Labour of the Stitch

The making of fashionable women''s dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft industry gender and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching along with printmaking drawing and painting composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which together constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.