Dbq 1 Fashion Analysis

During the times of civil war all clothes were mainly custom made and designed “by tailors, by individuals, or by their family members at home.” After a bit of time during the war, companies began to create workshops that would resourcefully solve the inflating weights of the army. During the creation they began to take the solders measurements which “revealed that certain sets of measurements tended to recur with predictable regularity”; in paragraph 1. The sizes taken were used to establish a system of measurements for men in all sorts of clothing. Things came easy for men, but it wasn’t until the 1920s until, “women’s outfits were generally custom-made”; in paragraph 2. “New industrial production techniques were developed, driving supply, and the advertising industry rose in prominence, driving sales. Most importantly, demand was created in the form of rising urban professional class.” This is when clothes catalogs became popular and in demand which made access to new styles of clothing easier. Fresh consumer companies hastily grew changing the way Americans viewed mass-produced merchandises. Of course they encountered many problems during this newly implemented system. For example, companies began to make clothes based on their own measurement system and …show more content…
We know that “families made their own clothing by hand from fabric they made or purchased locally”; in paragraph 4. This means that they needed to find material to make these unique clothes, how hard can that be? Well fabric was a hard thing to make which made it expensive. “Merchants made their wealth in transporting fine fabrics and threads.” Of course before factories began mass-producing clothes, sewn fabric was very hard for people to put on. What made matters worse was that the zipper or buttons never existed back then. “People often had to be sewn into their own