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Roslyn Sugarman and Peter NcNeil
Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story
Sydney: Sydney Jewish Music, 2012
Dressing Sydney is rich with fascinating new information about the contribution of Jewish immigrants to the clothing and allied industries in Sydney. This elegantly designed publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Sydney Jewish Museum, running from October 2012 to December 2013. Charting new ground, both exhibition and book help to substantially augment our understanding of many facets of dress production, style, and promotion in this city, and, indeed, wider afield. They tell a vibrant story of the garment and textile industries that spans from the late 1940s to the 1980s.
Oral-based evidence reveals that many of Sydney's Jewish migrants started with nothing, and, struggling against the odds, re-established their lives in an unfamiliar environment through fashion production and the clothing trades. Intensely personal, these narratives show remarkable individual resilience, ingenuity, business acumen, improvisation, and risk-taking. That the garment industry has been of such crucial importance to the survival of migrant workers from many cultures is due to specific factors. These include small-scale production lines, the stylistically volatile nature of fashion, the limited capital required, and the work being suited to those with strong networking abilities, who have little need for local language skills. Further, because piece work (primarily undertaken by women) suits employment at home, it is an occupation that allows for strong familial coherence. Unquestionably, the family and the community formed the bedrock of the 's chmatte business'.
The central role of clothing in defining Jewish identity has received previous attention, as has fashion and accessory consumption (for example, the global Jewish trade in fashionable ostrich plumes1). And there are analyses of day-to-day rag-trade practices in Paris, London's East End, Los Angeles,2 and Tel Aviv, as well as Flinders Lane, Melbourne.3 But here, for the first time, the focus is on Sydney-in particular, the Newtown and Surry Hills areas. Presenting important new material, what emerges is a detailed geographical and economic picture of urban dressmaking and hosiery, tailoring, design, promotion, importing, retail supply, labour, and service practices. Setting the oral history in context, discussion ranges over the relatively successful period of the 1950s and 1960s through to the severe decline of the trades,...