The sweater is a fashion accessory. But it took a long time before it became one!
To begin with a sweater as a person who sweats. In the late 1500s it was necessary to be relatively rich to be able to sweat – to have enough leisure time to go to the equivalent of a sauna. English people were warned to avoid “sweaters and idle eaters” and to keep away from “sweaters and belchers”.
Parallel to this was the idea of a sweater as someone who works exceedingly hard, like travellers or tailors. The idea of a sweat shop, still used today as a place for making fashion items, appeared for the first time in English in 1628 in a comment relating to “the blood of sweaters and the tears of the people.”
The industrial revolution institutionalised work by putting it into factories. The workers worked hard. Mayhew writes, “Amongst the sweaters of the tailoring trade, Sunday labour is almost universal ”. At this time it was not particularly clear whether the people working in the factories were sweaters or those who exploited them. In the Manchester Guardian the sweaters are defined as those who employ “men and women at starvation prices” to do tailoring work.
Sweater was a very flexible word at the beginning of the 19th century. It also related to a piece of clothing worn by a horse or a man to make them sweat and thus lose weight. There is a great story about a rowing team forcing their cox to lose weight. “The little ruffian actually weighs over 8 stone; but we’re going to make him run a mile every day, with four sweaters, and three pairs of flannel trousers on.”
It was only at the beginning of the 1900s that the piece of clothing meant to make you sweat became a fashionable item. In 1912 it is described as a fashion accessory which is “sometimes a gaudy article of wear”. In 1920 it made it into Vogue which meant that sweaters were in and here to stay.
