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Focusing on the intricate process of creating fashionable women's dress in Georgian England, this work highlights the collaboration among mantuamakers, seamstresses, and artists. It emphasizes the significance of manual labor and the skilled hands involved in crafting garments, while exploring themes of craft, industry, gender, and labor. By utilizing recreation methodologies, the text examines how these interconnected trades shaped the culture of fashion in the eighteenth century, revealing the profound impact of stitching and artistic practices on society.

This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. It explores how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century.

List of Illustrations List of Charts and Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations -- 1. Introduction: Making Material Lives Material Life Writing The Consumer Culture of Making Four Material Lives -- 2. Material Accounting: A Sartorial Account Book Barbara Johnson (1738?1825) Educating Barbara Johnson Accounting for Herself Material Literacy A Chronicle of Fashion -- 3. Dress of the Year: Watercolours Ann Frankland Lewis (1757?1842) Sartorial Timekeeping and the Fashion Plate Accomplishment and Creative Practice Society and Fashionable Display Selfhood, Emotion and the Mourning Watercolours -- 4. Adorned in Silk: Dressed Prints Sabine Winn (1734?1798) Paper Textiles, Dress and the Dressed Print Sabine Winn's Dressed Prints Print and Making at Nostell -- 5. Fashions in Miniature: Dolls Laetitia Powell (1741?1801) The Powell Dolls Mimetic Dolls and Miniature Selves Dolls as Sartorial Social Narrators -- 6. Conclusion: Material Afterlives Glossary Bibliography Index.