Triangle Fire: Liberating Clothing Made in Confinement
By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
Remembering the fire that killed 146 workers at a garment factory in Manhattan and its lasting impact.
The American shirtwaist was a trend that, quite literally, had legs. This brash but sensible pairing of tailored shirt and skirt offered a glimpse of the ankles, which was as rare in its day as it was freeing.
Designed for utility, the style was embraced at the turn of the 20th century by legions of young women who preferred its hiked hemline and unfettered curves to the confining, street-sweeping dresses that had hobbled their mothers and aunts.
Few looks have been as versatile — or as egalitarian — adapting through the decades to all sorts of shifting conditions and sociopolitical landscapes.
And few have so nimbly walked the line between function and frivolity.
By 1911 the Triangle factory, a half-block east of Washington Square Park, was the largest maker of waists in New York City. Pressed elbow to elbow at the factory, in Greenwich Village, hundreds of women, working 12 to 16 hours six days a week, earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white, gauzy blouses — also called shirtwaists — that when worn with a skirt completed the look.
In the last minutes of the work week, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a match or a cigarette tossed into a waste basket ignited a fire that fed on the scraps of cloth and paper patterns hanging overhead. The blaze swept through the factory — the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the 10-story building — within a half-hour, leaving 146 dead, all but 23 of them young women. About 50 jumped to their deaths to escape the relentless flames.
As hundreds of events this week mark the 100th anniversary of the fire on Friday, the shirtwaist style has proved its remarkable staying power.
Democratic from its inception, the shirtwaist was “one of America’s first truly class-shattering fashions,” wrote David Von Drehle, who briefly outlined its history in “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
The practical uniform of factory hands, clerks, shopkeepers and librarians, it “both symbolized and enabled a wave of women’s liberation,” Mr. Von Drehle argued, the “perfect repudiation of corsets and bustles and hoops — all the ludicrous contraptions that literally imprisoned women in their own clothes.”
The earliest shirtwaists — originally shirts and separate skirts — were engineered for mobility, their popularity coinciding with a huge urbanization that saw women rushing about the streets, demanding the vote and, ultimately, flooding the workforce.
By 1910, when the entire American population was only 90 million, more than 5 million women held jobs outside the home. At that time, as Mr. Von Drehle noted, nearly a third of all factory workers in New York State were women, the majority dressed in a shirtwaist and skirt.
Shirtwaists flourished in the early 1900s as a badge of confidence and athletic femininity, the sporty attire of the Gibson Girl. They attained a touch of worldliness in the late 1940s when Christian Dior introduced a version, propped up by petticoats, as an essential component of his fabled New Look.
By midcentury, calf-length interpretations of the Dior shirtwaist represented domesticity to a generation of homemakers taking their style cues from Donna Reed. More recently, this sturdy fashion archetype was resurrected on “Mad Men,” the popular television series set in the 1950s and ’60s, inspiring a wave of nostalgic revivals on American fashion runways.
The look traveled well, as popular on the playing field as it was in more formal settings. As the fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank observed in “New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style” (Abrams, 1989), the dress “was suitable for working women and college students, for street wear and lunching in a restaurant, and also for golf, tennis, boating and other summer sports.”
In the early 1900s, “waists,” as these comfort-driven shirts were known, were turned out by the thousands in steamy tenement rooms and factories like that of the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village. In later versions combining top and skirt, they thrived as the practical uniform of women working on assembly lines, as bookkeepers and clerks, as seamstresses and even as factory foremen.
Buttoned-up as it was, the shirtwaist could flirt. There is nothing more coquettish in the summer than “a crisp-looking shirtwaist of taffeta,” proclaimed The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903. Society scribes liked its standardized look. “If a man can wear the same general-type shirt all day why can’t a woman do the same?” Amos Parrish pointedly inquired in The Schenectady Gazette in the spring of 1934.
By the 1950s, the trend had extended its reach to every level of the marketplace, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Sears.
Style setters lent it an unassailable chic. Grace Kelly wore a version in beige silk — subsequently christened the “To Catch a Prince” — when she and Prince Rainier of Monaco announced their engagement a few months before their marriage in 1956.
The following year the shirtwaist became, without willing it, an emblem of stoic resistance. “Of all the images of the civil rights movement, one of the most chilling is a photo of a black teenager in a shirtwaist dress and sunglasses,” Andrea Stone wrote in a 2007 USA Today article commemorating the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School.
In the early 1970s, the shirtwaist was given a shot in the arm by Halston, whose streamlined, one-style-suits-all adaptation was issued in machine-washable Ultrasuede.
The bread and butter of his line, it achieved best-seller status, engendering a raft of knockoffs for the better part of the decade and continuing even now to inspire designers who have tweaked it for a modern eye.
The fashion equivalent of comfort food, recent incarnations derive their appeal from an economic climate that favors reliable standards over the showy and the new.
Yet designers have played fast and loose with a formula built on cinched waists, roomy skirts and mannishly tailored placket fronts. In their spring shows, some riffed on the shirtwaist, offering versions in leather. Others toyed with skewed waistlines and fluttery kimono sleeves, placing their own quirky stamp on this trusted American classic.
By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
Remembering the fire that killed 146 workers at a garment factory in Manhattan and its lasting impact.
The American shirtwaist was a trend that, quite literally, had legs. This brash but sensible pairing of tailored shirt and skirt offered a glimpse of the ankles, which was as rare in its day as it was freeing.
Designed for utility, the style was embraced at the turn of the 20th century by legions of young women who preferred its hiked hemline and unfettered curves to the confining, street-sweeping dresses that had hobbled their mothers and aunts.
Few looks have been as versatile — or as egalitarian — adapting through the decades to all sorts of shifting conditions and sociopolitical landscapes.
And few have so nimbly walked the line between function and frivolity.
By 1911 the Triangle factory, a half-block east of Washington Square Park, was the largest maker of waists in New York City. Pressed elbow to elbow at the factory, in Greenwich Village, hundreds of women, working 12 to 16 hours six days a week, earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white, gauzy blouses — also called shirtwaists — that when worn with a skirt completed the look.
In the last minutes of the work week, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a match or a cigarette tossed into a waste basket ignited a fire that fed on the scraps of cloth and paper patterns hanging overhead. The blaze swept through the factory — the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the 10-story building — within a half-hour, leaving 146 dead, all but 23 of them young women. About 50 jumped to their deaths to escape the relentless flames.
As hundreds of events this week mark the 100th anniversary of the fire on Friday, the shirtwaist style has proved its remarkable staying power.
Democratic from its inception, the shirtwaist was “one of America’s first truly class-shattering fashions,” wrote David Von Drehle, who briefly outlined its history in “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
The practical uniform of factory hands, clerks, shopkeepers and librarians, it “both symbolized and enabled a wave of women’s liberation,” Mr. Von Drehle argued, the “perfect repudiation of corsets and bustles and hoops — all the ludicrous contraptions that literally imprisoned women in their own clothes.”
The earliest shirtwaists — originally shirts and separate skirts — were engineered for mobility, their popularity coinciding with a huge urbanization that saw women rushing about the streets, demanding the vote and, ultimately, flooding the workforce.
By 1910, when the entire American population was only 90 million, more than 5 million women held jobs outside the home. At that time, as Mr. Von Drehle noted, nearly a third of all factory workers in New York State were women, the majority dressed in a shirtwaist and skirt.
Shirtwaists flourished in the early 1900s as a badge of confidence and athletic femininity, the sporty attire of the Gibson Girl. They attained a touch of worldliness in the late 1940s when Christian Dior introduced a version, propped up by petticoats, as an essential component of his fabled New Look.
By midcentury, calf-length interpretations of the Dior shirtwaist represented domesticity to a generation of homemakers taking their style cues from Donna Reed. More recently, this sturdy fashion archetype was resurrected on “Mad Men,” the popular television series set in the 1950s and ’60s, inspiring a wave of nostalgic revivals on American fashion runways.
The look traveled well, as popular on the playing field as it was in more formal settings. As the fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank observed in “New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style” (Abrams, 1989), the dress “was suitable for working women and college students, for street wear and lunching in a restaurant, and also for golf, tennis, boating and other summer sports.”
In the early 1900s, “waists,” as these comfort-driven shirts were known, were turned out by the thousands in steamy tenement rooms and factories like that of the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village. In later versions combining top and skirt, they thrived as the practical uniform of women working on assembly lines, as bookkeepers and clerks, as seamstresses and even as factory foremen.
Buttoned-up as it was, the shirtwaist could flirt. There is nothing more coquettish in the summer than “a crisp-looking shirtwaist of taffeta,” proclaimed The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903. Society scribes liked its standardized look. “If a man can wear the same general-type shirt all day why can’t a woman do the same?” Amos Parrish pointedly inquired in The Schenectady Gazette in the spring of 1934.
By the 1950s, the trend had extended its reach to every level of the marketplace, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Sears.
Style setters lent it an unassailable chic. Grace Kelly wore a version in beige silk — subsequently christened the “To Catch a Prince” — when she and Prince Rainier of Monaco announced their engagement a few months before their marriage in 1956.
The following year the shirtwaist became, without willing it, an emblem of stoic resistance. “Of all the images of the civil rights movement, one of the most chilling is a photo of a black teenager in a shirtwaist dress and sunglasses,” Andrea Stone wrote in a 2007 USA Today article commemorating the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School.
In the early 1970s, the shirtwaist was given a shot in the arm by Halston, whose streamlined, one-style-suits-all adaptation was issued in machine-washable Ultrasuede.
The bread and butter of his line, it achieved best-seller status, engendering a raft of knockoffs for the better part of the decade and continuing even now to inspire designers who have tweaked it for a modern eye.
The fashion equivalent of comfort food, recent incarnations derive their appeal from an economic climate that favors reliable standards over the showy and the new.
Yet designers have played fast and loose with a formula built on cinched waists, roomy skirts and mannishly tailored placket fronts. In their spring shows, some riffed on the shirtwaist, offering versions in leather. Others toyed with skewed waistlines and fluttery kimono sleeves, placing their own quirky stamp on this trusted American classic.
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