Slop Shops and Merchant Tailors

Last week Historic Deerfield shared an essay about what a shipping invoice from 1760 reveals about the clothing business in eighteenth-century America.

Tyler Rudd Putnam and Henry Cooke IV write:

As the century wore on, ambitious tradesmen in western Europe and Euro-America began to produce ready-made clothing for off-the-rack sales.

New categories emerged. “Slops” meant ready-made garments, and slop sellers and slop shops focused almost entirely on these garments, selling primarily to transient sailors and other poor workers.

Meanwhile, “merchant tailors” presented a slightly more refined face, continuing to make some bespoke clothing but also producing and importing ready-made garments.

According to his business papers, William Waine [1704-1786] gradually transitioned to something more like a clothing dealer – a merchant tailor – from his earlier work in the bespoke trade. His shop would have looked more like what we would expect to see today in a clothing store – albeit almost certainly with some production space – and less like the busy workshops of other tailors.

Though he did it earlier than most, Waine was not entirely unique in this transition. What sets him apart, however, is the survival of archival material that documents his work, including this invoice in as well as papers at Stanford University Libraries and the American Antiquarian Society [P.D.F. download].

The essay says Waine’s business papers were “almost inexplicably well preserved by future generations.” And that lets experts put together the 1760 invoice with his other accounts and images of street scenes a few decades later to picture what customers might have seen in Waine’s shop.

In addition to researching the lives of colonial tailors, Cooke is also an expert tailor himself. He will demonstrate that craft at Historic Deerfield on Saturday, 25 September, as part of the museum’s Stitcher Saturday event. Also on hand will be dressmaker Linda Oakley and shoemaker Peter Oakley.