Look up for Ghosts: Old Haberdasheries
Jo Andrews is a handweaver and podcaster. She is the host of Haptic & Hue’s Tales of Textiles which has just embarked on its third series, called the Chatter of Cloth. She also writes about the way cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives.
Image courtesy of the artist
Words by Jo Andrews
Sometimes to catch ghosts you have to look up.
In the main street of any town in Europe, however small, sooner or later you will find a glimpse of what was. It might be etched into the tiles, painted on the brickwork, a name above the door in mosaic, obscured behind advertising hoardings or known only to memory.
But the haberdasheries and draperies of yesterday have gone, taking with them the scent of new material, the glory of colour-sorted buttons stacked end on, the magic of bias binding, or boxes of steel pins and tailor’s chalk, a table of trimmings and a shop window that beckoned possibilities.
Their decline was a protracted thing, as manufactured clothing dropped in price and the internet’s convenience usurped the old stores for the few who still wanted to make and repair clothes. But as the haberdasheries dwindled, faded and then shuttered, we lost part of ourselves and our history - a story of women using and often enjoying their skills and talents to keep themselves and their families ‘presentable’, as my grandmother would have said.
Half a century ago the haberdashery and drapery on the main street of the little country town where I was at school in Britain’s West Country ran from the double-fronted windows of prints and sheers, twisted and folded into curious displays, into the darkness of the big shop at the back, where bolts of heavy furnishing and working fabrics were stored. The undressed floorboards bore the marks of a century or more of the boots of farmers’ wives, country ladies’ slippers, the patched shoes of vicars’ daughters, the clogs of dairymaids, and the scuffed lace-ups of a thousand bored children. (“sit still William and don’t touch ANYTHING.”)
At the centre was a big flat table with a wooden yard rule alongside. The assistants who, quite rightly, eyed us coldly, knowing we couldn’t afford much, wielded that ruler at an alarming speed, pinning down four yards of fabric faster than you could say: ”How much does that cost, please?”
It was a secret world that we didn’t entirely understand, but where we went to learn the difference between poplin and printed lawn cotton, between quality wool tweeds for skirts and jackets, and stretch jersey for dresses and slinky tops. Where words like silesian, bombazine, hessian, chiffon, muslin, damask and organza meant something precise, where you could, slyly, test the difference with your fingers and let them tell you by touch which one called to you. It took time to learn that what looked lovely on a bolt or in a window wouldn’t necessarily look nice on you.
Events that rocked the world, or just countries and families, stopped off at the haberdashery first. “Duchesse satin for a wedding dress? You’ll need 8 yards.” “Baby wool is in the second drawer down.” “If he’s going to Africa he’ll need a number of quality cotton shirts.” “Blackout material is at the back, bottom shelf.” “I’m afraid we can’t get that at all at the moment, even with clothes rationing – all the silk has gone to make parachutes.” “The telegram came yesterday? I’m so sorry. We are short of mourning fabrics at the moment.” The ebb and flow of a nation – its joys and sorrows, illnesses and fashions, births and deaths, shortages and gluts, how it earnt its living, where it went and what it did – all passed by the haberdashery.
“There is pleasure in letting the buttons slip through your hands as you look for just the right shape and shade, or as you match a length of trimming and the weight of a zip.”
No one quite knows where the word haberdasher comes from. In American English haberdashery is called notions. And of course, this being English, there are other names for these shops describing related functions, so we have drapers and mercers, who sell cloth, and in France, the haberdashery is still called a mercerie. And we have manchester too. I remember being in New Zealand and seeing in Wellington’s wonderfully smart department store, Kirkcaldy and Staines, a sign that said simply Manchester. I wondered if it was one of those way-posts with the miles underneath (11, 576). But it was a different kind of sign, signalling the way to the fabric and linens department – which of course in the days gone by had come to New Zealand directly from Manchester.
There is a haberdasher in Chaucer’s Tales – although sadly he doesn’t have his own tale to tell and only makes a fleeting appearance in The Prologue. The word itself derives from the Anglo-French word hapertas meaning small stuff, the little things you never think about but without which life would be infinitely harder, the buttons and poppers, darning wool, zips, pinking shears, ribbons, beading needles, embroidery hoops, silk floss, and sewing thread.
In Europe, these things reach deep back into history to the travelling pedlar, a man or woman around whom folk tales and mystery swirled. They walked from village to village, from farmstead to hamlet, from family to field workers with a pack, filled with cloth that might have travelled thousands of miles from where it was made, and the buttons, ribbons, and beads to quicken your heart with their colour and feel.
Across the shtetls of Europe, the small places out on the edge of the big plains, the crofting villages of Scotland, the Dutch polders and the Italian marshes, life was hard and isolated, the community tight and turned in on itself, anchored to its fields. The pedlar‘s arrival chased away the still air with a breeze of news from the city, stories from the next village, scandal and tragedy, tales of different lives. The pedlars saw how people lived, and it was their business to understand what they would and could buy.
In much of Europe, the Jewish community from the Middle Ages onwards were deeply discriminated against, denied full citizenship and prohibited from different trades. They were often prevented from owning land. Many of them found a trade in cloth, even though they were often forbidden from producing new garments, but they could sell cloth, first as pedlars and then, later, as the cities developed and grew, as knowledgeable and enterprising drapers, haberdashers, clothing producers, and department store owners.
The links between the Jews, cloth and fashion grew deeper and more tightly bound over time. Take the Ascher family in Prague. By the start of the 20th century the smartest cloth and haberdashery shops there were owned by two separate branches of the family, the Zigmund Aschers and the Jindrich Aschers, with different shops in the city. In Berlin, the smart department stores in the 1920s were Nathan Israel, Valentin Manheimer and Herrmann Gerson. Uwe Westphal, author of the book, “Fashion Metropolis Berlin”, estimates that by 1930 there were over 2,500 high-class fashion and cloth producers in the city, most of them Jewish. By 1939 this had shrunk to fewer than 150, and the once-thriving industry was thrown to the winds of the Holocaust.
Caren Garfen’s wonderfully moving textile piece, “Fragments”, documents the fate of some of these firms and their owners. The lucky ones ended up in Britain, America, Australia, and Canada, descendants of the pedlars and traders, finding new ways to use their knowledge and talents: people like Bernat Klein, the Scottish fabric designer, Zika and Lida Ascher, London designers and producers, and William Goldstein, one of East London’s best-loved haberdashers, shortened to William Gee: still there, but now a shadow of itself with little more than broken chairs and dusty boxes in the windows.
In Britain, my great, great grandfather was a travelling salesman in cloth, or as they were known then, a Scotch Draper. He crisscrossed Victorian England by train with samples and took orders from the grand houses who clothed their parlour-maids and gardeners, the haberdasheries in market towns looking for the latest colours, prints, and quality for their customers, to the orphanages making careful purchases to dress their charges cheaply, and the summer agricultural fairs where people hunted for a bargain.
But slowly the drapers’ and haberdashers’ grip on our lives loosened. Year by year we stopped making things for ourselves, as the reckoning of women’s time changed and we entered formal employment in ever greater numbers. At the same time the clothing manufacturers that drove so many of the little trades like glove and button making, milliners and ribbon weavers, moved east and south for cheaper labour, and the haberdashers lost the clients that underpinned their businesses. Who knows now that in Britain thread used to come from the great mills in Paisley, pins from Redditch, ribbon from Coventry, and tweed from Galashiels?
Photograph by @swedishlinencupboard
We can still buy all of this, in great abundance and at comparatively low prices, online. But we lose something in doing this: the drape and turn of a piece of cloth, the way it catches the light, or drops from a shoulder. We lose the ability to feel it between intelligent fingertips and judge it. There is pleasure in letting the buttons slip through your hands as you look for just the right shape and shade, or as you match a length of trimming and the weight of a zip. The pandemic has made these things seem like extraordinary luxuries, things to be savoured and enjoyed. But they are hard to find now, even in the most metropolitan of cities.
There is still evidence, though, of the haberdasher’s art in the inherited sewing boxes from our mothers and grandmothers. An excavation through one gives you a life memoir more powerful and accurate than any book. It speaks of old holes mended in the toes of hard-worn socks one cold winter, scraps of Christmas ribbon, a patch for a torn baby’s nightdress, spare elastic for recalcitrant underwear, salvaged lace and curious little pieces, rattling around the bottom, the use of which we no longer understand (rubber stocking grips, anyone?). And most of all there are the buttons – each with its own song - dark blue navy ones with embossed anchors for a son who served, pearl buttons from old shirts, cuff buttons, collar buttons, rugged horn coat buttons, 1930s bakelite ones from a dress that once was, Edwardian mock jet buttons, boiled sweet buttons, and trendy 1960s plastic 4 buttons in lurid colours – all hoarded for a ‘just in case’ that never was. These boxes tell too of the equality of purpose in women’s lives, everyone sewed and mended, whatever their position in life... But also they speak of the inequality of materials: handmade sewing box, or old biscuit tin? Silks or cotton, pearl or plastic, buttons for overalls or suits?
I haunt charity shops for vintage haberdashery, wondering as I rifle through the sad plastic bins at the tales behind a box of embroidery floss from a project interrupted by life, old crochet hooks and fine wool, lonely darning mushrooms, scraps of fabric from 1950s curtains and dishevelled tassels, roughed up by life.
We should value these, not just for what they are, and what we can do with them, but for what they tell us about women’s lives, and how they lived them. We should cherish too the haberdashery shops that are with us still, for the chance to learn through feel and touch, to train our eyes to match shade and hue and to discern between different fabrics and their uses. Or to gauge the weight of a good pair of scissors and select just the right needle for what we have in mind, from delicate beading to tough leatherwork.
These are the great skills of hand and eye that bring a balance to our lives and help us mark the way-posts of our own journey. We would be greatly impoverished without them.
The third season of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles podcast launched on Thursday September 9th with a rare interview with one of the world’s pre-eminent collectors of handmade and domestic textiles, Karun Thakar.
Thakar’s collection is unequalled in several fields and he is using it to change the way museums think about and value domestic textiles. For several decades he has collected handmade textiles that have often been disregarded or disparaged by museums and dealers.
His collection focuses on Asia, Africa and Europe. The podcast is a portrait of him, why he started collecting, what the collection means to him and how he is trying to change the way museums think about textiles. He argues that as most museums were set up by white men, they missed the importance of domestic and handmade textiles in those collections. He is trying to redress that balance, and his textiles will form the basis of several new major exhibitions in the UK and the US over the next couple of years.
The new series is called The Chatter of Cloth. It takes 8 different fabrics and listens to their stories, what they are and where they came from, but more importantly what they meant to the people who made them and used them.
Other episodes look at a pattern that has travelled the world for thousands of years, turning up with different meanings in cultures as diverse as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and the American Wild West. There is the story of how a fabric sparked hardship and wartime scandal, and the tale of a quilting tradition that refused to travel and instead put down deep roots in a rural area of northern England.
The episodes will run every two weeks from September 9th until December 16th 2021. It can be found on all major podcast platforms or at www.hapticandhue.com/listen. For more details please contact Jo here