HABERDASHERY IS THE place where buttons of every size and shape reside: carded, colour-coded and sometimes boxed in small squat drawers, each one labelled with its own button – glass, mother-of-pearl, vegetable ivory (made from the corozo nut and polished until it gleams), gilt, enamelled and silk-covered, plus composition buttons of all kinds. Here they exist in profusion.
The British button industry was for many years based in Birmingham. Established in the 1660s, and assisted by protective legislation to prohibit the importation of buttons, the trade came into its own in the eighteenth century when clothing had ceased to be defined by rank and became an expression of wealth and fashion. Buttons formed part of the ‘toy’ trade, the name given to the silver clocks, brass candlesticks, snuffboxes and other small metal objects with which an expanding class of merchants and industrialists decorated their homes but, whether gilt, silver or cut-steel, the buttons that scintillated by candlelight decorated male not female clothing. A woman wanted the newly imported silk and a walnut tea caddy; her husband had his eye on elaborate buttons for his waistcoat and topcoat, and shiny buckles for his breeches and shoes.
Birmingham made the fortunes of numerous button manufacturers. By the 1770s, there were more people making buttons than anything else; a 1773 directory lists 104 firms. Buttons depicting delicate Watteau-like landscapes, or made from exquisitely patterned mother-of-pearl were produced in a city described by Southey in the early nineteenth century as a place of ‘noise beyond description … The filth is sickening … active and moving, a living principle of mischief, which fills the whole atmosphere and penetrates everywhere.’1
In 1852 Household Words described button manufacture: the punching, drilling, stamping machines, the polishing wheels and ‘all the bright and compact and never-tiring apparatus’.2 With industrial advances, gilt, silvered, electro-plated, silk, Florentine, mother-of-pearl, steel, wood, bone and horn buttons could all be produced. Dies for stamping patterns were created via a complex process; the drawing of tiny portraits, animals or crests involved intricacy and skill. This was men’s work. Women were engaged at tasks such as covering and carding buttons; it was said that, in years gone by, the covering of buttons was ‘one of the most important lessons given to the infant needlewoman’.3 As the century advanced, buttons captured the coming world as well as current trends and pleasures like ballooning, sport and photography; buttons depicting insects reflected the growing fascination with botany and science.
By the late nineteenth century, elaborate picture buttons were fastening women’s clothes. In 1895 Home Notes advocated the purchase of ‘beautiful buttons with miniature paintings’ to ornament the satin blouse each fashionable woman should wear. ‘One of the great charms about these buttons is their expense,’ its columnist advised. ‘I say “charms” and I mean it too, for this will be the means of preventing their becoming common.’4 It would not do to have the same buttons as everyone else.
Buttons are but a small part of the haberdasher’s theme. Ardern’s Crochet Cotton; Clark’s Embroidery Thread; tuppenny packets of Flora Macdonald needles; Stratnoid Knitting Pins; floral paper baskets opening to reveal rows of needles and pins; knitting wools; feathers, ribbons, beads and braids; ‘Wizard’ bodkins for whizzing ribbon through machine-embroidered nightgowns, plus a selection of darning aids – for woollens, stockings and gloves – comprise some of the many items needed for decorative and functional sewing, plus making of various kinds.
A prosaic list cannot begin to convey haberdashery’s pleasures. Novelist Lettice Cooper describes a child’s fascination with a box ‘full of bits, scraps of lace and coloured satin, lengths of narrow shaded ribbon with picot edges, fragments of embroidery, threaded with gold, some studded with bright things … called beetles’ wings. To be allowed to dip in that box was like being offered the treasures of Aladdin’s cave.’5 Adults, myself among them, have been similarly wooed. In The Ethics of Shopping (1895) Lady Jeune confessed that, ‘We are not able to stand against the overwhelming temptations which besiege us … We go to purchase something we want; but when we get to our shop there are so many more things that we never thought of till they presented their obtrusive fascinations on every side. We look for a ribbon, a flower, a chiffon of some sort or other, and we find ourselves in a Paradise of ribbons, flowers, and chiffon, without which our life becomes impossible and our gown unwearable.’6 Fashionable ladies were not the only ones craving pretty things. The folk song ‘Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?’ conveys a young girl’s longing for blue ribbons to tie up her bonny brown hair; even those desperate women handing their babies to London’s Foundling Hospital found ways to prettify their clothes.
A paradise of ribbons, flowers and chiffon, haberdashery may be found on a counter or department within a draper’s shop or have a whole shop to itself. In earlier centuries, every village and hamlet had its travelling salesman or market stall selling buttons, fabric and trimmings, or found ways to purchase what was needed. Edith James recalled visiting her country grandmother by carrier’s wagon in the early 1900s:
We left Wellingborough at four o’clock and it took until eight to cover the twelve miles. On the outward journey in the morning the carrier’s daughter used to collect, from the villages through which they passed, all sorts of commissions to buy this and that, and in the evening these items were all delivered. It might be a couple of bloaters, or a reel of cotton or a card of buttons, or some ‘shop’ cake – anything, in fact.7
‘Anything, in fact’ might be a wayward definition of haberdashery. Even a ‘highly respectable draper’ told Henry Mayhew that ‘he never could thoroughly understand where hosiery, haberdashery, or drapery, began or ended’.8 Traditionally, Haberdashery was the department in which shop assistants learned the ropes. Its extensive stock and fiddly transactions, not to mention innumerable sub-divisions of the most prosaic items, provided the ideal training ground. In the days when customers expected personal service, Haberdashery required patience too: all those rolls of organza, silk and satin and yards of unspooled ribbon had to be put away again. The length of time women spent looking far exceeded the amount of money they finally parted with. And there were beady-eyed customers to deal with; Margaret Penn’s grandmother among them, who, to ensure that ‘woollen’ fabrics were actually wool, put a match to one corner because wool does not burst into flame.
A similarly vexing customer may have led one haberdashery assistant to flex her superior knowledge. In 1940, Derbyshire schoolteacher May Smith
Decided to pop off in search of a hat and clover trimming for my spotted frock … but had a fruitless mission. The only trimming produced by Stockbridges was a hectic clover, not at all the right shade, but when I said so the girl said she thought it was a Perfect Match and added threateningly that I Wouldn’t Get a Better. She gave me a lecture on Trimming, its Uses and its Selection, proclaiming profoundly that Trimming is Only a Decoration and shouldn’t be The Exact Colour.9
London-born Lu Gamble, tired of skivvying as a cleaner, longed to dress in black and stand behind a haberdashery counter, but was rejected because her hands were ingrained with dirt. ‘A business girl should take as much care of her hands as an actress,’10 Miss Modern advised interwar young women who hoped to get on. John Lewis had no such problems with the graduate trainees it appointed in the 1920s. For a brief spell, before she found her vocation, pilot Amy Johnson was one of them. The scheme promised graduates and ‘Ladies of Gentle Birth and Breeding’ a minimum salary of £3 a week and training, with the hope, no doubt, that their refined tones would attract new custom. Delighting in the ‘delicate shining materials’11 beforehand, Amy Johnson quickly discovered that the idea of selling chiffons, silks and ribbons was very different from the real thing.
The ha’pennies and farthings shop assistants were obliged to tot up in those by-gone, pre-decimalised days had a particular meaning for Haberdashery. Before the First World War, this department customarily gave women ‘a paper of pins’ in lieu of their farthing in change. While appearing to spare store and shopper alike from pocketing coins of little value, retailers made a profit on pins ‘sold’ this way, and most shoppers felt unable to request the actual farthing. Some small draper’s shops gave out farthing novelettes instead, enabling their customers to feast on poorly printed images of high society along with their reel of cotton or carded thrupenny buttons. Morley’s department store was more high-minded: it gave out ‘Wonderful Books’ and ‘Citizen Books’ instead. The ‘paper of pins’ was such a quaint custom that Mollie Panter-Downes referred to it when ramping up her portrait of Second World War Britain for readers of the New Yorker.
Pins were bought in quantity, of course, as well as ‘given away’, and were the bane of the apprentice dressmaker’s life. Professional seamstresses cast quantities of them to the floor when sewing; it was the junior’s job to pick them up. When not scrabbling for pins, apprentice seamstresses, be they employed by couturier, department store or a little ‘Madam’ (or ‘Modom’) shop, could be found in Haberdashery each morning, matching sewing silks to fabric pieces: which shade of Silko – juniper berry or petunia – to correspond with a piece of shantung silk? Matching silks taught young women to judge by eye, a skill they would need later, when required to copy and cut out garments without using paper patterns.
The sewing machine, whether used by a professional or home-dressmaker, was crucial to the democratisation of fashion. By the 1880s, treadle machines were fast becoming part of the furniture and Butterick was producing around forty to sixty patterns a month, priced between 3d and 2s. ‘Most Exquisite Embroidery & Art Needlework as well as Ordinary Plain Sewing can be done on Singer’s new Sewing Machine’12, the manufacturer advised women in 1895. By the 1930s, a different approach was needed: ‘No longer need you “make do” with last year’s wardrobe. The Singer man shows how a length of fabric can be transformed into a “straight from Paris” frock at a fraction of the cost of a ready-made garment.’13 By the 1960s, Mary Quant patterns for Butterick were selling in their thousands.
Butterick, Mabs Weekly, Weldon’s, Fashions for All – names like these transformed home sewing. Vogue’s Guide to Practical Dressmaking (1s) advertised patterns ‘made for just those women in every community who wish to dress in the metropolitan manner’.14 Women’s magazines offered paper patterns along with love stories and advice. Woman’s Life, aimed at a lower-middle-class readership, promoted a weekly free pattern as a banner headline, in addition to advertising sixpenny patterns within the magazine. ‘Do you make your own frocks or are you afraid to attempt them?’15 an advertisement in Modern Home enquired. Even young women dragooned into sewing perfect hems at school did not necessarily have the skills to turn out a ‘smart new frock’, and those making household economies might be making their own clothes for the first time. Although the looser styles of the 1920s simplified home-sewing, women who wanted to be up-to-the-minute still had to tackle complex designs; dresses could have tiered skirts, tie-cuffs, and scarf necklines. A pattern accompanying the button-and-buckle set (in tortoiseshell or amber) that came free with a 1928 issue of Woman’s Life required readers to master a pronged belt, gored skirt and half a dozen buttonholes.
The Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Science promised to solve all difficulties via a correspondence course. Advertisements placed in The Needlewoman, Good Housekeeping and Home Chat made an appeal across the social classes: ‘I made all these clothes myself – quite easily’ is the headline above the illustration of a woman with arms brimful of different garments. ‘And they cost me less than half the usual price.’16 A woman looking chic in a patterned evening cloak with a shawl collar gazes out in silent sophistication in a more upmarket publication. Correspondents were promised ‘all the little tricks and arts of the highly skilled dressmaker – the subtle touches that mean so much – the perfect fit that gives style … Write today for our free booklet: “Dressmaking & Millinery Made Easy.”’17
Abetted by women’s magazines and fashion manuals, haberdashery departments made a virtue of necessity. Vogue cheered its readers in January 1931: ‘At this time of year, when the rich woman is buying new items to refresh her winter wardrobe, the girl with nothing a year is dyeing, turning, or altering hers, and having just as good a time at it.’18 How to Dress Well was similarly reassuring: ‘attractive designs and artistic touches are simply the result of experiments in remodelling. … A little touch of hand-work, such as embroidery, beading, or braiding, is almost always acceptable and is an attractive means of camouflaging a seam or the insert of an extra piece.’19 The Miss Robinsons of the dressmaking world took heart.
Home-dressmakers, like shoppers, drew inspiration from multiple sources. In writer Alison Uttley’s youth, ‘the village dressmaker was the glass of fashion’.20 She copied styles from Weldon’s Journal but she also took ‘ideas from attendance at church where she saw the latest modes in the Castle pew’. Women have always taken ideas from the gentry; from at least the seventeenth century commentators remarked on young women imitating and aping ‘their betters’. Sewing machines and ready-to-wear clothing, plus the development of cheaper, washable fabrics, made imitation that much simpler, which accounts for the numerous observations about factory workers dressing like duchesses – although, from the 1930s, they were more likely to dress like film stars.
For all the advertisements and encouragement, sewing was the last thing some women wanted to do, and whether they liked sewing or not, few could delight in mending, a chore for which there was no fashionable gloss. M. V. Hughes discovered an excellent solution: ‘I would bring [my pile of mending] out when a friend came … “I can’t sew alone,” would be my excuse, “because I keep on thinking of all the other things I would rather be doing.” Then my friend (whether truthfully or in a Christian spirit I did not seek to know) would say, “I love sewing; let me do it all while we talk”.’21 M. V. Hughes also had her own approach to knitting, explaining away her many dropped stitches as ‘a new kind of open-work, much in vogue at the moment in London’.22 Knitting requires a different kind of concentration and, for the skilled knitter, is soothing; it is a respectable activity too, its respectability underlined in an incidental moment in The Weather in the Streets when, after dinner, the matriarch and her married daughter, Kate, sit and knit while Olivia contemplates an illicit love affair. As Alison Adburgham pointed out in the Guardian some thirty years later, ‘The Other Woman Never Knits’.23
While some women sewed reluctantly, from necessity, others sewed for pleasure. Some of the dressmaker’s ‘little tricks and arts’ came from embroidery. Home Chat advised its readers that ‘Mab Says Stitch in the Chic: Get busy and smarten up your frocks with modish embroidery.’24 Embroidery also had its own magazines. Priced 2d a month (postage 1d extra), Fancy Needlework Illustrated was down to earth in its approach, containing patterns for crochet jumpers and the ubiquitous crochet corners for tablecloths; The Needlewoman cost twice as much and appealed to a different market. This ‘magazine of exclusive fashions’ included the pattern for a compact brush and comb bag with elaborate tassels. The Needlewoman also featured a social diary. A column in January 1929 announced Diana Mitford’s engagement to Bryan Guinness and, managing to make a set of silver buttons look cheapskate, advised a little car as the perfect twenty-first birthday gift.
The needlewoman is not a seamstress. Whereas plain sewing demonstrated thrift and domesticity, embroidery was seen to add refinement to femininity, suggesting the decorum and gentility only fancy work could convey. An early instruction book, Treasures of Needlework (1855), advised that needlework ‘brings daily blessings to every home … without its ever watchful care home would be a scene of discomfort indeed’.25 Even in 1926 the Guardian advised that a room did not ‘feel very liveable without some evidences of needlework’. However, like the young subject of Colette’s short story ‘The Sempstress’, who terrifies her mother by thinking as she sews, its reporter observed that the nineteenth-century woman ‘must have enjoyed the liberation of thought that comes from an occupation that is partly mechanical’.26
Most women choosing embroidery silks are choosing skeins of leisure; the home-dressmaker seeks serviceable thread, but even women sewing from necessity enjoy a little flourish now and then. My great-grandma’s house was full of crochet edging, drawn-thread-work runners and lace doilies; the word ‘pyjamas’ scrolls across my great-aunt Eva’s pyjama case in thick icing-sugar pink. Many women stitched colour into their lives; by 1930 Mercer crochet silk advertised buttercup, orange, coral, sky blue, marine blue, jade green, spring green and light amethyst among its brand-new shades. Interwar women ‘stitching in the chic’ were asserting their individuality, albeit in small ways. At a time when, for all the talk of freedom, domesticity was much to the fore, small ways of personalising clothes and asserting individuality were important. Embroidery decorated homes as well as clothing. Those without a garden could make one to hang on the wall by stitching blazing hollyhocks, vibrant nasturtiums and every other cottage-garden flower – and a crinoline lady to water them. Embroidery stitches are veritable gardens in themselves: fly stitch, leaf stitch, stem stitch, spider … daisy …
Haberdashery was a female domain and, as such, was a place where women could buy dress preservers for those occasions when they ‘glowed’ a little too much; and also discreetly purchase sanitary napkins and pins, and sanitary towels. Tampax was trademarked in 1932, but the introduction of a new product did not guarantee its immediate widespread use; historian Elizabeth Roberts explains that none of her respondents remembered even disposable sanitary towels until after the Second World War. In the 1940s, Naomi Mitchison watched her future daughter-in-law joshingly push a packet of Kotex at her son, and compared that easy gesture with the horrified silence that surrounded menstruation during her own youth – a horror between women, let alone in front of men. Women of my grandma’s generation were too ashamed and embarrassed even to speak to their daughters.
In 1930 Kotex tied itself in knots promoting sanitary towels to drapers without once referring to the term; Kotex may have been coy because some drapers’ assistants were male (bolts of cloth mean heavy lifting). A full-page advertisement in the Draper’s Record, illustrated with young women drivers, and headed ‘Kotex says it’s not so much the car you ride in as the road you ride on …’, expended a considerable number of words talking around the subject. Finally, Kotex cut to the chase:
‘Make it easy for them … Many women dislike asking for this product. Why not appreciate this and help them avoid embarrassment … Simply wrap a few packets, place them on the display so that any of your customers can simply step up, take a packet and complete the sale for you.’27
Hurrah. The manufacturer of Pheltose Sanitary Belts was bolder. Disdaining ‘Victorian discomforts’, it illustrated its modern approach with a young woman clutching a pochette and striding ahead with her dog. In years to come, her equivalent would be leaping about in tennis whites.
For more than 150 years, Haberdashery was where you placed an order for Cash’s name tapes, those essential labels for gym kit and school blazers, provided by J. & J. Cash of Coventry. There was something tidy and pleasing about names spelled out in coloured thread on narrow ribbon. Many more tapes were ordered than were needed; all over the country, a lifetime’s name tapes exist in buff-coloured packets pushed to the backs of drawers. In 2014 J. & J. Cash went into administration (though a reduced operation continued). Thanks to indelible pens and the growing reluctance of mothers to spend their evenings stitching names into school uniforms, tapes like theirs fell out of favour.
Ordinarily name tapes had a mundane function, but aspiring novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold found an unexpected use for hers. Shortly before the First World War, she was invited to join a lunch for actor Sarah Bernhardt:
I was wild with excitement. But how should I be dressed? I had what I knew was a smart coat and skirt, black, pin-striped, like a businessman’s, and so daringly short that it showed my ankles. White silk stockings and patent shoes with a big buckle. But what about a hat?
On the day of the luncheon, in Bond Street near Cartier’s, I saw a white hat in a window, with a big gull’s feather. I went in. It cost three or four guineas. I had five shillings on me and a pound in the bank.
I pointed out the urgency, the immediacy, the total necessity – and the steady seventy-five pounds [a considerable sum for an allowance] which, though not there at the moment … I pointed out my father’s name in the telephone book.
‘But how am I to know that you’re his daughter?’ I still wore my school vest. By wriggling and dragging, the sales lady could see the Cash’s name-tape sewn at the back of my neck. I went out with the hat.28