Maltese tailors and dress making, 1850-1930

Abstract

Malta has always been important for its cotton industries since the middle ages. This was often exported and economically beneficial for the Maltese society. Specialized tailors are known to have come to Malta with the coming of the Order of St John in 1530. most of them being Rhodiots who came to Malta with the Knights. The description of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings in certain books, help us to form an idea on the type of dresses Maltese people wore, and that the common knowledge that all of them wore the same type of dresses is not true at all. Differences in dress clearly showed social class and status, and indeed dress and class is one of the elements which this thesis attempts to discuss in relation to the exosphere of tailors and their different specializations. When Malta was a British colony several tailors both Maltese and foreigners (especially from Sicily), opened their own tailor's shops in several villages on the Islands. Most of them though were held in Valletta and the harbour area. This work attempts to analyze the statistical records from a geographical and social perspective. For instance we will ask why there were so many specialized tailors in the inner Harbour area during most of the nineteenth century. Amount of advertisements found in newspapers such as the II-Malta and The Malta Daily Chronicle of these shops made evidence the trends of dresses they sew. Some of these shops were specified for making military clothes, considering the fact that there were a lot of British sailors who were residents in Malta.