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 greatgrandmother, 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 greatgrandmother’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 “oldfashioned.” 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
8
Enstad, 751.
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
12
Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000), 33.
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 TShirt 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.