In this engaging history of the men's clothing industry, Michael Zakim argues that mass-produced clothing of the antebellum period “represented the same industriousness, modesty, resistance to fashion's corrupting influences, and common civic life that homespun had” during the revolutionary era. This continuity “demonstrated that … the republic did indeed rest on a transcendent social order.” But in the process of moving from homespun to ready-made clothing, the virtues associated with men's dress “no longer signaled the self-sacrifice of elites but, rather, the propertied mobility of all” (p. 2), thus creating a democracy out of civic membership. Yet despite the dates given in the book's title, the late-eighteenth-century history of men's dress—nicely summarized in the largely historiographical essay that constitutes his first chapter (“A Homespun Ideology”)—merely serves as background for the nineteenth-century evolution of the men's clothing industry comprising the body of the book.

Chapter 2 (“A Clothing Business”) describes the emergence of the merchant tailor who took advantage of the large quantities of cheap British cloth being dumped on the American market after 1815 to open retail establishments in prominent urban locations. This period also witnessed the birth of the clothier—a businessman with little or no knowledge of the tailoring trade who acted as a middleman between the garment maker and the client. In order to gain control over their costs, both types of businessmen vertically integrated into the markets for cloth and labor, thus serving as the predecessors for the large wholesaling establishments of mid-century. Although chapter 2 seems to presage the death of the custom tailor trade at the hands of ready-made clothing, Zakim argues in chapter 3 (“The Reinvention of Tailoring”) that “the custom trade was the branch of the clothing business that underwent the most far-reaching industrial transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century” (p. 71). Faced with intensifying competition from the emerging ready-made market, tailors sought to increase the efficiency of their trade without sacrificing the all-important “fit” at the heart of demand for custom clothing. The trade was rationalized through such innovations as patented drafting systems that cutters could employ to translate measurements into the proper cut, self-measurement diagrams for people to place custom orders without a personal visit to the tailor, and the acceptance of the inch tape measure as the standard measurement unit after 1820.

Chapter 4 (“Dressing for Work”) jumps into the world of the middle-class clerks who were among the chief beneficiaries of the declining cost of clothing. But while this chapter makes mention of some of those elements of dress crucial for the aspiring clerk—such as the detachable white collar—Zakim wants the clerk to represent “the demise of the homespun patriarchy” (p. 96). “The clerk was at once a creation of America's capitalist revolution and a repudiation of capitalism's claim as heir to an older tradition of virtuous industry practiced by independent, propertied men” (p. 115). The clerk is thus the linchpin for the argument of this book, and yet the reader gets little sense of how the clothing demands of clerks were actually driving the transition from custom- to ready-made clothing, nor how a homespun ideology of industry came to be replaced by a ready-made democracy based on “individual ambitions and their social consequences” (p. 123).

In detailing the steady deskilling of the labor force involved in the production of clothing, chapters 5 and 6 (“Ready-Made Labor” and “The Seamstress”) follow most naturally on chapter 3. From the in-house cutters—“the craft elite” (p. 132)—to the seamstresses working out of their homes, Zakim describes the numerous people involved in producing men's clothing, as well as how those people moved seasonally between the custom- and ready-made markets. In particular, the putting-out system allowed clothiers to pass the costs of tools and workspace, as well as the risk of varying demand, onto the laborers themselves. The system simultaneously drove down labor costs by employing women—the seamstress representing the prototypical victim of capitalism, “the practical link between capitalism and whoredom” (p. 171). Readers of this JOURNAL are likely to notice the conspicuous absence of the sewing machine in this account. Although Zakim briefly mentions the invention on a handful of occasions, its role in the history of the men's clothing industry is summarily dismissed. It “effected no reorganization of production” (p. 130), “[n]or did the sewing machine have a particularly novel affect on the nature of sewing” (p. 154).

Zakim's overall argument about the transition from this homespun ideology to a ready-made democracy is virtually ignored in the chapters detailing the evolution of the tailoring trade, whereas in “Dressing for Work,” it is presented as a fait accompli. The triumph of the ready-made industry in chapter 7 (“A Fashion Regime”) represents the triumph of democracy itself, and it is only in this final chapter that Zakim begins to demonstrate the ways in which a democratic order gave rise to the ready-made clothing industry. Additionally, although change over time is implicit in the narrative, it is often hidden from immediate view; the reader must consciously piece together for herself a timeline that is ostensibly a central part of the argument.

The strengths of this book are the descriptions of the custom- and ready-made trades themselves, as well as the labor issues inherent in their evolution. The sections on the gendering of the trade in Chapter 5 are particularly compelling. Read with these issues in mind, the book as a whole provides a wealth of knowledge and insights.