Clothing Consumption

Along with the consumption of food and shelter, consumption of clothing fulfills the fundamental physical needs of humans. Without thick layers of bodily hair, a human body requires clothing to protect itself from the elements, distinguishing it from that of other animals. Clothing is also used as a symbol to distinguish a person from other people or to assimilate with others, in which case, clothing consumption transpires beyond that of basic needs. Although clothing appeared by the Neolithic period and since then has been a feature of human societies, consumption of clothing itself, separate from consumption of textiles, appeared in more recent societies with the emergence of the ready-made clothing industry.

The origins of ready-made clothing are found in the early uniforms of armies and navies and in the secondhand clothing markets in seventeenth-century Europe. Other early examples are work clothes for sailors on long-haul voyages and those for children in orphanages. In eighteenth-century England, non-noble consumers were fashionably clothed, often in printed calico costumes, purchased secondhand, with a muslin handkerchief around their neck. It is said that the craze over the printed calico made available to the British consumers, thanks to the expansion of commercial voyages, motivated the inventors of the cotton spinning and weaving machineries during the Industrial Revolution. Although the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the industrialization in the late-eighteenth century, the mechanization and the mass production of ready-made clothes for non-noble citizens increased with the diffusion of the sewing machine.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the sewing machine expanded the output of clothing factories in the United States, well ahead of the development in Europe. In the United Sates, Diana Crane argues, standardized and mass-produced denim overalls, for example, became widely available from mail-order catalogs by the end of the nineteenth century and were worn by farmers on the Western frontiers as well as factory workers in the North. Cheap, ready-made seersucker jackets were also widely available by then in the warmer South. The transition from handmade to machine-made clothing occurred earlier in the United States than in Europe, not only due to the availability of the sewing machine, but also due [Page 178]to the diffusion of clothing patterns and the development of a standardized system of body measurements, as well as the lack of mature local markets for secondhand clothing outside of the cities. In Europe, working-class families relied on the fast turnaround of used clothes and, by the end of the nineteenth century, on inexpensive ready-made clothes.

The contexts in which clothes are worn and the sociocultural meanings of clothing have changed over time. Fashion and social norms have governed the way people dressed themselves for centuries, but had become pronounced by the eighteenth century with the influx of less expensive textiles, as seen by the contemporary social critiques and satirical cartoonists who recognized the effect of fashion and social emulation in the English towns and countryside. Although clothing that had traditionally been worn by the working class, such as smocks and wooden clogs, did not disappear until the twentieth century, workers started to possess stylish garments and suits for Sunday use. Social emulation was most apparent in one's best clothes, commonly called Sunday best because they were reserved for going to church. By the end of the nineteenth century, male workers would often dress themselves in three-piece suits, with a black or dark blue jacket, trousers, and a waistcoat, adorned with accessories such as a chained watch and a hat, resembling the style of the middle class. By the early twentieth century, the desire to dress well was more widespread among the working class in the United States than in France or England, possibly due to their higher aspiration in the less-hierarchical society and because immigrant newcomers often discarded traditional clothing and customs on arrival. The custom of wearing one's Sunday best as a means of conspicuous consumption receded slowly during the twentieth century.

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