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This paper describes research undertaken at the Nottingham Trent University which investigated body movements and their relationship to garment design. The study identifies the difference between ergonomic measuring positions and the natural postures used by real figures in real activities. A new approach to the identification and coding of upper body postures has been made. A body coding system and a simple piece of equipment was designed that enables extended natural body positions to be recorded, thus achieving repeatability. This work enabled comparisons of aesthetic appearance and the functional comfort of women's tailored jackets to be examined.

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This article explores the way in which fashionable items in a woman's wardrobe became accessible to a mass female market during the nineteenth century thanks largely to the interaction of fashion requirements themselves and developments in pattern drafting and grading, but also supported by contemporary social and cultural change. Using the case of the woman's jacket, it shows how progress in cutting techniques, in measurement, in the 'shape' of fashion, and in the use of the more exible practices of dressmaking, allowed manufacturers to produce and sell -in the new department stores and elsewhere -a cheaper, fashionable yet ready-made tailored garment that appealed to large numbers of women.The tailored jacket which had emerged in earlier centuries as riding wear was adopted as a practical garment for day wear from 1800. In France after the 1789 Revolution, such tailored garments were adopted by the bourgeoisie as symbols of a new democratic age. In England it was common for the jacket and the greatcoat to be worn by women of all classes for many practical and social outdoor pursuits throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An earlier paper in this journal has described the development of cutting practices in the rst half of the nineteenth century in detail.2 By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the tailored jacket became an accepted and essential part of the wardrobe of many men and women, fuelling opportunities for the new entrepreneurs engaged in the mass manufacture of clothing.This article will argue that, whilst the mass demand by women for aVordable fashionable clothing was driven by many social and cultural changes, the methods and the rate of its execution rested on two principal factors: the development and publication of pattern drafting and grading methods in the early nineteenth century; and the demands made by fashion styles. The emergence of the aVordable woman's tailored jacket is traced, describing how fashion dictated the cutting practices and determined the speed of development of the women's ready-to-wear trade in the second half of the nineteenth century.