Shirts, Shifts and Sheets of Fine Linen explores how the jobs of the ‘seamstress’ evolved in scope, and status, between 1600-1900. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, seamstressing was a trade for women who worked in linen and cotton, making men’s shirts, women’s chemises, underwear and baby linen; some of these seamstresses were consummate craftswomen, able to sew with stitches almost invisible to the naked eye. Few examples of their work survive, but those that do attest their skill. They took apprentices and generally made a good living by the standards of their time. However, as the ready-to-wear trade expanded in the 18th century, women who assembled these garments were also known as seamstresses, as were women employed by families to keep the household linen and in good order. By the 1840s, most seamstresses were outworkers for companies or entrepreneurs, paid unbelievably low rates per dozen for the garments they produced, notorious examples of downtrodden, exploited womenfolk. This book explores the seamstress’s change of status and the reasons for it, and hints at the resurgence of the trade today because so few 21st century women are now individually skilled at repairing and altering clothes.

The dressmaking trade developed rapidly during the 18th and 19th centuries, changing the lives of thousands of British workers. Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid focuses on the trade and the people within it, from their working conditions and earnings to their training, services and relationships with customers. Exploring the lives of dressmakers in fact and fiction, the book looks at representations of the trade in the plays and novels of the time, while surveying the often harsh realities of the workers' lives. From the arrival of the sewing machine to the influence of the department store, it explores the impact of mechanization, commercialization and modernity on a historical trade. Pamela Inder illuminates a new world of dressmaking enabled by goods like paper patterns and magazines, and sets out to investigate the increasing monopoly of female dressmakers in an industry once dominated by male tailors. Drawing on a range of original and hitherto unpublished sources - including business records, diaries, letters, bills and newspaper articles - Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid reveals the untold story of the dressmaking trade. Beautifully illustrated with over 80 images, the book brings dressmakers into focus as real people, granting new insights into working class life in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.