This social history describes the women workers of the French fashion industry in the nineteenth century, first the world of les petites mains (little hands), and then the fashion columnists and illustrators—“fashion’s eyes and ears.” The story is foundational for the industry that endures to this day. At its origins, of course, the industry was practically revolutionary, for it involved immense social upheaval: women who had been compelled by convention to live sequestered lives, were now compelled to take work, and hence to enter the public sphere—and to negotiate the boundary between invisibility and visibility. Behind the Seams uses the metaphor of seams—equating hiddenness with respectability—to reveal a story more complex than previously acknowledged. Behind the Seams ushers women workers and their work out of obscurity and asks that we rethink women’s relation to fashion as one not only of passive consumption, but also, importantly, of productive agency and self-determination.