Industries and Creation of Markets: Clothing Innovations and Department Stores

Industries and Creation of Markets:

Clothing Innovations and Department Stores

• During the 1920s, the notion of keeping up with fashion trends and expressing oneself through material goods seized middle-class Americans as never before.

• Fashionable clothes served as the principal marker of social respectability.

• Since the mid-nineteenth century, Godey's Lady's Book, Harper's Bazaar, and other national women's magazines had conveyed the latest clothing fashions to their readers, but prior to 1900, fashion trends changed relatively slowly.

• By the 1920s, the postwar explosion of magazines, newspapers, modern advertisements, radio commercials, and Hollywood motion pictures dramatically accelerated the pace of fashion developments.

• During the 1920s, women's clothing fashions were largely dictated by French haute couture. Haute couture, which simply means “high sewing” or the best sewing, is the most elite, expensive sort of fashion, in which each garment is cut and fitted individually, every stitch is done by hand, and every bead, feather, or rhinestone is affixed one at a time.

• Back in the United States, they then re-created the latest Parisian designs in inexpensive fabrics and sold them as ready-to-wear fashions. For an additional measure of authenticity, clothing retailers liberally sprinkled their advertisements with French phrases, since fashion-conscious shoppers devoured anything with a Parisian flair.

Department Stores

• By 1890, however, the booming industry of ready-to-wear clothing offered consumers the option of buying clothing right off the rack, available in a variety of sizes and colors. By the 1920s, most Americans wore wardrobes consisting largely of ready-made clothing, although the wealthiest urban dwellers still bought couture fashions and the poorest rural dwellers still wore homemade clothing. Of course, many middle-class women continued sewing at least some of their own and their family's clothing during the 1920s, and widely available pattern books and magazines made it easy for them to create the latest fashions at home.

• During the 1920s, department stores such as Gimbels, Marshall Field's, Wannamaker's, and Macy's offered shoppers a wide variety of merchandise arranged in attractive combinations. In fact, these department stores commonly used mannequins to display clothing that had already been assembled into eye-catching outfits

• Whole departments were grouped together in order to encourage multiple purchases. Handbag and hosiery sections adjoined shoe departments, and children's clothing departments bordered children's toy sections. Carefully designed displays ensured that department store customers would not only remain aware of the latest fashion trends in clothing but would also covet, and perhaps purchase, entire outfits rather than single items.