Description:Important developments were taking place in the role of women in the early twentieth century, with growing interest in women’s rights, the Suffragette movement demanding votes for women, and increased participation by women in sport, including cycling. Fashion responded to the mood of the times, and tailored clothes for women, made from the materials normally used for male clothing, became popular. This smart two-piece suit, made from a sombre grey wool, dates from around 1904.
Parisian styles tended to dominate fashion at this time, but the tailor-made costume for women apparently originated in England in the 1890s.<small><sup>1</sup></small> In July 1906, we find Robert Stevens of 28 Paradise Street, the maker of this suit, advertising as a ‘well known ladies’ tailor’ in Edgbastonia magazine. It is noticeable that the word ‘tailor’ is here preferred to ‘dressmaker’, and emphasises the fact that this new look tended to make use of techniques and fabrics usually associated with male clothing. A suit like this would have been worn with a blouse, again possibly modelled on male shirt designs with a stiff white collar. It had become fashionable to wear a skirt, tailored over the hips, with just a blouse at the top for indoor wear, and the fact that in this example the skirt is much more discoloured than the jacket would suggest that it has been worn in exactly this way; the jacket being saved for more formal occasions.
Businesses like Robert Stevens would have provided an important source of employment for women. Middle-class women were beginning to enter the world of work. The Gentlewomen’s Employment Bureau, in Ethel Street, Birmingham, aimed to ‘obtain employment for gentlewomen who, by a sudden turn of fortune’s wheel, find themselves but face to face with poverty’ and offered ‘a splendid medium by which plain and fancy needlework and other suitable work is found for applicants’<small><sup>2</sup></small>. Most middle-class buyers would have expected to have their clothes made to measure, but cheaper ready-made clothes were available, and were making fashion more affordable for working-class people. However, there were growing concerns about ‘sweated labour’ in the clothing trade, particularly among immigrant workers in London. ‘The Anti-Sweating Exhibition’ of 1906 organised by the Daily News at the Queen’s Hall in London attracted 30,000 people.<small><sup>3</sup></small> The concerns were felt in Birmingham too: Edgbastonia published an excerpt from ‘The Anti-Sweating Exhibition’ catalogue in June 1906 – perhaps with the encouragement of Edgbaston resident George Cadbury who was at the time owner of the Daily News. A version of the exhibition then appeared in Birmingham at Bingley Hall in 1907.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Elizabeth Ewing, History of 20th Century Fashion (London: Batsford, 1974), p.18
<sup>2</sup> Edgbastonia (November 1905)
<sup>3</sup> Ewing, p.53</small></font>