New Developments and Technological Change: The Business of Mass Manufacturing Fashion

Abstract

Mass manufacture of consumer goods in Britain experienced an unprecedented growth in the 1930s, due to the rise in the light industries producing aspirational user focused goods that included radios, time saving electrical appliances and cars. Products were made in newly built large modern factories, with the main industries located in sites such as the periphery of Birmingham, in the Midlands, and in London’s suburbs of Dagenham, in the east, and Isleworth, in the west. Clothing too was produced in these provincial locations, however, for sources of cheap, fashionable lightweight dresses and blouses “much of the output came from smaller factories” found in central London (Wray 1957, p.30).

Commercial Road, known locally as “Fashion Street” (Stein 1988) because of the numerous fashion manufacturing establishments housed there, ran through the heart of the East End community; a tributary of fashion commerce, with its neighbourhood offshoot roads accommodating work, home and leisure lives. Although young working-class women’s consumption practices are not the focus of this chapter, their modern lifestyles—actual and aspirational—along with their demand for affordable, fashionable garments were pivotal to the development in the design, manufacture and production of lightweight fashionable dresses in 1930s England, predominantly in London (2019, p. 371–381). This chapter will explore those inter-relationships that were firmly embedded with the streets of London.