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1918 — 1919
The other end of the clothing trade: Fashion was the famous end of Fort Wayne clothing; the working end is documented in a single federal snapshot. The Woman in Industry Service's memorandum of October 1918, surveying the city's women workers, counted the Boss Glove Company employing 200 girls making work gloves, alongside the hosiery mills and the biscuit and lamp works — the clothing Fort Wayne made for other people's labor, produced by Fort Wayne labor. The mills' own war work crossed the two ends together: in the First World War Wayne Knitting Mills turned out 50,000 standard-issue woolen army socks, the most utilitarian garment the fashion house ever shipped, while its girls' chorus, the Knittingales, sang for the war effort at home. The record reached does not document a Fort Wayne school-uniform trade or a local wartime rationing-fashion press campaign; those belong to the gaps named in the leg note, not to invention here.
Sources:
- Woman in Industry Service memorandum, October 1918 (Records of the Women's Bureau, via FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) — the Boss Glove Company's 200 girls, as surveyed in Industrial Revolution and cross-referenced here.
- The History Center, Wayne Knitting Mills account — the 50,000 army socks and the Knittingales chorus.