Ready to Wear Boom in the 1950s & 60s

The Ready to Wear Boom

Excerpted from Vintage Fashions For Women: the 1950s & 60s

      In the 1950s, manufacturers made the latest fashions more accessible than they’d ever been to every woman—wealthy or poor. Where once mass–manufacturers stole designs from the top couture designers, now designers allowed mass–manufacturers to buy garments with the expressed knowledge that they were for copying. At a more expensive premium, buyers could purchase a toile or rough copy of the garment in muslin. Occasionally, special deals were even made where the mass–manufacturer was given an actual pattern—but only for limited rums. Even so, mass–manufacturers did hire their own designers (who largely went nameless and unrecognized) to create all–new designs in keeping with the popular lines and attitudes of the woman of the fifties and sixties...
      By the end of the 1950s, many couture designers were suffering; mass-manufacturers were stealing away clients. Buying a mass-produced dress was far simpler (not to mention less expensive) than the old-fashioned couture method. (The traditional couture route had, for some eighty years, been for a client to choose a design and fabric, then have their every measurement taken; a week or more later, the client attended a fitting, then waited again while adjustments were made. A second fitting was then required, and perhaps a third or fourth if the design was elaborate. Though Givenchy once made a coat overnight for the Duchess of Windsor, the average couture garment takes two or three weeks to actually find its way to a client’s wardrobe.) Clearly, designers realized, they’d have to modernize. While the old-fashioned methods were still kept in place (and, indeed, they still exist today), they were reserved for the most discriminating and affluent clients. For other customers, designers opened ready-to-wear boutiques. Still too expensive for the majority of women, and sacrificing most of the hand-worked details and custom work that makes couture garments exceptional, these boutiques nonetheless gave couture designers an all-new market and succeeded in keeping them afloat while the ready-to-wear industry swept through the United States. “American women are always in a hurry,” explained Mainbocher. “They want to pick a dress today and wear it yesterday.” Christian Dior elaborated: “She prefers three new dresses to one beautiful one. She never hangs back from making a choice, knowing perfectly well that her fancy will be of short duration and the dress which she is in the process of buying will be jettisoned very soon.”
      By 1966, the ready-to-wear industry accounted for $14,000,000,000 of fashion business, and couture designers made up only 12% of all dresses sold in the United States. Adding power behind them, the five biggest ready-to-wear manufacturers went public: Jonathan Logan, Bobbie Brooks, Russ Togs, Puritan, and Leslie Fay. Lumped together, these companies newly on the stock market exchange produced over 70,000,000 garments, which were then sold through some 30,000 retail stores...
       As the ready-to-wear industry skyrocketed, the cost of dressing plummeted. In 1967, manufacturers of moderate to inexpensive garments claimed that for several years 40% of all dresses sold (about 110,000,000 dresses total) were $5.98 or less, and that “all but 12% of all dresses sold for less than $25”—that’s 233,000,000 dresses.
      In 1967, fashion writer Jessica Doves literally wrote the book on the ready-to-wear industry. In awe, she titled the book appropriately—The Ready-To-Wear Miracle—and her text overflows with wonder at the ease and cheapness to consumers the new industry provided. Taking us to 463 Seventh Avenue, New York City, where a great many manufacturers of inexpensive women’s garments resided, Daves also offers an unprecedented look into just how the ready-to-wear industry functioned technically during the sixties:

“In the big, quiet, cutting room just inside the door, the pattern makers are turning the dress designer’s ideas into oddly shaped pieces of cardboard, as many as sixteen pieces for one dress. At the back of the room, working at a table that looks almost half a block long, a man is bending over this series of little shaped pieces of cardboard, fitting them as neatly as possible into the forty–five–inch–wide material stretched on the table. He moves them around until magically there seems to be enough space between only for the blade of a thin knife; having done that, he goes from pattern piece to pattern piece, punching holes in certain strategic spots. On an adjoining table a cutter works on a similar, pattern-covered length of cloth. The length of cloth turns out to be 400 layers of cloth, and on the top layer the pattern pieces are placed exactly according to the careful plotting on the neighboring table. The electrically driven knife goes through the 400 layers as cleanly as the Cordless Cutter goes through cheese. Once the pieces are cut, tiny holes are punched in what seemed to be random markings of the magician who had fitted the pattern to the cloth on the other table. These are the guidelines for the workers who presently take over the patterns. Lying on the table is a six-handled, flat, small metal machine about a foot square: the size grader. This is a vital part of the cutting, making it possible to change the measurements from size eight to size sixteen, accurately, and to come out with the same dress, ready for the machines. The sewing is done in another building on West 23rd Street...
“Besides the markers and cutters, more than 700 girls work there at the sewing machines. Soft music is played most of the time...Even in this inexpensive house, many of these workers make the complete dress except for the finishing [for example, the fastenings]...These costumes...are more complicated than a shift [dress], which, with lining, consists of about sixteen separate pieces and is made by the section method...Individual girls make these individual parts of the dress, and they are then put together by other workers.”

“How much [fabric] do they buy at one time?” Doves questioned further. “Of one fabric? ‘Oh, about twenty thousand yards to start...’ (Twenty thousand yards is a little more than eleven and one-third miles, or about a quarter-mile shorter than Manhattan island.)” The author, and every woman who cherished her ability to purchase attractive clothing inexpensively and easily, was dazzled.

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04/21/2006