All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing and Costume

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About the Collection

Butterick Publishing Company / The new dressmaker

This digital collection includes millinery, dressmaking, clothing and costume books from the UW-Madison collections. These books from the first half of the 20th century (1907 – 1940’s) include the history of clothing, styles of dress, fashion drawing, and design and construction of hats, clothing and costumes. Items in this collection will appeal to vintage clothing collectors, those studying costume design, fashion, and women’s history, and those who just enjoy reminiscing about days gone by.

Millinery and dressmaking were popular professions for women in the decades before and just after the turn of the 20th century. The 1900 census¹ reported 338,144 women dressmakers, 138,724 seamstresses, and 82,936 women milliners in the continental United States. Dressmaking ranked third, seamstressing ranked ninth, and millinery ranked fourteenth among occupations for women breadwinners.

Summer courses in millinery and dressmaking were offered by the Home Economics department of the UW-Madison’s School of Agriculture during the 1910’s and 1920’s. Perhaps Miss Schmit, Miss Dodge, Miss Arbogast, Miss Musgrave or one of the other instructors introduced some of these books to their summer students. In any event, the digitized versions will serve to preserve millinery and dressmaking history and techiques, and reintroduce them to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

¹ “Statistics of Women at Work; Based on Unpublished Information Derived from Schedules of the Twelfth Census, 1900” (Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Census) Washington 1907

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.