‘No Small Share of Ingenuity’: An Object-Oriented Analysis of Eighteenth-Century English Dressmaking

Abstract

This article details eighteenth-century English dressmaking through an in-depth, object-oriented exploration of garment construction practices and techniques from a maker's perspective. Building upon prior scholarship of women's work and aspects of pre-industrial English garment trades, this article employs primary and secondary source materials in conjunction with extensive object-based research of extant garments. The research findings outline exactly how pre-industrial English dressmakers’ skills were nuanced, sophisticated and adaptive to making and remaking, as well as the personal, haptic connections they cultivated with their work.