Modern Sewing for Modern Women

• In Event: Modern Professions for the Modern Latin American Women

Abstract

Dressmakers’ shops filled the busy urban quarters of downtown Mexico City and Madrid during the first half of the twentieth century. Modisterías were small businesses run by women and usually only employed other women. While modistas had developed their own professional space in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly serving the dressing cravings of upper-class women, during the twentieth century the trade greatly expanded to supply a growing middle-class. New academias opened, and professional modistas developed their own pattern-making and dressmaking methods. Governments also increasingly offered education in dressmaking in their aim to regulate different professions in the twentieth century.
This study argues that albeit contemporaries’ views on women’s work emphasized that women were at the center of the private/domestic sphere, dressmaking became an important opportunity for women to live economic independent lives – or to face urban increasing economic harshness – as well as to participate in the development of national and global fashion trends. With an emphasis on transnationalism, this work also seeks to place Spain’s and Mexico’s history, and Spanish and Mexican working women’s history in particular, in an Atlantic and global context.

Author

• Paula A De la Cruz Fernandez, Florida International University