A House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System was established in 1889 which publicly exposed the poor conditions in which garment workers toiled. Sweating came to describe work which lacked respect for the human factor. The desire of manufacturers to pay the lowest possible wage, coupled with a huge number of rural poor and immigrants looking for work in Britain and the US, produced a climate ripe for the exploitation of workers and the establishment of the first sweatshops. In the 19 th Century, a sweater was an employer or middleman who abused his workers with monotonous work, unhealthy or unsafe conditions and poverty-level wages. What has changed, however, is our proximity to, and awareness of, the impact of our purchases. Our desire for fashion has certainly not diminished in the ensuing 200 years. 1780 Lima, Peru Brooklyn Museum Collection For the wife mentioned in the letter, clothing had become a vehicle to make herself visible in a male-dominated society, expressing her status and social freedom. Whilst his wife had garnered admiration from society in Lima, the husband was unable to pay his debts. He protested her need to have a different dress for every social occasion. In Latin America, clothing was recognised as a symbol of social status and prestige and was manipulated by the marginal sectors of society in order to become more socially, economically, politically and culturally reconised.Īn overwhelmed husband wrote to the Mercurio Peruano in 1791 setting out the precarious financial situation in which he found himself as a result of his wife’s fashion taste. This desire for new clothes was not confined to 18 th century Europe.
The fashionable young women portrayed on its pages embodied the rise of consumer culture. It was also the beginning of our moral disengagement as community values gave rise to individual values. This was the start of the connection between fashion and taste, fashion and ideals, fashion and individualism. In the mid 18 th Century, the first examples of fashion press appeared in Paris with publications like Le Journal de la mode et du Goût. He called this as a ‘moral sense of beauty’ and, importantly, he understood it as something which could be altered by information and reasoning. In his opinion, an outward perception of beauty was impossible without an inner sense of beauty as well. In 1725, Rev Francis Hutcheson wrote An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Fashion comes with many adjectives attached: fabulous, iconic, elegant, sumptuous, dashing, nostalgic, effortless… but moral is rarely one of them. It’s not a word we use very often, especially when we talk about fashion.
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