Tailor shop

“ At all events, the owners of these show-shops realize a far higher profit than need be, while the buildings required for a tailoring establishment are surely not more costly than those absurd plate-glass fronts, and brass scroll-work chandeliers, and puffs, and paid poets. A large house might thus be taken, in some central situation, the upper floors of which might be fitted up as model lodging-rooms for the tailor's trade alone. The drawing-room floor might be the work-room; on the ground floor the shop ”

“ Moreover, I bespoke of him other clothes and bade him hang them out in front of his shop, that the folk might see them and buy them. He did as I bade him, and whoso came forth of the palace and aught of the clothes pleased him, I made him a present thereof, even to the doorkeeper.
One day, the tailor said to me, “O my son, I would have thee tell me the truth of thy case; for thou hast bespoken of me a hundred costly suits, each worth much money, and hast given the most of them to the folk. ”

“ And then the gown sleeves! What a description by Stubbes of the virago-sleeve “tied in and knotted with silk ribbons in love-knots!” It is all wonderful to read.
We learn from these tailors’ bills that tailors’ work embraced far more articles than to-day; in the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, 1659, a tailor’s shop has hanging upon the wall woollen hats, breeches, waistcoats, jackets, women’s cloaks, and petticoats. There are also either long hose or lasts for stretching hose, for they made stockings, leggins, gaiters, buskins; also a number of boxes which look like muff-boxes. ”

“ But I had not been there many minutes when the tailor came to me, saying, “There [171] is one, a foreigner, in the shop, who desires to speak with thee. He hath an axe and a pair of sandals, which he thinks are thine, and the other woodcutters have directed him to thee; so come forth to receive them, and to thank him.” With this, he returned to the shop, leaving me pale with fear, for well I knew the meaning of this thing. While I was planning what to do—whether to go into the shop, or escape by some other way—the floor was rent asunder, and there rose from it the Efrite. ”

“ We had on one occasion just begun sewing for a tailor who was considered to be of the better class,—that is, one who kept a shop in a fashionable street, and sold a finer and better description of goods than were to be found in the slop-shops,—and while making up a dozen fine vests, were congratulating ourselves on having advanced a step in our profession. ”

“ Should the tailor sell the cheapest article in his shop, scarcely weighing a pound, he was all courtesy to the buyer, and his messenger would be despatched half over the city to deliver it. Not so, however, with the sewing-women. There was no messenger to wait on them; their heavy bundles they must carry for themselves.
The prices paid to us were always low. As the character of the work varied, so did the price. Sometimes we brought home shirts to make up at only twenty cents apiece, sometimes pantaloons at a trifle more, and sometimes vests at a shilling. ”

“ Presently he espied a tailor sitting with his prentices at work in his shop, opposite the lattice giving upon the river bank and said to me, “Yonder is one by whom thou shalt win thy wish; but first tear thy pocket and go to him and bid him sew it up. When he hath done this, give him ten dinars.” “I hear and obey,” answered I and taking with me two pieces [355] of Greek brocade, went to the tailor and bade him make of them four suits, two with long-sleeved coats and two without. ”

“ It cost me 12 cents American money, and in Hutchinson would have cost me 50 cents, in New York at least 65 cents. The barber told me that most English workingmen could not afford to pay 6 cents (or 4 cents in a plain shop) and therefore cut their own hair.
I could have had a tailor make a suit in London for $12 or $15 that would cost me $30 in Hutchinson or $40 in Kansas City. The American tailor can figure out how it is done. But here is a thing that pleased me: The swell shops in London advertise “American tailoring.” A European tailor sews beautifully, but he can’t fit. ”

“ The wholesale manufacture of ready-made clothing has superseded the output of the individual tailor shops. Under the present system of wholesale manufacture of ready-made clothing, the work is subdivided into many branches. Formerly a tailor made and completed the garment himself, by reason of skill which it took four or five years to acquire; now the garment passes through the hands of a dozen or more workers, who are each skilled in some particular branch of the industry. Their skill is acquired in a few months, and they can only do certain kinds of work. ”

“ Well, before that day the tailor was seeing lots of wickedness at the child. When the woman would be out feeding the pigs and sarvin' the craythurs, he would be hoisting his head up out of the cradle and making faces at the tailor, winking, and slicking, and shaking his head, and saying "What a lad I am!"
That day the woman wanted to go to the shop in Glen Meay to sell some eggs that she had, and says she to the tailor:—"Hom man, keep your eye on the chile that the bogh [poor dear] won't fall out of the cradle and hurt himself while I slip down to the shop." ”

“ HE is a tailor. His shop is down at the corner. When trousers are left with him to be pressed and to have suspender buttons sewed on he is always obligingly willing to promise them by the morrow; or if you are in somewhat of a hurry he will promise that the job shall be done this very night. ”

“ In the meantime, the profits of the beasts of prey who live on these poor fellows—both masters and sweaters—seem as prodigious as their cruelty.
Hear another working tailor on this point:—"In 1844, I belonged to the honourable part of the trade. Our house of call supplied the present show-shop with men to work on the premises. ”

“ It has been taken out of the hands of the American group. The old-fashioned dressmaking and tailor shops have given way to the huge lofts where many factories are turning out clothing for men, women, boys and girls in large quantities. ”

“ As to the fabrication of clothing, which gives work to more than 350,000 men and women, distributed over nearly 45,000 workshops, let it be noted that it is not small tailors that is spoken of here, but that mass of workshops which swarm in Whitechapel and the suburbs of all great cities, and where we find from five to fifty women and men making clothing for the tailor shops, big and small. ”

“ A tailor makes an entire garment himself; but in the ordinary contractor's shop one person does the basting, one of the operators sews the first straight seams, another takes the more difficult part, while the rest of the work is divided among several handworkers, the button-sewers, and the home finishers. Most parts of the work one can learn easily in a day, or in a week or two at the outside. It is not difficult, then, to find workers, people who have no trade and no pride of trade or skill ”

“ Come, tailor, let us see't. O mercy, God! what masquing stuff is here? What's this? A sleeve? 'Tis like a demi-cannon. What, up and down, carv'd like an appletart? Here's snip and nip and cut and slish and slash, Like to a censer in a barber's shop. Why, what a devil's name, tailor, call'st thou this? ”

“ There are the workshops, quite ready for another contingent of lads, such as are now busily at work in the tailoring department, where they are sitting on the board in the proper tailor-fashion, sewing away at one or other of the many private orders for gentlemen's clothes, or "juvenile suits," which are the better appreciated because they are hand-sewn, instead of being made with that machine, at the end of the room, to learn the working of which is, however, a necessary part of the modern tailor's trade. ”

“ They quizzed the cut and colour, proud of their own envelopes; and, to their cost, judged us by our clothes. They have since felt our arms. Your tailor is an important personage all the world over, but alas! he is too restricted in his commerce. He is confined to spots and spaces, that is, individually speaking,—universal is the race. It is quite curious to consider what free trade may do for him. The export and the import may quite change the appearances of all, men, women, and children. ”

“ In recent years the demand for men’s and women’s ready-made clothes has so increased that now large department stores which formerly sold only cheap grades of ready-made clothes are stocking up with expensive garments in order to cater to the class of customers who used to order their clothes directly from the custom tailor. ”

“ Any garment resting on the floor would have been too soiled for a gentleman’s wear before it was donned at all.
I have discovered one thing about old-time tailors,—they were just as trying as their successors, and had as many tricks of trade. A writer in 1582 says, “If a tailor makes your gown too little, he covers his fault with a broad stomacher ”

“ One bitter cold day near Christmastime the tailor began to make a coat (a coat of cherry- coloured corded silk embroidered with pansies and roses) and a cream- coloured satin waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester. The tailor worked and worked, and he talked to himself: "No breadth at all, and cut on the cross; it is no breadth at all; tippets for mice and ribbons for mobs! for mice!" said the Tailor of Gloucester. When the snow-flakes came down against the small leaded window- panes and shut out the light, the tailor had done his day's work ”

“ Foreign competition is ousting you from your markets as the marten ousts the squirrel from her nest. If you want a coat, or a pair of trousers made, in comes your foreign tailor who will sew and stitch for sixteen hours a day for what is barely sufficient to keep body and soul together. ”

“ The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised them perfectly finished.
"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business." ”

“ Remember this, dear, the tag of the maker of your apparel is not the only important mark of an exclusive shop—the principal mark is the cut and style, and these high-grade shops turn out hats, coats and gowns which the other shops endeavor in vain to imitate. That is why one can be recognized in a way by the clothes they wear. ”

“ Clothing stores, or more exactly, cloth-shops, are perhaps most numerous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an “importer and exporter,” and after morning mass manto-wrapped women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more apt than not to be abandoned. ”

“ Notwithstanding almost everybody cares more about the outside than the inside of his coat, the tailor will make the inside more lasting than the outside.
He makes custom work and will work for your custom. Too often when his work is done he has to dun his customer for the pay. The tailor owes his living to sin, for through sin came cloth; but though one of the cloth, the tailor is not a clergyman, who also, by the way, gets his living through sin. ”

“ A loosely hanging garment, and not a strait-waistcoat, in fact, a fashion very much in favour of bunglers, seeing that anybody can make a sack, while it takes a tailor to make a coat. The Major’s cost him about two pounds five, the cloth having been purchased at a clothier’s and made up at home, by a three shilling a day man and his meat. We laugh at the ladies for liking to be cheated by their milliners; but young gentlemen are quite as accommodating to their tailors. Let any man of forty look at his tailor’s bill when he was twenty, and see what a liberality of innocence it displays. ”

“ The ordinary run of English clothes may not be especially good, but they are, on the other hand, never bad; whereas American freak clothes are distortions like the reflections seen in the convex and concave mirrors of the amusement parks. But not even the leading tailors of Bond Street can excel the supremely good American tailor—whose clothes however are identical in every particular with those of London, and their right to be called "best" is for greater perfection of workmanship and fit. ”

“ In this connection one interesting point of contrast is presented by the statistics, for it will be seen that while, as before noted, the factory section of the dress and mantle-making trade showed a higher general level of earnings than the workshop section, the reverse is true of the tailoring trade. This is probably due principally to two facts. The [Pg 222] first is that while the work in the bespoke shop is usually skilled, it does not necessitate any exceptionally well-paid work such as that done by cutters and trimmers in the dressmaking establishment. ”

“ THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADES IN MODERN INDUSTRY Under the old conditions of apprenticeship a boy learned all the processes and became a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized clothing factory, thirty-nine different persons perform different specialized operations in the manufacture of a coat. ”

“ His wife requires always a certain amount of dresses and bonnets to maintain herself in a respectable position in the estimation of her friends, and dresses and bonnets entail an uncertain amount of expenditure. A man’s tailor will inform him in advance exactly how much his garment will cost, and one can contract for a bridge across the Mississippi at an agreed sum, but there is no force known in nature that will induce or drive a dressmaker into foregoing an opportunity for advantage taking, or persuade her to fix in advance a price for the making and trimming of a gown. ”