FIDM Museum Blog

A Look at the ILGWU

In honor of Labor Day, we want to recognize one of the largest labor organizations in the garment industry: the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), representing the thousands of men and women who painstakingly made and manufactured women's clothing. The ILGWU was active from 1900 to 1995, but throughout its 95 year history it made great strides in demanding justice and fair representation for those working in an industry known for extremely hazardous conditions. 

Workers in a garment factory, c. 1910. Courtesy of the Kheel Center at Cornell University.

The ILGWU was started in 1900 during the throes of the Industrial Revolution, when employers and workers clashed over dangerous factory conditions, unfair wages, long hours, and unsanitary environments. The garment industry in particular was rife with injustice, as factory owners took advantage of the largely immigrant workforce. Employees were forced to take sewing home to their cramped tenements, or worked in overcrowded factories with no breaks. The Yiddish lament below (translated to English) was sung in clothing sweatshops at the turn-of-the-century, before reforms reached the factory floors:

Day the same as night, night the same as day.
And all I do is sew and sew and sew.
May God help me, and my love come soon.
That I may leave this work and go. [1]

Large-scale strikes in 1909 and 1910 spurred compromise between the ILGWU and clothing manufacturer associations, resulting in the Protocol of Peace agreement that established fair working conditions and standardized payment structures. After the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 workers perished because they were locked in on the factory floor, efforts were doubled between the government, social welfare groups, manufacturers, and the ILGWU to enforce safety regulations. Soon, ILGWU local branches expanded from New York City to other capitals of garment manufacture, including Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. 

Like many unions, the ILGWU was formed with a strong Socialist ideology. The organization provided education, healthcare, housing, and even recreation for its members. The union also raised money for socialist causes, providing funds for refugees fleeing the Nazis during World War II and making contributions to the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War. Health Centers were established as early as 1913; in addition to general medical care, they addressed women's health and cared for ailments often found in garment industry workers, such as tuberculosis and respiratory issues from poor ventilation.

Evening Coat
I. Magnin, 1955-1956
Gift of Mrs. Roxanne Wilson
S2003.1.3 

The Inimitable Victor Costa

Long before he earned his reputation as "fashion's knock-off king," Victor Costa (b. 1935) created a line of Bohemian-inspired dresses—including this maxi dress wittily woven with hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds—under the Romantica label.¹ 

Romantica by Victor Costa
1968-73
Gift of Melissa Manlove
2006.870.34       

A career in fashion was always in the cards for Costa. Growing up in Houston's depressed Fifth Ward, where his Italian-American family owned a grocery store, he sold handmade paper doll clothes and, later, prom dresses to his classmates.² He went on to study fashion at the Pratt Institute in New York before attending the prestigious École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. In 1958, he married his high-school sweetheart, making her wedding gown from a pattern his classmates had smuggled out of Christian Dior’s atelier.³ The following year, the couple returned to New York, where Costa continued making wedding dresses for a string of bridalwear designers. This formative experience cemented his love of feminine florals and flounces, as well as his sense of sartorial drama. "Special occasion dresses have always been my hallmark," he once confessed.⁴ In 1965, Costa became the in-house designer for Suzy Perette, a large New York label known for producing line-for-line copies of French haute couture. At the time, Seventh Avenue manufacturers routinely paid a "caution" of several thousand dollars to Paris couture houses, which allowed them to attend their shows, sketch their designs, and produce inexpensive copies of couture gowns, which they sold for as little as $40.⁵ Costa, who has a photographic memory, showed such flair for the work that he was rewarded with his own line of original designs, Romantica by Victor Costa for Suzy Perette, in 1968.⁶ The label grew to comprise 90 percent of the company's sales.

Detail

In 1973, the family relocated back to Texas after Costa's young daughter developed asthma. Costa saw the move as an opportunity to strike out on his own. He bought a Dallas manufacturer of plus-sized clothing and transformed it into his own label, Victor Costa. Although he continued to travel to New York frequently, he made the most of his unique status as the resident designer in a conservative, cash-flush city obsessed with dressing up.⁷ Costa’s taste for frilly but formal eveningwear for suited the debutantes and dowagers of Dallas well. As the city’s oil boom went bust, Costa discovered a demand for inexpensive knockoffs of high-end designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Scaasi, Bill Blass, and Christian Lacroix--men whose exuberant aesthetic mirrored his own. His fame grew as his clothes appeared on television shows like Falcon Crest, Moonlighting, and Dynasty and celebrity fans including Whitney Houston, Morgan Fairchild, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Ivana Trump.⁸ While his tactics were sometimes controversial--he was once thrown out of Neiman Marcus when an Oscar de la Renta rep spotted him lurking at a trunk show--Costa argued that "the word 'fashion' would not exist if there were no copying."⁹ Given his reputation as a gifted copycat, it's no surprise that Costa even knocked himself off, briefly reviving the Romantica label for J.C. Penney in 1994.¹⁰

¹Texas Monthly, September 1987, p. 100.

²Texas Monthly, September 1987, p. 102; Women's Wear Daily, December 22, 1987.

³Richard Martin, Contemporary Fashion, 2nd edition (New York: St. James Press, 2002), p. 149; Texas Monthly, September 1987, p. 146.

⁴Baltimore Jewish Times, Fall 1989.

⁵Caroline Rennolds Milbank, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (New York: Abrams, 1989), p. 220.

⁶Martin, Contemporary Fashion, p. 150; Women's Wear Daily, October 28, 1968.

⁷Texas Monthly, September 1987, p. 146.

⁸People, vol. 30, no. 8, August 22, 1988; Women's Wear Daily, December 22, 1987.

⁹People, vol. 30, no. 8, August 22, 1988; Baltimore Jewish Times, Fall 1989.

¹⁰Women's Wear Daily, September 29, 1994.