshops or in their homes. Having learned their trade in waged work, many seamstresses continued to use their skills after marriage by taking in work, often making simple garments or restyling old ones in their own poor communities where they played an important role in the provision of cheap clothing outside the regular retail trade. Some seamstresses were employed in a temporary but regular visiting capacity in wealthier households where they supplemented existing domestic staff and worked by arrangement through an accumulation of sewing and mending tasks, in exchange for a day rate of pay and meals. This practice lingered until World War II in some areas of Britain.

A Dressmaker, or couturiere, is one who makes patterns, designs garments, sews (often by hand), fits the design, scale and trim of the garment to the client, does embroidery, beading, makes trims, does hand finishing, and uses couture techniques. One would go to a dressmaker or tailor for expensive clothing of fine fabrics and trims for an event such as a wedding.

Historically, aristocratic and upper-class women's fashionable Western dress was created by an intimate negotiation between the client and her dressmaker. The investment in the design was principally in the cost of the luxurious textile itself, not in its fabrication. The origins of the haute couture system were laid by the late seventeenth century as France became the European center for richly produced and innovative luxury silk textiles. Thus the preeminent position of France's luxury textile industry served as basis and direct link to the development of its haute couture system. The prestigious social and economic value of an identifiable couturier, or designer's name, is a development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the Paris-based haute couture created a unique fashion system that validated the couturier, a fashion designer, as an artist and established his or her "name" as an international authority for the design of luxurious, original clothing. Couturiers were no longer merely skilled artisans, but creative artists with identifiable names printed or woven into a petersham waist tape that was sewn discreetly into the dress or bodice. This was the beginning of designer labels in fashion. The client was required to visit the couture house where a garment was made to measure to high-quality dressmaking and tailoring standards.

The couture house workrooms are carefully distributed according to sewing techniques. The sewing staff are divided between two areas: dressmaking (flou), for dresses and draped garments based upon feminine dressmaking techniques, or tailoring (tailleur), for suits and coats utilizing male tailoring techniques of construction. The staff work according to a hierarchy of skills ranging from the première, head dressmaker or tailor, to apprentices. The selling areas, salons, are equally controlled and run by the vendeuse, saleswoman, who sells the designs to clients and negotiates the fabrication and fittings with the workrooms.

In our example, the lady wanted a seamstress who would make a garment according to the pattern directions, for the size indicated, with no fittings or hand finishing. That's fine. However, when my own children were little, I made them costumes all the time, not just for Hallowe'en, and they wore them as playclothes for years, until they could no longer be let out, let down, and were threadbare; my point being that they lasted for years, as they were intended to do. To a child, a costume isn't just a one time wear item, it is the gateway into their magical world of imagination.

To my mind, this deserves the skills of the couturiere.