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Fashion · What South Bend Sewed, Sold, and Wore
South Bend was never a fashion capital, and this section does not make it one. What it was, for the better part of a century, was a place that sewed for the nation: white dress shirts by the tens of thousands a day, wool underwear off the East Race, and — from 1916 — the overalls and one-piece Union-Alls of the H. D. Lee company. Its own dressing was done in the ordinary American way, through downtown stores that kept millinery and cloak departments, through some fifty dressmakers and thirty-five tailors a directory could count in a single year, and through a university across the city line that required its young men to come to dinner in coat and tie and then, in 1967, argued the rule to death in its own newspaper. The record also holds two honest absences, and they are printed where they belong: the federal census, which counted this city's manufactures industry by industry, never printed its garment trade as a line of its own — the whole trade hides in a footnote — and no designer of national standing was born or formed here. What follows is the cloth record at the size the documents give it.
The garment trade the census would not print
1899 — 1909
Counted, but folded away: The Thirteenth Census measured South Bend's manufactures three times — 1899, 1904, and 1909 — and in its comparative table for the city (Vol. IX, Table I) it printed the leading industries by name…
Wool first: the river mills and the underwear trade
1863 — the twentieth century
The city's first cloth was wool: Before South Bend sewed a shirt it fulled and wove wool. Chapman, writing in 1880, records an early woolen mill on the East Race, on ground the Variety Bracket Works later occupied, and records it…
The shirt city: Wilson Brothers and the white dress shirt
1883 — 1975
The signature garment: If South Bend had a fashion good, it was a shirt — not a novelty but the white dress shirt itself, made by the thousand dozen. Wilson Brothers, founded in Cincinnati in 1864 and headquartered in Chicago…
Work dress: H. D. Lee's South Bend factory
1916 — the mid twentieth century
Overalls, jackets, and the Union-All: The third garment trade the city held was work clothing, and it arrived as a branch plant of a Kansas house. The H. D. Lee Mercantile Company of Salina, Kansas — a wholesale grocery and…
The cabinet paradox: the sewing machine's furniture
1868 — 1955
Everything about the machine except the sewing: The largest clothing-adjacent manufacture in South Bend made no cloth at all. The Singer sewing machine sat in a wooden cabinet, and from 1868 Singer built those cabinets here …
The custom trades: milliners, dressmakers, and tailors
1883 and 1921, as the directories count them
Women's trades, counted at two dates: Before ready-to-wear finished its conquest, a city dressed through custom trades, and in South Bend those trades were largely women's. Farr's directory of 1883 — the city's ninth — lists…
The fashion floors: Robertson's, Wyman's, Ellsworth's, and Sax
1883 — 1986
Where the city bought its dress: The downtown department store was the city's fashion institution, and its departments are documented in the directories' own language. Robertson Brothers Company opened in 1904; the 1921 Polk…
Festive dress: the Greek costumes, and the Polish silence
1994 — present
One documented costume tradition: The ethnic-festival record documents festive dress carefully in exactly one of the city's communities. The Hellenic Dance Troupe of St. Andrew Greek Orthodox Church, established in April 1994…
The modern remnant: no Blass, and a working designer
The present day, at its documented size
The famous-designer test, run and failed: Fort Wayne, an hour and a half away, produced Bill Blass. The test for the same claim here was run against the biographical record, and it fails: no fashion designer of national standing…