2 - Notions and Sewing Tools

Summary

Chapter 2 lays the ground for an understanding of what was involved in the transformation of tailoring, identifying key developments in technology, tools and materials. Pre-industrial sewing techniques and tools show much shared terrain between China and Europe. Items such as scissors, needles and measuring rules were essentially similar. Under the impact of cultural and technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even these tools were gradually displaced and a range of entirely new items entered the realm of tailoring. Buttons, safety pins, belt hooks and tape measures flowed into the Treaty Ports from suppliers in Germany, Britain and Japan, stimulating new local industries in China. The changed contents of a sewing basket point in the first half of the twentieth century to a large-scale reconfiguration of clothing production under way in these years, ahead of the visible transformation of dress in the Mao years.