Clothing Invention

Abstract

Historians have increasingly used patents to better understand historical antecedents for modern functional attire. This study examined 1,126 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office “Nether Garments/Skirts” class to investigate skirt function from 1846 to 1920. Thematic content analysis was used to determine a primary purpose for each patent; purposes were then grouped into (a) fashion (primarily shaping devices), (b) wearability, (c) use, and (d) manufacturing. Wearability-related purposes outnumbered those devoted to fashion almost twofold, which emphasizes difficulties women encountered in wearing fashionable skirts. Two major thrusts were determined: (a) between 1846 and 1890, inventors attempted to overcome dysfunctional aspects of wearing fashionable skirt silhouettes, and (b) after 1890 attention turned to skirts designed for sports and professional activities and to meet the special requirements of women's unique physiology (maternity and sanitary protection). Shaping devices followed the generally accepted timeline for fashionable silhouettes, indicating market demand as a patent incentive.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.