Wardrobe Crisis by Clare Press

Author:Clare Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510723436
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

Terrible waist

The shirtwaist was a type of ladies’ blouse made popular in Harry Gordon Selfridge’s time. Made from cotton or linen, usually cream and trimmed with lace, it was worn with a long skirt, and its simplicity (compared to the fussy, heavy dresses that preceded it) felt like a fashion revolution – freeing up ladies to dash about, perhaps even accessorised by the suffragette’s purple sash.

As Lindy Woodhead notes in Mr Selfridge, women loved the new blouses, and ‘ever-increasing demand put added pressure on production space and staff costs, leading to a marked increase in “sweated labour”’15 in both the UK and the US.

Skilled tailors and seamstresses, either in independent ateliers or the department stores’ on-site workrooms, mostly still made complicated outfits. But shirtwaists, along with that oh-so-badly-paid-for-underwear Margaret Irwin writes of, were run up in their thousands by homeworkers, outworkers (who banded together to rent cramped workrooms) or the new factory workers in their lofts.

In the early 1900s, many of New York’s shirtwaists were made in factories like the Triangle, which was run by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris from the Asch Building on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place.

In 1911, the Triangle employed about 600 people, mostly teenage girls, who were cheap labour. The fact that most, being new immigrants, couldn’t speak English and were unlikely to join unions was a bonus. Blanck and Harris had been in trouble with the unions before.

They were dodgy characters. They paid their child workers fifteen dollars a week, to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. During the ILGWU strike in 1909, they hired thugs to beat the workers up. That winter, Triangle fired 150 union sympathisers.

Blanck and Harris knew all about dangers of factory fires, too. The Triangle had copped it twice, and another of their enterprises, the Diamond Waist Company, had also burnt after hours. Some said the bosses lit the blazes on purpose for the insurance money. All this experience with flames, however, didn’t stop them from locking the Triangle’s doors from the outside during the working day. It was to prevent theft, they said.

There were four elevators in the Asch Building, but only one was in working order. When fire tore through the eighth and ninth floors, management, based on the floors above, was able to escape via the roof. The young workers were left to queue in single file, along a skinny corridor, to access the elevator. Twelve people could squash inside, and the elevator made four trips before it was too late. Of the two stairwells that led to the street, one ended with a door that opened inwards; the other was bolted. It was a death trap, and 146 people died as a result.

The fire brigade rushed in, but their ladders were too short. Girls began to jump from the windows. Fifty-eight people died hitting the sidewalk. Some of their bodies landed on the hoses before the firemen had chance to use them. The sheer number of corpses overwhelmed the

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