Dressmaker

Custom Clothing for Women, From Fashion Plates

A dressmaker's work is custom work. The dressmaker makes clothing for women, such as dresses, blouses and evening gowns, for an individual client, to that client's measurements, taste and occasion, rather than for a rail of anonymous stock. The Oxford English Dictionary first records dressmaker in 1803, and the trade the word names became the normal way clothing was obtained in the century that followed. Throughout the nineteenth century and until the rise of ready-to-wear, most women who did not make their own clothes at home resorted to a local dressmaker. The local dressmaker's skill was interpretive as much as technical: she copied or adapted the latest fashions from Paris based on printed illustrations called fashion plates, translating a pictured gown into cloth, trimmings and a fit for a particular woman in a particular town, often without ever seeing the Paris garment itself.

That system placed the dressmaker between the fashion capital and the client, and it shaped what clients expected: a consultation, a choice of fabric and trimming, fittings as the garment was built, and a finished dress made for one body. The relationship was personal and local, and a good dressmaker's reputation traveled by word of mouth through a community of women who saw each other's dresses at church, at visits and at assemblies. The trade also sat within a gendered division of the clothing crafts. The dressmaker served women and made the soft, fitted garments of women's dress, while the tailor served principally men and boys with structured garments; the seamstress sewed, often as an employee or outworker, without necessarily designing or fitting as the dressmaker did. Those distinctions have blurred, but they explain the older vocabulary of the trade and why dressmaker named a recognized, skilled occupation rather than simply anyone who sewed.

Mantua-Maker, Modiste and the Modern Niche

The dressmaker has carried other names in other periods. Mantua-maker, in the eighteenth century, was a maker of mantuas, or in general a dressmaker, named for the loose gown that was then the central garment of women's dress. Modiste is a maker of fashionable clothing and accessories, with the implication that the articles made reflect the current Paris modes; the word carries the flavor of the fashionable shop, where the maker's taste and currency were themselves the product. Dressmaker as an adjective also survives in a trade phrase: it denotes clothing made in the style of a dressmaker, frequently in the term dressmaker details, which includes ruffles, frills, ribbon or braid trim. Dressmaker in this sense is contrasted to tailored, soft and trimmed against structured and plain, and it has fallen out of use since the rise of casual wear in the mid-twentieth century simplified women's clothing and thinned its trimmings.

Today, custom dressmakers fill a niche between haute couture and ready-to-wear, and are most often consulted for one-of-a-kind special occasion dresses, such as wedding gowns and prom dresses. That niche is defined by the occasions where fit and individuality matter most and where a standard size is most likely to disappoint: a wedding gown photographed all day, worn once and kept for decades, justifies fittings and custom construction in a way everyday clothing no longer does. The modern dressmaker therefore does much of what her nineteenth-century predecessor did, consulting, adapting designs the client brings as pictures, now photographs and phone images instead of fashion plates, fitting in stages, and finishing a garment for one wearer. Ready-to-wear took the everyday trade; the dressmaker kept the occasions.