Skills with Threads: Heroes Who Make Fashion

Abstract

In this chapter Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario turns the stuff of fashion inside out to explore the work that creates textiles and clothing. The marvellous creations of the clever, nimble fingers of early heroes were absorbed into nineteenth-century tales of domestic virtue. Sewing and spinning are traditional forms of employment open to women and fairy tales celebrate not only the skills, but also the suffering and vulnerability of women forced to sew or spin for their lives. Changing opportunities in female employment in the twentieth century and wartime “make do and mend” attitudes, then, informed a new approach to the production of fashion in fairy tale, doing away with fairy godmothers as women were able to purchase or make their own clothing, eventually establishing more positive economic and social relationships between women.