Already in 1860 the manufacture of clothing became one of the main industries of Cleveland. The garment industry probably peaked during the 1920s, when Cleveland was located near New York as one of the country's top garment production centers. During the Depression and continuing after World War II, the garment industry in Cleveland declined. Dozens of plants left the area, sold or closed their doors. Local factors certainly played their part, but the boom in the Cleveland Ready-to-Go industry as well as its decline paralleled industry growth and decline across the country. Thus, the history of the garment industry in Cleveland is a local or regional variant of a much wider phenomenon.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the garments were handmade, produced for the family by the women of the house or made to measure by those most accommodated by tailors and seamstresses. The first production of prêt-à-porter was stimulated by the needs of sailors, slaves and miners. Although still manually produced, this early prêt-à-porter industry set the stage for the industry's broad expansion and mechanization. The ready-to-go industry grew enormously from 1860 to 1880 for a variety of reasons. Increasing machining was one of the factors. In addition, the systems for classifying men's and boys' clothing were highly developed, based on millions of measurements obtained by the US Army during the Civil War. Finally, they also developed an exact size for women's clothing. The depression of 1873 contributed to the growing and growing acceptance of male prêt-à-porter, because men found in off-the-rack clothes a satisfactory and less expensive alternative to custom-made clothing. The production of prepared trousers or men's trousers, separated from the suits, stimulated during the depression of the 1870s, allowed men to complement their attire without having to buy a complete suit. In general, however, the great expansion of the ready-to-use industry coincided and was in part the result of the tremendous urbanization and large wave of immigrants who arrived in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the 20th. Industrial cities like Cleveland also experienced rapid growth, and it was during this period that the Cleveland ready-to-wear garment industry flourished.
The first entrepreneurs of the garment industry in Cleveland were often JEWS from the German or Austro-Hungarian extraction. His previous experience in retailing prepared them for the transition to the manufacture and wholesale of clothing. An example was Kaufman Koch, a clothing retailer whose firm eventually evolved into JOSEPH & FEISS CO., A leading manufacturer of men's clothing. The company still exists in the early 1990s, although it is no longer locally owned. The entry-level manufacturer needed relatively little capital to launch a garment factory. H. Black & Co., which would become Cleveland's major manufacturer of women's suits and coats, began as a home of notions. The Black family, Jews of Hungarian origin, decided to produce clothing based on European patterns in their own home. Later, the cloth was contracted to the domestic sewers and then returned to the factory for final assembly. This hiring system was widely practiced at this stage of the development of the garment industry, but by the end of the nineteenth century, work at home had generally been replaced by factory production. Clothing manufacturing began in the FLATS, but at the beginning of the 20th century, it was concentrated in what is now called the ALMACEN DISTRICT, an area bounded by W. 6 and W. 9 and Lakeside and Superior avenues. L. N. Gross Co., founded in 1900, was one of those firms in the growing garment district, specializing in the production of women's shirts. Many women wore costumes, and the separate shirt provided a relatively inexpensive way to modify and vary their wardrobe. L. Gross was also a pioneer in the specialization and division of labor in the manufacturing process. Instead of one person producing an entire garment, each garment worker specialized in one procedure, and then the entire garment was assembled.