Shirtwaists and the Price of Fashion

Jessamyn Hatcher

Shirtwaist, purchased at the Goodwill in Traverse City, Michigan

Shirtwaist, purchased in San Telmo in Buenos Aires

Since high school, I’ve been in the habit of shopping at used clothing stores, and

in this way, I came to own two shirtwaists. I found one in a Goodwill in northern

Michigan, and one in Buenos Aires in a shop that so closely resembled my childhood

daydreams of a magic dress-up closet that it’s hard to believe it really existed. Both

shirtwaists are made of sheer, cream-colored fabric, with three-quarter sleeves, waists

that end at the midriff, and elaborate lace detailing. One fastens with a row of buttons

down the back, the other with a long, maddening trail of miniscule hooks and eyes. I

know enough to tell that one was hand-stitched and made of fine material; the other looks

to have been made on an early sewing machine. But I purchased the shirtwaists without

any idea of what they were, or knowing anything about their history. Mostly they just

seemed beautiful to me, and old-fashioned, and I wore them all the time.

The majority of people know they don’t know much about how their clothing is

produced. With my shirtwaists, I was even less conscious than usual about their

production. I was taken with their allure of history. But their actual history remained

vague, further clouded by the feelings of minor triumph and romance I get from a good

thrift store score.

I see now, though, that my shirtwaists are part of what scholar Bill Brown calls

“the material unconscious.” Brown uses Freud’s model of the unconscious as a metaphor

to describe how a culture’s history persists within and animates the material stuff of

everyday life. To misquote him, (I’m substituting “thrift store” for “literature”): “Within

the [thrift store] the detritus of history lingers, lying in wait…within neglected images,

institutions, and objects.” 1

1 Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 4.

In the material unconscious of my shirtwaists lingers any number of large scale

histories: histories of industrialization and the mass production of clothing, histories of

labor, immigration, and urbanization, of consumer culture, of fashion, of feminism, of

socialism, of the rise of the middle-class, of New York City, of modernity. For members

of NYU community who spend time in the Silver Building where the Triangle Shirtwaist

Factory was housed, or any of the surrounding buildings, many of which sheltered similar

factories, shirtwaists are also personal and local history.

In my case, shirtwaists also turn out to be part of a family history. My great-

grandmother, Dora Olitsky (Dora Rosenberg before she married), worked as a seamstress

manufacturing the blouses in a Greenwich Village sweatshop in the 1910s. This was a

typical occupation for young Jewish women at the time, and is commonplace in the

histories of thousands of families with roots in the massive migration of Eastern

Europeans to New York at the turn of the 20th century. Nevertheless, it was only once I

started working on the project for the Dean’s Circle and Colloquium that my mother

revealed this fact about her grandmother to me. It illuminated a host of murky family

stories, subterranean feelings, and mundane details. The circumstances of my great-

grandmother’s life before she married my great-grandfather (they went on to own a

laundry in Ozone Park, Queens). The sense of sadness that surrounded any mention of

her. The pride my grandmother and her peers took in never having learned to sew.

2. The New York School poet Kenneth Koch has a famous poem called “One Train

May Hide Another” :

In a poem, one line may hide another line,

As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.

That is, if you are waiting to cross

The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at

Least after the first train is gone. 2

The structure of one-thing-hiding-another is useful here: The pleasurable sensation of

history derived from buying and wearing old clothing hides the history woven into that

clothing; a mother hides a painful family history; a classroom building thrumming with

smart, curious 18-to-21 year-olds in 2011 hides a blouse factory in which many people

the same age died in 1911.

Each of these forms of hiding or elision or repression or forgetting or palimpsest

or reuse or simply time passing are common enough that they have shelves of

illuminating theories to explain them. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s

psychoanalytic ideas about transgenerational haunting help explain how Dora Olitsky’s

story was conveyed across generations, even as it remained unspoken. Grant

McCracken’s theories about the value consumers place on commodities that have a

“patina” of history (what Arjun Appadurai describes as “the wear without the tear”) help

anatomize what I found beautiful about my shirtwaists. And the idea that consumption

hides production—as when my thrift store shopping eclipses the story of how what I

bought was manufactured—could be seen as a textbook example of Marx’s idea of

commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism describes how the allure of goods obscures

the labor that went into making them, as well as the value of the manufactured object

2 Kenneth Koch, “One Train,” in One Train (NY: Knopf, 1994).

expressed in purely functional terms—in this case, the use-value you would place on an

old, transparent shirt.3

Marx’s ideas about how consumption hides production, elaborated in the work of

many subsequent theorists, are critical to understanding governing social formations of

modern and contemporary life. One of the most important changes in recent history is

the rise of consumer culture and the new institutions and identities it fostered—many of

which, like advertising, were and are in the business of just the sorts of obfuscation Marx

describes. But, as Colloquium speaker Nan Enstad can help us to see, within the story of

the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—or more properly within the story of how the Triangle

Shirtwaist Factory is most often told, there’s another form of hiding going on. A story

where the theory of commodity fetishism itself obscures our ability to see the Triangle

shirtwaist makers clearly. A story where assumptions about production hide less often

told or well-understood stories about consumption. A story, to put it a little differently,

where the boundaries of production and consumption are porous.

3.

Do this thought experiment: Picture the Triangle waistmakers in your mind’s

eye. What do you see?

For me it was until recently a blunt-yet-watery caricature. I saw a horde of pale,

undernourished girls, dressed in rags.

3 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Grant D. McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1996), 75; Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1; A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin), 1992.

It’s a caricature that remained untouched by photographs from the period because

for some reason I couldn’t even really see those photographs.

Let’s look again:

One thing I see right away and with discomfort is what I can’t see. These six

photographs are the entire contents of a file in the Library of Congress from the George

Grantham Bain Collection, the archives of one of America's earliest news picture

agencies.4 The collection documents sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes,

disasters, and political activities. The photographs Bain produced and gathered for

distribution through his news service were worldwide in their coverage, but he

specialized in life in New York City. Lot 10855 has the heading “New York City

garment workers strikes, 1909-1916” but contains this bibliographic note: “Title and 4 George Grantham Bain. New York City garment workers strikes, 1909-1916. Library of Congress, Division of Photographs and Prints, Washington, DC. Retrieved August 18, 2010. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=LOT%2010855&fi=call&op=PHRASE&va=exact&co!=coll.

other information transcribed from unverified, old caption card data and item.” Perhaps

we can presume that Bain or one of his associates took the pictures and sold them to

newspapers, much in the way the AP works now. But we don’t know the names of the

women in the photographs, or their ages, or how these particular subjects were assembled

and chosen—although we can see that they were chosen, since all the photographs are

carefully posed.

In the first photograph, I see children…

I see women’s faces. I think I read on them variously: pride, laughter,

distraction, sorrow, determination, and a host of less legible expressions.

I also see: Enormous hats with feathers, ribbons, lace, nets, bows, and plumes.

Lockets, stickpins, cameos, belt buckles, and scarves. High-heeled boots, upswept hair,

handbags. Smart jackets, long skirts, and delicate gloves. And I see shirtwaists.

These outfits might not transmit anything for viewers now except “old-

fashioned.” But a look back at contemporary covers of Vogue shows us that the women

who posed for Bain were, in fact, in the height of fashion, even as the differences

between the settings of the photographs and the mise-en-scène of the Vogue covers mark

a cavernous social and economic divide:5

5 Vogue covers from November 6, 1909; December 4, 1909; June 15, 1910; April 1, 1911. “The Vogue of Hats: The Cloche—When Chic Started at the Eyebrows.” Weblog. Conde Nast Archive Blog. November 16, 2009. Retrieved on August 18, 2010. http://blog.condenaststore.com/2009/11/16/the-cloche/.

How do the striking shirtwaist workers’ fashions accord with the assumptions

behind my watery caricature, which, even if it is wrong in many respects, recognizes a

basic social and economic fact: people who worked in sweatshops in Greenwich Village

in the 1900s were poor?

What we are seeing in these photographs is evidence of a subculture, as Nan

Enstad’s work helps us understand. In other words, a social formation located outside

the structures of power, comprised of people intently creating a highly visible group

identity. We can see that the key modality for this subculture and its spectacular

visibility is fashion. Enstad gives the waistmakers’ subculture the name “ladyhood.”6

Why fashion? And what kind of messages does ladyhood contain?

Perhaps a second thought experiment can help to address these questions.

4.

Imagine that you are a shirtwaist maker. You work 12 hours a day, 6 days a

week manufacturing women’s blouses that you yourself could never afford. The Vogue

covers reproduced above are, of course, heavily idealized and romanticized, but let’s

guess they describe a basic truth you routinely notice when you walk or take the streetcar

to and from work: There are women in the city—in the United States—who are

financially and socially secure. One of the ways other people, including you, most

readily form opinions about who these women are and how they can expect to be treated

is by looking at the clothing they are wearing. The clothing they are wearing is the kind

you and your coworkers manufacture.

What, then, do you know about the meaning of fashion? For starters, you know

clothing is important in ways far beyond its use-value. (A coat does far more than keep

you warm.) You also know clothing successfully carries and transmits all sorts of

important social messages, which may in turn have real material consequences in a

6 Nan Enstad, "Fashioning Political Identities: Cultural Studies and the Historical Construction of Political Subjects," in American Quarterly 50:4, 1998: 749.

person’s life. (Enstad suggests a fashionable outfit would have helped you get a

placement in a factory in the first place.)7

What happens if you can stitch together your own fashionable garb from scraps at

work, or purchased at pushcart, saving up money by not eating much lunch, or walking

instead of taking the streetcar? You are under no illusions that an outfit will change your

social position. (Enstad writes that for some women, outfits like the ones pictured,

would have been the only clothing they owned.)8 You’re not suddenly going to have the

proprietors of shops waiting on you while you examine diamonds, or a butler attending to

your toilette, as do the women in the drawings on the cover of Vogue. Who’s to say

that’s what you want in the first place? (I don’t think what’s happening in ladyhood can

be explained by Thorstein Veblen’s idea of the working classes enviously imitating the

middle and upper classes.) But you might, at the bare minimum, be recognized as a

human being, and as such be accorded a measure of respect.

5.

In short, ladyhood was political garb.

To dress in ladyhood was to assert that working women were “human,” and not

just “part of the machines they are running,” as none other than Clara Lemlich, the

shirtwaist strike leader and worker conveyed:

We’re human, all of us girls, and we’re young. We like new hats as well as any

other young women. Why shouldn’t we? And if one of us gets a new one, even 7 Enstad, 751. 8 Enstad, 758.

if it hasn’t cost more than fifty cents, that means that we have gone for weeks on

two-cent lunches—dry cake and nothing else.9

Certainly the attire of ladyhood didn’t match either the stereotypical idea of the

impoverished working girl or the radicalized striker. When workers walked the picket

line in ladyhood’s finery in the years leading up to the fire, their style was an object of

contention. Union organizers worried that workers’ flamboyant dress made them seem

both less serious and less needy. The largely unsympathetic mainstream press confirmed

these fears: “Girl Strikers Dance as Employers Meet: The Waistmakers are Holding

Impromptu Meetings in Their Headquarters” announced a New York Times headline. A

New York Sun article described the striking workers as a “leisure class of 40,000, all in

holiday attire.”10 But flying in the face of what they were supposed to look like (properly

abject or properly sober) was exactly the waistmakers’ point. For the people who

manufactured blouses that sold for more than their monthly wages (and the shirtwaists

produced at Triangle were nowhere near the top-of-the-line), factory work provided daily

lessons in the fact that human subjectivity, dignity, value, and visibility were inextricably

linked to fashion’s commodities. Who knew better than the workers in factories such as

Triangle that you were what you wore?

6.

Clothing is a social skin, located at the boundary between the internal and the

external world, and assembled out of commodities. Fashion, like skin, is a densely

9 Clara Lemlich, “Leader Tells Why 40,000 Girls Struck,” New York Evening Journal, 26 Nov. 1909, 3. Cited in Enstad, 772. 10 New York Times, 27 Nov. 1909, 3. New York Sun, 30 Nov. 1909, 5. Cited in Enstad, 765.

textured, highly responsive, psychologically, politically, and culturally meaningful

surface. It provides the grounds where identities are formulated and negotiated, and

pitched ideological battles are fought.

If dress always points two ways—towards the inner world and the outer world—

the power of fashion also leads in two directions. Fashion is a tool for binding people to

powerful interests and institutions. A practice of forging identities out of commodities

cannot avoid complicity with structures of power. But, at the same time, fashion is

uniquely positioned to be a tool of resistance. It is relatively accessible and highly

visible. Its system of signification is mobile and not fixed, and hence open to

reappropriation. And its location at the border of self and world means that it is

saturated with importance.

A person, or group of people, can have an idea about a potential future or desire—

even a difficult-to-achieve or unlikely one—that can be embodied in an outfit and tried

out (tried on).

Certainly to put on different clothing is to make a change in the symbolic realm.

A legitimate question, then, is whether changes in symbolic realm can transform into

work towards changes in the social and material realms. Or are fashion’s wishes

terminal?

Without a doubt, that’s been an oft-sounded fear. As Carla Freeman writes:

"Some scholars … present [concern with]…dress and appearance among female workers

as superficial compensatory practices that mute women's inclination to resist (in an

organized manner) the harsh labor conditions they face in their jobs.”11 But there may be

a lot lurking behind this fear. Part of it may have to do with what we want other people

to want. We tend to forget, for instance, that the striking shirtwaist workers’ grievances

included a need for dressing rooms, but sometimes did not include demands for greater

workplace safety.12 Retrospectively, we may want the shirtwaist workers to have wanted

something better for themselves than cloakrooms, in large part because we wish they had

not died.

The problem comes in seeing fashion as necessarily in opposition to workers’

“inclination to resist in an organized manner.” We can look back and wish from the

deepest part of ourselves that the Brown Building had been equipped with proper fire

exits, that the greed of the factory owners had not made it their routine practice to lock

the factory doors, that the fire department had owned fire ladders that could have reached

the 7th and 8th floors, that the desire for fancy blouses on the part of one social class did

not depend on the exploitation of another. But these wishes shouldn’t bar us from seeing

that more than one woman’s political awakening took place in part through her feelings,

experiences, and experiments with fashion. Lot 10855 shows us resistance and fashion

went hand in glove.

Triangle workers not only fabricated fashions for others, they also used fashion to

fabricate political and psychological selves. We can find countless other examples of

how fashion has functioned not only as a tool of oppression but as part of a practice of

resistance, often in the most unlikely places: from the declaration by French

Revolutionaries on October 29, 1793, that freedom of dress was a basic human right, 11 Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), 33. 12 Enstad, 772.

“Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories he finds pleasing”; to the

centrality of khadi to Gandhi’s conceptualization and leadership of the Indian

independence movement; to the “Zoot Suit Wars” in 1940s Los Angeles. 13

7.

As any student knows, at the end of an essay, it’s good to go back to its

beginning, and to fasten the top button, as it were.

I don’t wear my shirtwaists much anymore. I was drawn to them by their patina

of history. But once I learned more about their real history, wearing them became too

fraught, and no longer pleasurable. I keep them, though, and cherish them, and think

perhaps I’ll wear one of them on March 25, 2011, in honor of the Triangle shirtwaist

workers who died that day one hundred years ago.

Studying the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory makes me feel differently about clothing

in general. Most of the time it seems we buy clothing not in pursuit of the sensation of

history, but in pursuit of feeling new, of being a la mode. But the newness that comes

from buying clothing also hides an old story. There were 26.5 million textile and

clothing industry workers laboring worldwide according to a 2006 report—70 percent of

them women. A 2005 study estimates that each year Americans purchase approximately

1 billion garments made in China alone, the equivalent of four pieces of clothing for

13 Cissie Fairchilds, “Fashion and freedom in the French Revolution,” Continuity and Change 15 (3), 2000: 419; Emma Tarlo, “Ghandi and the Recreation of Indian Dress,” in Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996: 62-128; Stuart Cosgrave, “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare,” in Jennifer Scanlon, ed., The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, New York: New York UP, 2000: 342-354.

every U.S. citizen.14 The chances are, if you ever buy anything, your clothing is bound

up with women whose lives resemble those of the Triangle workers in more ways than

one.

At the same time, there’s evidence that workplace fashion subcultures are still

playing an important and largely unrecognized role in workers’ lives. In the summer of

2010, for instance, I was avidly following a series of strikes across provincial China. My

attention was first arrested by this picture on the cover of the New York Times of striking

workers at a Honda auto parts plant in Zhongshan:15

14 “Well dressed? The present and future sustainability of clothing and textiles in the United Kingdom,” Julian M. Allwood, Soren Ellebaek Laursen, Cecilia Malvido de Rodriguez, Nancy M.P. Bocken, eds. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing, 2006); Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade (Wiley, 2006). 15 Keith Bradsher, “A Labor Movement Stirs in China.” New York Times. June 10, 2010. Retrieved July 1, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/global/11strike.html.

The journalists who went beyond reporting the basic facts about the strikes were struck

by the modern look of these young women. But they focused on the use of cellphones

on display in images like this one, and the role new technologies were playing in

workers’ organized protests. What leaps out at me are the women’s fashions. Because

where I saw gorgeous hats, French heels, ankle-grazing skirts, and shirtwaists in the

photographs of striking shirtwaist workers, in the photograph of striking auto parts

workers in Zhongshan, I see side-swept and blunt-cut bangs, fashionably dyed hair, and

sparkly and brightly colored t-shirts, cut close to the body: the current global uniform of

the young and the fashion-conscious.

Looking at the images of the workers on strike in China, I wondered if, far from

“mut[ing] women's inclination to resist (in an organized manner) the harsh labor

conditions they face in their jobs,” the opposite could be true. Could it be

that investment in dressing fashionably can be an index or an indicator of political

galvanization? Could it be true for these women, as it was for the shirtwaist strikers, that

dressing fashionably is linked to self-assertion and to a sense of group belonging—both

in the workplace culture and the larger society? At the very least we can ponder how a

seemingly ineffable thing like the material investment in and psychological attachment to

clothing—which we always seem to run the risk of trivializing—hides histories we need

to know.