The sewing machine...a technology very near and dear to my heart. Over 50 years and 5 different people went into its invention, but it was all collated and patented by Isaac Merrit Singer in 1851...this made the other 4 guys whose ideas he had borrowed start suing him, leading to a series of lawsuits known as the Sewing Machine War, which finally ended in 1856, when they all pooled their patents and created the entity that became the first modern sewing machine. It, when combined with the various patents that had been granted for industrial looms about 50 years previously, revolutionized mass clothing production, and was one of the key components of the industrial revolution. Pre-made clothing was no longer just for people who could afford to go to tailors and dress-makers, and millions of jobs were created in the textile and clothing production factories.

According to Marshall Mcluhan, the famed media theorist, this would be an example of an enhancement of the original 'sewing' technology. And while it drove out the necessity for dressmakers and tailors, it also, in a strange way, enhanced their value by narrowing their clientele (the people who would have seen mass-produced clothing as a degradation). Today, we hold people who can make their own clothes and make clothes for others quite highly, but it is a novelty, rather than a skill necessary to the survival of themselves and their family. Mothers now don't generally teach their daughters how to sew as soon as they can sit up, because there is no real need, so, when speaking in absolutes, there is no real need for the skill of a seamstress any longer.

So what did it bring back? One could argue that with the sewing machine was a leveler, and once a person has a sewing machine, they have the ability to produce any type of clothing, therefore clothing rises above class and race, and the fact that a woman has a fancy dress isn't necessarily synonymous with wealth. This, to a utopian idealist would indicate a 'return to how it used to be' when humans were free of such superficial labels as clothing and hairstyles.

Now we have the labels written directly on the massed produced clothing...since you really can't tell a Banana Republic white t-shirt from a Wal-Mart white t-shirt unless the names are written on the tag. So, the immediacy and accessibility the sewing machine originally intended has morphed into another divide, where wealthy people shop at Banana Republic and poor people buy their clothes at Wal-Mart (obviously a generalisation), and clothing has reverted to an immediate indicator of status.