In this pioneering history, Suzanne Rowland reveals how the blouse became both the foundation of ready-to-wear fashion and a powerful symbol of female identity and independence. This everyday garment, though physically lightweight, emerges as an industrial and social heavyweight in early 20th-century movements towards modernization and democratization.
Looking beyond the world of couture, this book illuminates the lives of the working-class women who designed, manufactured, and wore these blouses. Through a rich material culture-based analysis of over 400 blouses in museum collections and an array of trade and archival sources, The Blouse traces the garment's journey from the restrictive, high-collared styles of the Victorian and Edwardian era through to the practical shirts of the professional 'New Woman'. Rowland connects the rise of industrial technology, like the Singer sewing machine and Eastman cloth-cutters, to the women who operated them, showing how mass production not only professionalized female labour but also made fashion accessible and affordable for working-class women for the first time. This persuasive account of fashion, class and modernity, told through the compelling history of a single, revolutionary garment is essential reading for scholars and researchers in the history of dress, fashion, gender, business and material culture.