The Long Endeavor: The Early Fight Against Fast Fashion at the Hull-House Settlement
/by Katie Akerboom
This essay was originally published in the exhibition catalog for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s 2024-2025 exhibition Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1899-1935.
Hull-House entrance, ca. 1903–12. This photograph shows a woman wearing a shirtwaist and walking skirt as she greets immigrant neighbors.
Hull-House Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois Chicago. 0000.0125.0528
Look at the clothing you are currently wearing. Do you know where it was made? Can you trace the fiber’s path from its origin to your wardrobe? Most people in the United States likely could not—a reality in an age of fast fashion. Explained by Ethical Consumer, “‘Fast fashion’ is ‘fast’ in a number of senses: the changes in fashion are fast, the rate of production is fast; the customer’s decision to purchase is fast; delivery is fast; and garments are worn fast—usually only a few times before being discarded.” But the push for faster fashion—and associated practices, especially exploitation of workers in the garment industry—is not new. While the term “fast fashion” wasn’t used until 1990 in the New York Times, the garment industry began adopting “fast” manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution.
In late-nineteenth-century Chicago, the production of a ready-to-wear garment involved many steps—each an opportunity for manufacturers to cut costs and maximize profits. Natural fabrics like cotton, linen, or wool were dyed and sent to manufacturers near the south branch of the Chicago River. Manufacturers sent patterns to “cutters,” who cut many pieces from the same pattern. Cut pieces went to “sweaters” who assembled the clothing, often in tenement houses. Finally, clothing was returned to the manufacturer and inspected, pressed, and delivered for sale, for example in the brand-new department stores dotting State Street. The sweatshops that factory owners employed were largely operating illegally, dodging labor laws and crowding workers together, making disease and injury commonplace.
Woman working on a sewing machine in a tenement, ca. 1901. This photograph shows a woman working on a shirtwaist at home while surrounded by her family.
Hull-House Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois Chicago. 0000.0198.0318b
In 1895, the garment industry was the primary industry of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. The Hull-House settlement was located in a neighborhood of tenements and textile work. “Sweaters” occupied many attics and basements in buildings surrounding Hull-House; mold and fire were common. Old machinery that relied on manual labor (as opposed to newer steam-powered machines) exhausted workers, making them more prone to accidents. The people working in these shops were mainly non-English-speaking immigrants, often from Russia or Bohemia, who desperately needed a job. Hull-House served as a center for organization, thought-sharing, and rebellion against these conditions and this early form of fast fashion.
Labor activists, including the Hull House residents Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr, railed against fast fashion not out of the environmental concern that drives so much fashion activism today, but through the lens of fair and equitable labor. In “The Sweating-System,” Kelley notes that there were 162 garment factories in the area, making things like coats, shirts, trousers, and knee-pants. Separate workers stitched large pieces, stitched the buttonholes and buttons, and finished the seams. She posits that this division made it more difficult to effectively organize labor, and that the garment industry is unique in this labor division, lacking the automation that characterized other factories. Kelley used what she found as Chief Factory Inspector in Chicago in the 1890s to work with lawmakers to pass legislation protecting workers, shutting down sweatshops, and standardizing manufacturing practices.
Portrait of Jane Addams, ca. 1910s. This photograph shows Addams wearing a shirtwaist elaborately embroidered with dark thread.
Hull-House Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois Chicago. 0000.005b.0017
Beyond these issues with labor conditions, the industrialized production of garments also went against the creative sensibilities of many Hull-House residents, including Starr, who believed art was tied intrinsically to labor. In her essay “Art and Labor,” she condemns a mundane, uniform approach to production, particularly within the garment industry, that both stifled creativity and diminished the result of labor: “The more exact the reproduction, the less of the personality of the man who does the work is in the product, the more uninteresting the product will be.”
Linen smock with floral detailing
Hull-House Collection
The Hull-House settlement’s focus on labor in the garment industry offers important perspective for the garment industry of the twenty-first century. Today’s fast fashion still relies on sweatshops. Many individuals, especially younger generations, are turning to thrift stores, mending, and hand-produced clothing in an effort to actively reject fast fashion, with sustainable fashion influencers like Bernadette Banner and Aja Barber leading the way. The platform for collective conversation is no longer the social settlement, but social media. Here, people are connecting and sharing ideas for reform, carrying the spirit of Addams, Kelley, and Starr into the digital age.
Alex Crumbie, “What Is Fast Fashion and Why Is It a Problem?,” Ethical Consumer, April 12, 2023. http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/fashion-clothing/what-fast-fashion-why-it-problem.
Anne-Marie Schiro, “Two New Stores That Cruise Fashion’s Fast Lane,” New York Times, December 31, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/style/fashion-two-new-stores-that-cruise-fashion-s-fast-lane.html.
Bernadette Banner, “Are the Victorians Responsible for Fast Fashion? Ft. Dress Historian Dr Serena Dyer,” YouTube, November 12, 2022, video, 22:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYSAHXuwg1M.
Florence Kelley, “The Sweating-System,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 27–45.
Jane Addams, “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 183–204.
Florence Kelley, “I Go To Work,” essay, in The Autobiography of Florence Kelley: Notes on Sixty Years, vol. 1, First Person Series (Chciago, IL: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 77–89.
Ellen Gates Starr, “Art and Labor,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895).
