Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work

Nancy L. Green offers a critical and lively look at New York's Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier in this first comparative study of the two historical centres of the women's garment industry. Torn between mass production and 'art,' this industry is one of the few manufacturing sectors left in the service-centred cities of today. "Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work" tells the story of urban growth, the politics of labour, and the relationships among the many immigrant groups who have come to work the sewing machines over the last century. Green focuses on issues of fashion and fabrication as they involve both the production and consumption of clothing. Traditionally, much of the urban garment industry has been organised around small workshops and flexible homework, and Green emphasises the effect this labour organisation had on the men and mostly women who have sewn the garments. Whether considering the immigrant Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Chinese in New York or the Chinese-Cambodians, Turks, Armenians, and Russian, Polish, and Tunisian Jews in Paris, she outlines similarities of social experience in the shops and the unions, while allowing the voices of the workers, in all their diversity, to be heard. A provocative examination of gender and ethnicity, historical conflict and consensus, and notions of class and cultural difference, this innovative volume breaks new ground in the methodology of comparative history. "Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work" will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those engaged in labour, immigrant, and women's history.