On the Hungarian side, we’ve got a long involvement in the needle trades.
My grandmother’s sister Betty was some kind of fashion model, who “went around with” and then married the son of aManhattan factory owner, whose workers attached soutache and passementerie to fur coats. Betty got an after-school job in the factory for my grandmother Sallie. Their father–a tailor–had died and their mother needed all the support she could find. After that Sallie dropped out of high school either to work full time at the factory or simply to cut to the chase–she did marry another son of the factory owner. (Not my grandfather.)
In the meantime, Sallie and Betty’s sister Grace worked as a delivery girl for a fashionable milliner–Grace told me how excited she was once to deliver a hat to the widow of Stanford White.