This engraving shows the interior of a tailor’s workshop before the advent of industrially manufactured clothes. While the master of the workshop takes a female customer’s measurements, apprentices, journeymen, and a seamstress perform other necessary tasks, such as piecing, sewing, and ironing. At the time, the well-to-do classes had their clothes made to measure, while members of the lower strata of society made their clothes at home. But many tailors worked for the common folk as well, producing both marriage finery and reworking older clothes for new purposes.