Shirtwaist, Glen D.L.R. & Co. label, 1895-1900
The shirtwaist, a feminine version of a man’s shirt, revolutionized women’s fashion and its industry. Although white blouses were occasionally seen in earlier nineteenth-century fashion, especially in the 1830s and 1860s, it was not until 1890 that the separate shirt and skirt ensemble really burst on the fashion scene. They were initially offered in white cotton and other men’s shirting material, with sleeves following women’s fashion (leg-of-mutton sleeves in the 1890s, and so on). Soon enough, shirtwaists were also offered in more “feminine” versions made of softer, lightweight cottons and with lace insertions and embroidery, to add variety to how they might be worn.
The longstanding fashion for snugly fitted dress bodices, which required custom-fitting to achieve the smooth fit that fashion and propriety demanded, had precluded widespread development of ready-made garments. Mass-produced garments in standardized sizes and proportions could never achieve that snug custom look; only unfitted outerwear and underwear could successfully be ready-made for women.
The shirtwaist’s loose fit, along with the simple gored skirts of this decade, offered new possibilities for mass production, as both could be easily produced in a range of sizes, either ready-made or made-to-order. After 1890, factory-made shirtwaists were made by the hundreds of thousands in New York and other cities. They were worn by everyone from the fashionable elite to the factory workers who sewed them by the millions under atrocious working conditions. Young women made shirtwaists an unofficial uniform for college and the newly popular sports of golf, tennis, and bicycling. Thousands of women entering white-collar office jobs as stenographers, typists, and secretaries wore them with tailored jacket-and-skirt suits. Washable, affordable, and smart-looking, the shirtwaist led a young woman interviewed by Alexander Black in his 1899 book Modern Daughters: Conversations with Various American Girls and One Man to suggest that “the most important inventions of the century are the bicycle and the shirt waist. Each has had an immensely important influence on the physical and economic situation of women.”
Cotton. Lent by The Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, Northampton, Massachusetts
Clara Lemlich, about 1910
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center Collection, Cornell University
To young women like Clara Lemlich, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, shirtwaists were not only affordable and practical, but uniquely American, and represented their willing assimilation as Americans.
Clara, one of thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrants working in New York’s garment industry, led the 1909 “Uprising of 20,000,” a labor strike of shirtwaist factory workers protesting low pay and dangerous working conditions—two years before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 146 workers.