Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Postwar Britain 9781350986145, 9781786731975

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Geraldine Biddle-​Perry is a fashion and cultural historian who l­ectures in fashion and design history and theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is co-​author, with Sarah Cheang, of Hair: Styling Culture and Fashion. ‘Dressing for Austerity is so much more than a history of fashion in postwar Britain. It shows the potential of an approach that connects dress to changes in politics, culture, manufacturing technologies, leisure and forms of citizenship – this is a significant contribution to the wider history of the late 1940s and the way that the period shaped consumption cultures, identities and social attitudes in the following decades… Running through Dressing for Austerity is a sense of the distinctiveness of the period, and its profound difference from our own “age of austerity”. The book looks beyond easy stereotypes of constraint and stylistic conservatism, to show the optimism and hope that was woven into the way we once dressed for austerity.’ David Gilbert, Professor of Urban and Historical Geography, Royal Holloway University of London.

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Series Editors: Reina Lewis & Elizabeth Wilson Advisory Board: Christopher Breward, Hazel Clark, Joanne Entwistle, Caroline Evans, Susan Kaiser, Angela McRobbie, Hiroshi Narumi, Peter McNeil, Özlem Sandikci, Simona Segre Reinach Dress Cultures aims to foster innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks to understand how and why we dress, exploring the connections between clothing, commerce and creativity in global contexts. Published and forthcoming: Branding Fashion: Bridging the Self and the Social Consumer

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by Anthony Sullivan

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Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion

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edited by Anneke Smelik

by Sarah Cheang

Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Postwar Britain

Styling South Asian Youth Cultures: Fashion, Media and Society

by Geraldine Biddle-​Perry Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body

by Francesca Granata Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775–​1925

edited by Justine De Young Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape

edited by Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion, Music and Gender

by Rachel Lifter Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith

edited by Reina Lewis

edited by Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Reina Lewis Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik Veiling in Fashion: Space and the Hijab in Minority Communities

by Anna-​Mari Almila Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora

By Cheryl Sim Wearing the Niqab: Fashioning Identities among Muslim Women in the UK

by Anna Piela

Reina Lewis: [email protected] Elizabeth Wilson: [email protected] At the publisher, Philippa Brewster: [email protected]

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Dressing for Austerity Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Postwar Britain Geraldine Biddle-​Perry

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2017 Geraldine Biddle-Perry The right of Geraldine Biddle-Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Dress Cultures ISBN: 978 1 78076 628 7 eISBN: 978 1 78672 197 6 ePDF: 978 1 78673 197 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Austerity, Aspiration and Affluence

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Austerity by Design: Fashioning a New Jerusalem

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Austerity in Transition: Demobilisation/​Remobilisation

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Austerity by Consensus: Democratising Desire

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Lessons in Austerity: Styling Postwar Citizenship

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Austerity and Affluence: Another Look at the New Look

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Austerity and Aspiration: A Boy, A Girl and A Bike

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Conclusion: The Autonomy of Austerity: Postwar Affluence by Design

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Notes 182 Bibliography 201 Index212

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece to Introduction: A young woman modeling a fashionable style posed with bicycle, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion 1 ‘A tired cyclist’, Picture Post, 10 June 1939, photo by Felix Man/​Getty Images® 2 ‘The riding habit’, Picture Post, ‘Clothes for a Coupon Summer’, 5 July 1943, photo by Zoltan Glass/​Getty Images® 3 ‘The first collection of utility dresses. Designed by Norman Hartnell. Modelled in Bond Street’, © Associated Newspapers/​REX Shutterstock 4 ‘Oh crikey! Corduroys…’, A teenage Phyl Grey (née Macdonald) in corduroy knickerbockers c. 1943, image courtesy of Phyl Grey 5 Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown, Wendy Hiller, I Know Where I’m Going (dir. Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger, 1945), © Everett Collection/​REX Shutterstock 6 Ministry of Information, ‘Men’s utility suitings’, 1943, Imperial War Museum, © IWM 7 War Office Official Collection, ‘Demobilisation of British service personnel’, Olympia, Imperial War Museum, © IWM 8 Picture Post cover, 6 January 1945, ‘Problems of 1945’, photo by Felix Man/​Picture Post/​IPC Magazines/​Getty Images® 9 ‘Demobilisation of the British Army’, Imperial War Museum, © IWM 10 Grey Pin Stripe ‘demob’ suit, Imperial War Museum, © IWM 11 Fashion show at Selfridges, 1945, © Associated Newspapers/​ REX Shutterstock

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12 They Came to a City (dir. Basil Deardon, 1945), © ITV/​REX Shutterstock 13 Margaret Lockwood, The Wicked Lady (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945), © ITV/​REX Shutterstock 14 Hyde Park scene, Fashion Hall, Britain Can Make It, 1946, photo by COID, courtesy of VADS University of Brighton Design Archives 15 Britain Can Make It 1946, men’s fashion stand designed by Ashley Havinden, photo by COID courtesy of VADS University of Brighton Design Archives 16 ‘George the spiv, 21 August 1947: George Elms, a spiv’, photo by Express/​Getty Images® 17 ‘From battleground to ballroom’, The Outfitter Export, July 1947, image courtesy of the Emap Archive at the London College of Fashion Archive, University of the Arts London 18 ‘That kind of bloke …’, a recently demobbed Len Perry, c. 1947, image courtesy of Len Perry 19 Shopping by candlelight, power cut in London’s Oxford Street, © Planet News/​Science and Society Picture Library 20 Mrs Edwards who worked for Marks & Spencer, aged 18, in 1948, wearing Marks & Spencer brand utility frock, image courtesy of M&S Company Archive 21 Digby Morton and Angela Delanghe, wool suits, 1948, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion 22 Dorville royal blue worsted utility suit, 1950, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion 23 Marks & Spencer brand cotton rayon, floral print utility frock, c. 1947, image courtesy of M&S Company Archive 24 ‘Jane’s day’, Good Taste, March 1946, © Time.Inc (UK) Ltd 25 Honor Blackman and Patrick Holt, A Boy, A Girl and A Bike (dir. Ralph Smart, 1948) © ITV/​REX Shutterstock 26 A bike ride to Westerham c. 1947, image courtesy of Len Perry 27 ‘A nice day’s outing’, Picture Post, 19 June 1948, photo by Haywood Magee/​Getty Images®

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28 Cartoon by ‘Strube’, ‘The irresistible £10 suit’, especially drawn for Men’s Wear, 5 November 1949, image courtesy of the Emap Archive at the London College of Fashion Archive, University of the Arts London 178 29 Group of young cyclists in various wool ensembles, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion 180

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes a great deal to a generation of older teens and 20-​ somethings in the late 1940s and early 1950s: my mother and father Diana and Gerald, and my parents-​in-​law Len and Win Perry and their circle of friends, especially the four ‘Mac’ [Macdonald] sisters, Pat, twins Phyl and Ruby, and Doff [Dorothy]. Their memories framed a new understanding of the ambiguous possibilities of this time of massive and radical change. Their experiences stimulated a revised picture of life in postwar austerity Britain, from a period stereotypically defined by drabness and dreariness as the privations of the war dragged on, to a time also of great hope, of excitement … and of fun, dominated by an overwhelming sense of aspiration for what the future would bring. To use a cycling analogy, the writing of the book has been a bit of a ‘long pull up’. A big thank you, therefore, also goes to friends, colleagues and archival staff, but particularly Professor Elizabeth Wilson for her untiring support from doctoral supervision to manuscript, and for the help and encouragement of Philippa Brewster at I.B.Tauris who oiled the wheels and at times applied the brakes. Finally, I am eternally grateful to all those closest for their constancy: it is to you John, Ben, Suzy, Simon and Dia I dedicate this book.

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A young woman modeling a fashionable style posed with bicycle, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion

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INTRODUCTION: AUSTERITY, ASPIRATION AND AFFLUENCE WHEN THE WAR IS OVER … ‘Austerity Britain’ has become a catchall phrase for understanding the effects of World War II on everyday life in the late 1940s in terms of scarcity and of stoicism: scarcity as a result of the war effort and shortages of virtually everything, and stoicism on behalf of the British people in the face of such strictures. The origins of the word ‘austerity’ are difficult to trace with any exactitude, but certainly in this context, civilian life on the ‘home front’ provides a superficial starting point. The introduction by the wartime coalition government of austerity restrictions in 1942 proscribed stylistic limits on clothing, shoes and other consumer durables, correlative to a whole raft of measures instituted by the state governing the design, production, supply of raw materials and finished goods, and the rationing of their consumption. However, as the war drew to a close, reports in the popular press, memos passing back and forth at the Board of Trade marked ‘Austerity’, and a wider cultural atmosphere of war-​weariness and anticipation begin to suggest an imperceptible shift, beyond the specific material effects of by now familiar restrictions towards

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a more ontological argument about the exercise of discipline as the foundation of a ‘new Britain’. The purpose of this book is to explore the cultural and political dimensions of this shift from a fashion historical perspective. There was never a stylistic or ideological full stop between war and peace, rather a progression of shifts in fashion and style trends whose dissemination was a pivotal element in the wider popular cultural discourse of anticipating a new, peacetime identity. Clearly, it is impossible to understand postwar austerity Britain in the late 1940s without references to the war. However, the critical impetus of this book is to explore the period between 1944 and 1951 on its own terms, as a critical tipping point in British society embodied in distinctive austerity fashions and shifting style trends. Defined as the Age of Austerity, in recent years the period has acquired a certain cachet as the focus of notable studies such as David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945–​511 and, as the Great Recession deepened, as the object of popular nostalgia in television programmes, fashion and women’s magazine spreads mythologising the advantages of making and mending and disseminating retro styles with little regard to periodisation. Sandwiched between the outbreak of war and the youth revolution of the later 1950s, it is an age defined, perhaps quite accurately, by a collective mood and a set of emotional and physical responses as much as anything else. Critical understandings of postwar austerity Britain are essentially characterised by arguments that come down on one side or another of the relative success or failure of the Attlee administration’s radical agenda for postwar social welfare reform and planned economic management. Polarised debates as to the merits of policy objectives that either created a more democratic, fairer society, or left a pre-​war status quo relatively in tact have been sustained by a further oppositional framework of wartime proscription and postwar plenty. This discussion, in turn, is informed by concepts of either the ‘plight’ of the traditional middle class after the war, or the cultural ascendency of a post-​welfare state working class. Fashion history writing has also in many ways created its own version of this oppositional temporal and conceptual narrative. As a consequence, the importance of this period to modern fashion production and consumerism has been overlooked, lost in both the extended indefinite gloom of wartime austerity and a smokescreen of postwar affluence

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–​the one ending and the other beginning with Christian Dior’s introduction of the New Look in 1947. Through the timeless qualities of myth, this iconic ‘moment’ has become fashion historical shorthand for postwar consumerism as a whole. A constant temporal slippage has inhibited critical interrogation of strategies of fashionable consumption, style trends and wider production practices upon which Dior’s design was just one, albeit extremely important, influence. Fashion-​ historical scholarship has undergone a number of radical changes in the ‘cultural turn’ of the last 30 years. Fashion is taken seriously because it is now recognised as an important mode of social practice that shapes cultural meanings and thus provides an ideal critical focus through which to analyse the contradictions inherent in this period of massive social change. In the past, reductive equations have been made between restrictive government clothing controls and drab, utilitarian styles; during World War II fashion change it is argued, effectively halted. This view has been radically challenged by revisionist fashion historical accounts that demonstrate the emergence of a distinctive wartime aesthetic subject to constant stylistic innovation expressed in shifting fashions and fashion trends. However it is not just reductive but also intellectually inconsistent to see fashion and consumerism in the period immediately after the war defined by the same sense of gloomy stasis that once hung over its antecedents. Historian Peter Hennessy suggests that ‘[p]‌erhaps we have succumbed too readily to the first drafts of early postwar cultural history which were written even before the decade came to a close …’.2 This book is not another generic political history of austerity, nor does it narrowly focus on a discrete category of analysis such as gender or class, nor is it a month-​by-​month account of the legislative mechanics of wartime and postwar clothing controls and decontrols. The following chapters examine the interconnectedness of competing forces of fashionable agency and structures of institutional control in a way that does not isolate fashion from politics, civilian production from military, or male consumers from female, or pre-​from post-​1945 regulations. The aim is to avoid the temporal and conceptual gloom and gloss of previous approaches and explore how the continuance of wartime austerity measures served as both a curb and a stimulus to postwar popular consumer desire. This implies a revised understanding of postwar austerity in relation to the specificities of the extension of wartime

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austerity restrictions and of the Utility Clothing Scheme. Here, the political dimensions of fashionable desire and its discipline are set against a contemporary climate of postwar idealism. Affordable fashions and style trends, and access to leisure and the time and money to enjoy it, combined to function as totemic symbols of change that impelled new strategies of government intervention and consumer agency.

A TIME OF ‘PEACE BUT NOT PLENTY’ An outline of wartime clothing controls has to be the starting point for understanding the philosophical foundations of Labour’s longer-​term policy objectives. Chapter 1 draws on fashion historical accounts of the wartime Utility Clothing Scheme and the evolution of a distinctive British design aesthetic, central to which was the myth of a new kind of fashion democracy. Austerity measures and highly politicised attitudes to consumer wants and needs were elemental to a scheme driven at a material level by necessity in the face of successive economic crises and material shortages, but also ‘by design’. Strategies of state control, it was believed, could work in tandem with those of individual and collective self-​control to fashion a ‘better Britain’. There was a progressive shift of popular support to the left and an equation made between the need for radical reform and Labour’s growing reputation for action. The party’s overwhelming victory at the polls in 1945 was viewed as evidence of a popular mandate for it to pursue a new vision of democratic capitalism: notions of political consensus made little sense without a correlate vision of consensus consumers. An ‘improving’ agenda with its foundation in the nascent British Labour movement of the nineteenth century was reoriented to the demands of postwar austerity Britain. The Labour Chair of Plymouth’s Housing Committee justifying rent increases in return for better housing argued that working men and women would have to go without cigarettes and greyhound racing but people would realise that Labour ‘was building a new race of people who won’t want to do those things … They won’t want amusements made for them. They’ll make their own amusements’.3 Over the course of the war, the reform and rationalisation of popular leisure and consumerism were seen as an important political

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project to which those in power, and particularly an ascendant Labour Party, had to direct their energies. After 1945, rhetorical emphasis of utility and state controls moved away from a concentration on standardisation of production towards a more consumer-​orientated focus.4 An air of war-​weariness inflected the mood of late-​war Britain but it was lifted by the promise of impending demobilisation –​a huge undertaking whose planning and execution, particularly its outfitting, have rarely been the object of scholarly attention. The author Anthony Burgess described in his autobiography how the ordinary servicemen saw themselves as ‘civilians in temporary fancy dress’ who had played their part but now wanted to go home.5 ‘Demob’ was viewed by the electorate and by MPs of all political shades as symbolic of a commitment not to repeat the mistakes of the World War I settlement: the shabby treatment of returning heroes retrospectively perceived as inseparable from the economic depression of the interwar years experienced by many regions of Britain. Chapter 2 examines how the design and issuance of the ‘demob suit’ became a high visibility project embodying Labour’s growing ambitions for postwar government. Demob was a huge logistical operation. But over the course of the war the appropriate fashioning of those returning home assumed a huge cultural and propagandist potency, politically and party politically. The provision for all demobilised servicemen of a fashionable, ‘austerity free’ suit sought to ensure that all men regardless of rank returned to civilian life on an equal footing, and assumed a particular salience for Labour propaganda and its claim to be the ‘People’s Party’. Using a range of important primary sources, this chapter charts the evolution of a form of stylistic liberation effectively denied their female counterparts in service and on the home front. The chapter will argue that the continuation of austerity restrictions on women’s clothing was the means by which the millions of yardage needed to fulfil the pledge of ‘never again’ could be released. Historian Rex Pope situates demobilisation as ‘perhaps the greatest attempt in the history of the United Kingdom at managing the labour market’ and outlines the conflicting objectives the process sought to achieve: the necessity of meeting both on-​going service needs and providing a skilled labour force suitable for controlled economic reconstruction and at the same time fulfilling popular expectations of a speedy

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return to civilian life.6 While Pope’s study offers a rare insight into the economic and strategic machinations of such spurs to reconstruction, he does not address the role fashion and clothing controls played in giving concrete form to socialism’s more abstract ideals of postwar reconstruction. The demob suit was a strategic material expression of a desire to create a new kind of democratic capitalism but its success as either a politically astute strategy, or as a fashionable embodiment of socialist visions of a new kind of society, is open to question and is pondered in Chapter 3. How were differently gendered strategies of military demobilisation and civilian consumer remobilisation exploited to sartorially plot the wider ideological coordinates of peacetime citizenship and a radical agenda for welfare reform? A further cut in the clothing ration from 41 to an alltime low of 36 coupons (reduced by almost a half from the 66 initially allocated when rationing was introduced in 1941) did little to improve the fashion choices of supposedly ‘cash and coupon rich’ women demobilised from military and civilian services. It was never envisaged that women would be provided with a demob suit; the stylistic variations required were considered impossible to even imagine, let alone service. Women were instead provided with a cash grant, a standard coupon book and an additional 90 coupons. Finding the garments to spend this on was difficult; demobilisation placed even greater demands on a clothing trade already disgruntled by what it saw as government high handedness and extreme shortages of labour and raw materials. On VE Day five million men were in uniform –​80 per cent of these were still in uniform at the start of 1946; by the end of that year the same proportion would have been discharged.7

INSTRUMENTS OF PROPAGANDA A cinematograph film represents something more than a commodity to be bartered against others. Already the screen has great influences both politically and culturally over the minds of the people. Its potentialities are vast, as a vehicle for the expression of national life, ideals and tradition, a dramatic and artistic medium, and as an instrument of propaganda.8

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British films made in the 1940s were an extremely important propagandist resource for the coalition government and for a Labour Party growing in confidence, and analyses of a range of cinematic narratives are therefore integrated throughout this book. Over the previous six years of war, British film and fashion production had both evolved quickly in response to the war, to government intervention, and to the shifting experiences and expectations of their consumers. Thematically, too, film and fashion appeared to work in tandem, shifting focus from the overtly militaristic motifs of the ‘phoney war’ to the gritty realism of mid-​war grind, to the more allegorical domesticated backdrops of late-​ war weariness heightened by anticipation of war’s end. Both creative forms had their roots in radical shifts in European art and visual culture and the growing power of US economic might and Hollywood that were then melded together with British craft and technical traditions to create a distinctive, uniquely British, realist aesthetic. Both film and fashion industries worked closely with and were recognised by the coalition government as vital propagandist tools. The Ministry of Information actively facilitated the merging of the codes and technical conventions of filmic documentary realism with those of commercial film production; their desire to infuse propagandist messages into wartime films brought together what were previously two distinctive and differently motivated cinematic genres. The complex interchange of high-​end aesthetics and mass market commercial pragmatism paralleled the ideals that defined and drove the philosophical and political motivations of the Utility Clothing Scheme. Differences of nation, class and gender had to be meshed together through a new set of ideological coordinates that explored contemporary social anxieties through more allegorical evocations that used the war as a background against which intense personal dramas could be played out.9 Systems of status fractured and redefined by the war and expectations of what peace might or should bring impelled a new repertoire of costuming and characterisation that both acknowledged the war and looked forward to an uncertain future. In wartime, ideals of patriotic feminine chic and masculine reserve were brokered at the interstices of external physical controls and internal moral value systems, both made visible in and through self-​ consciously fashioned bodies and their display. However, morality was a fashionable

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strategy whose spectacular performance required careful styling and constant realignment with shifting social and cultural conditions and the war effort. British films made and released on the cusp of peace, like I Know Where I’m Going,10 discussed in Chapter 3, problematised the new uncertainties faced by the British people and offered solutions that were reliant on physical and psychological resources in new ways. The staging of appropriate fashionable consumption was an important performative element of filmic texts embedded in the discourse of austerity and its contradictory impulses. New versions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ had to be narrated according to a shifting criteria of authenticity that also had to fashion the here and now. The need to create a cohesive postwar national identity at a time of huge cultural and social uncertainty was a huge stimulus to all forms of cultural production after the war. Tensions between desire and duty relentlessly rehearsed over the previous five years had to be re-​envisioned to provide new lessons in austerity. Chapter 4 focuses on a range of representational forms produced from the late-​war period through which the embodied politics of postwar consensus consumerism were disseminated and embedded in the popular cultural imagination. The figure of the ‘spiv’ –​a term that came into popular currency at the end of the war to describe a petty black marketeer immediately recognisable by his oversized chalk-​stripe suit and large trilby hat –​ is, for example, situated as part of a whole typology of idealised citizenship played out on screen, in the press and in government-​led initiatives such as the Britain Can Make It exhibition. Such representations sought to reinforce the idea of a popular consensus on continued consumer constraint, and to instil good taste through good design and build on the supposed advances in popular aestheticism made over the course of the war. Nineteen forty-​six was the best year on record for British film takings, reaching over £110,000,000.11 Fashion’s capacity as an inherent symbol of both change and the cultural zeitgeist meant that it operated as a key element in British cinema’s commitment to aesthetic fidelity, central to which was a highly politicised agenda for social change. Fashionable dress was rarely an explicit topical focus in British films of this period; rather it was a pivotal discursive element employed to give tangible form to more abstract ideological goals. As film theorist Robert Murphy argues in his discussion of British wartime cinema, ‘[p]‌ropaganda … lies not in the surface but embedded in the structure of the film’.12 Postwar versions

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of modern womanhood amalgamated wartime images of patriotic femininity with new ideals of resourcefulness in the face of continued austerity: an ethos of make do and mend was channelled into one of ‘spend, spend, spend’ for the good of the nation.13

A NEW LOOK BRITAIN Postwar cultural production continued to emphasise fashionable consumer constraint not as a form of state coercion but as one of individual choice, and as the means by which a distinctive British culture of democratic fair shares for all was sustained. British couturiers, all members of IncSoc (Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers), formed in 1942 to promote British design and who produced templates for the wartime utility scheme, believed that the war had strengthened claims of a distinctive minimalist aesthetic based on the use of high quality British materials and craftsmanship. Chapter 5 examines the postwar fashion system in Britain in the context of Dior’s New Look collections in 1947 and the responses of the high-​end and high street fashion industries. The chapter explores the diverse needs of different consumers for practical, stylish clothing adaptable to a diversity of social situations and locations –​at work, at home, and for leisure. The demands of wartime military, civilian and export production, it will argue, exploited and accelerated innovations in manufacturing techniques, textile technology and quality controls, all of which had a significant impact on the postwar clothing and textile production aimed at a new generation of consumers. The development of synthetic fibres and dyes and crease-​resistant fabrics in Britain that had occurred before World War II saw further advances, particularly in the manufacture of cheap, colourful, cotton-​rayon textiles that continued to form the mainstay of opening up affordable fashionable change for all but the poorest in society. Dior’s New Look is situated as a multivalent form that fulfilled the desires for peace and for change of all classes of consumer. The arrival of the New Look in Britain was not, by inference, a rigid choice between wartime utility and postwar ‘freedom’; new looks and new lines were created by and for mainstream consumers in ways that blurred the boundaries between the two.

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WORKING THINGS OUT FOR THEMSELVES … … people have changed as much as fashion. Everyone asks more of life and that they should be let to work things out for themselves.14 Over the course of the war, the reform and management of leisure and fashion consumption came to be seen as a significant political project to which those in power had to direct their energies. Technological and social change came together in the second half of the 1940s in the fashioning of new kinds of modern working and leisured bodies. Postwar clothing controls and restrictions need to be considered not solely as knee-​jerk reactions to shortages and external imperatives. The paradoxes of austerity ‘by design’, political and fashionable, that the earlier chapters of this book examine in a wartime context, are further interrogated through an exploration of the figure of ‘the technocrat’ –​a new ‘breed’ of worker, citizen and consumer who emerged after the war. Positive and negative responses to the perceived effects of the war and the discipline of wartime service were appropriated to reflect shifting peacetime fashionable ideals. Chapter  6 shifts focus again, this time to wider developments in fashion correlated to the emergence of the New Look. The promotion of innovative style trends was interwoven with the enjoyment of better pay and working conditions and new opportunities for leisure for a new generation of skilled workers, men and women. This chapter examines the impact of the war and demobilisation on the construction of a modern technocracy in relation to the wider complexities of class identification in the ‘new Britain’ and it’s fashioning. The Labour Party reformulated ideals of productive work and leisure and historical notions rational consumption to create a new regime of postwar ‘improvement’ that rendered old systems of status recognition irrelevant. A generation of successful affluent workers, young 20-​somethings who had served in and survived the war, returned to work, married and settled down in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They were the first and youngest adult beneficiaries of the postwar settlement and the engine of major social change. However, their historical account is largely interpreted through the lives of their children, the post-​austerity baby boomers of the 1960s.The aim of the book is to use the fashioning of new social bodies in the period of postwar austerity as a springboard to thinking in

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new ways about this crucial interregnum in fashion and social history. In ‘Broad Vistas’, the opening chapter in David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, a vision of postwar Britain is contrasted with the realities of life in the years immediately following the end of the war.15 In a long introductory paragraph, Kynaston differentiates the two eras according to a long list of ‘haves’ –​corner shops, mangles, back-​to-​backs, Woodbines, Fynnon salts and so on –​and an equally long list of exemplary ‘have not yets’ –​supermarkets, motorways, teabags, frozen food, legalised abortions, washing machines etc. Towards the end of this list he finally reaches clothing, the war and immediate postwar ‘haves’ being: ‘Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no “teenagers.” Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being.’ For Kynaston the perceived benefits of life beyond austerity are plotted in a panorama of affluence realised through leisure and consumer goods and their antecedents in a Britain on the threshold of something else –​arguably better, as yet unavailable, but by mere association something younger, freer and lighter. The aim of this book is not to contest such a polarised vision nor is it to suggest some alternative golden age of postwar austerity. Rather, the following chapters examine how the promotion of affordable, accessible and available leisure and fashionable clothing was incorporated into a highly politicised socialist rhetoric of radical reform and social change. The fashioned body operates as a key conduit through which wider cultural anxieties and preoccupations are negotiated. Fashion change operates as a powerful vector through which to understand and chart the material expression of both conformity and contestation to normative values and beliefs. A popular and institutional culture of consensus, politically and materially, attempted to broker the ambiguous demands of continued austerity and aspirations for future affluence. Somewhere in between the fog of war and the mists of the mythical transformations of the 1950s is a complex set of government-​, industry-​and consumer-​ led interactions dressed in fashionable clothing and popular style trends that this book seeks to argue were as important as the preceding and succeeding iconic fashion historical ‘moments’ that until now have overshadowed them.

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1 AUSTERITY BY DESIGN: FASHIONING A NEW JERUSALEM

A GIRL AND A BIKE In June 1939, just prior to the outbreak of World War II, the popular illustrated magazine Picture Post features an attractive young female cyclist on its front cover. The young woman is carefully made up, her hair is fashionably waved and she wears shorts rolled up very short indeed with a matching collared shirt and tie (Fig. 1). The accompanying article, titled ‘A Day Awheel’, charts the activities of the Dulwich Paragon Cycling Club from South London, described as being made up of young men and women who, ‘like thousands of others all over Britain, leave behind the workaday streets … and make for the open country’.1 To illustrate the egalitarian nature of bicycling and the freedom to be found in a British countryside to be enjoyed by all, particular attention is paid to dress allied to new attitudes to leisure and fashionable consumption: Their costume is simple, light and inexpensive. Good stout shoes. Shorts are favoured by both men and women … Couples on tandems,

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Fig. 1  ‘A tired cyclist’, Picture Post, 10 June 1939, photo by Felix Man/​Getty Images®

young men in horn-​rimmed glasses and thick socks and sturdy young female cyclists are part of the 100,000 enthusiasts in Britain who take part in the national hobby of cycling … It is not that such people do not have cars, many do and use them for business, it is that they do not use them at the weekend but rather seek health, fresh air and good companionship.2

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A little over six months later, Picture Post returned to the theme, but the rhetoric was transformed through a new discourse of equally healthy and fashionable comradely consumerism to now highlight how the ‘pre-​war cult’ of cycling and its fashionable clothing might be used to advantage in wartime, especially by women. The recent raising of car tax and the introduction of petrol rationing meant thousands of people had been forced to garage their cars for the duration so that ‘soon the roads may be vivid with cycling lovelies wearing the most striking cycling kit ever seen’.3 Well-​designed, practical split skirts, slacks and shorts favoured by young cyclists before the war were already exerting a visible influence on the models shown in the latest London collections, to which the well-​cut chic of the West End added variety and sophistication. Of particular note were a ‘zipped “all-​slacks” suit of camel hair and wool with a hooded jacket’ suggesting ‘a hint of the St Moritz holiday-​maker … of the Finnish soldier’, and a more homespun practical suit in the ‘newest blue tweed’: a short Norfolk-​style belted jacket with knee-​length culottes co-​ordinated with honey-​coloured knitted stockings and jumper, finished off with a smart turban. Fashionable, functional, and appropriate for a variety of social contexts and locations, such clothing Picture Post suggests was ideal for wartime. It was not only country roads where bicycles and their fashionable young riders would now be seen: The other day a smart girl rode up to the Ritz for lunch, parked at the curb and walked straight in. Unconcerned? Yes, of course. Why not? She was as chic as anyone else, with her tailored dress of grey-​striped light-​weight wool. The divided skirt cut so that it fell in symmetry with the stripes, indistinguishable from an ordinary suit … If we must pedal our way through life until the war is over, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be smart.4 This chapter explores this evolving sartorial landscape of patriotic fashionable innovation through a series of complex interactions between statutory and self-​directed strategies of consumer constraint formulated and re-​formulated throughout the war. The aim is to examine the fashion historical dimensions of clothing controls as a critical springboard to interrogating the concept of war and postwar austerity ‘by design’

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(fashionable, cultural, political, and party political) as much as by material or legislative necessity. Geraldine Howell argues that ‘the story of wartime fashion is essentially the story of wartime controls’; her study carefully details the progressive introduction of clothes rationing, the Utility Clothing Scheme, and austerity restrictions and analyses the impact of a high-​end British fashion industry on the distinctive wartime fashion aesthetic that evolved in response.5 The critical impetus of this study is to take up the ‘story’ in 1944 where Howell and other revisionist wartime fashion histories effectively come to an end  –​but that of wartime controls, and indeed the war itself, did not. War in Europe ended in May 1945 and in the Far East a few months later in August but, as Christopher Sladen points out, clothing controls were part of a ‘utility patchwork’ of aesthetic, economic, material and ideological measures and piecemeal modifications in operation right up to 1951, the year before the orders governing them were finally annulled.6 The late-​war period and plans for demobilisation arguably heralded not a release from, but a new chapter in the history of wartime controls, in their differentially gendered form and function, and in their political and moral justification. This chapter offers a new perspective on wartime controls and a shifting fashion aesthetic. Links between pre-​war and wartime notions of modern citizenship embodied in fashion and style trends and popular leisure consumption formed the foundation of postwar socialist ambitions for the reconstruction. The introduction and nature of wartime clothing controls are outlined, not to provide another potted history of their mechanics but rather as a structuring device to lay out the critical ground for the chapters that follow. Austerity is problematised as a symbolic and material nexus of trade, designer, government and consumer responses and stimuli sustained by a discourse of patriotic citizenship that it was believed cut across previous boundaries of status recognition and signalled a new consensus on ‘fair shares’ when the war was over.

AUSTERITY BY (FASHIONABLE) DESIGN At the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, there were initially plentiful stocks of clothing and raw materials, and although food rationing was

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introduced almost immediately (drawing on lessons learnt in World War I), various wartime ministries avoided taking responsibility for intervening in the workings of other manufacturing industries. Both Conservative leader and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his successor Winston Churchill were averse to taking on a task seen as complicated and fraught with politico-​philosophical difficulties.7 However, the rocketing cost of living impelled the introduction of price controls (November 1939) and then, as demand for affordable clothing and footwear rapidly outstripped supply, of the levying of Purchase Tax on clothing (October 1940) followed in March 1941 by the announcement of the first Making of Civilian Clothing [Restriction] Orders, commonly known as ‘austerity regulations’. These regulations proscribed limits on the design and making up of garments, for example, restricting the number of seams, pleats and buttonholes women’s coats might have and eliminating all non-​essential decoration, embroidery, appliqué finishing and fur or leather trimmings.8 Two inches was also required to be removed from the bottom of men’s shirts and socks, ties and jackets shortened; trouser legs were narrowed and waist pleats, breast pockets and turn-​ups banned, along with double-​breasted jackets and double cuffs on shirts, and buttons were limited to three on jackets and waistcoats.9 Despite bureaucratic and philosophical misgivings, as the demands of war intensified so clothes rationing swiftly became a priority and legislation was rushed through in the summer of 1941. All adults, whatever their level of income, were allocated 66 coupons annually, issued at intervals throughout the year. Picture Post immediately responded with fashionable suggestions for ‘A Coupon Summer’: cotton trousers and dungarees ideal ‘for gardening, for cleaning, for washing clothes or bathing the baby’ or a new kind of ‘riding habit’ –​a stylish ensemble of white culottes, matching blouse and scarlet bolero (Fig. 2).10 However, it was soon realised that while rationing was egalitarian in theory, the already materially comfortably off could use coupons merely to supplement well-​stocked existing wardrobes. The Conservative MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, for example, noted that, barring being bombed out, he possessed enough clothes to last for years; he was lucky enough to own at least 40 suits and foresaw that

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Fig. 2  ‘The Riding Habit’, Picture Post, ‘Clothes for a Coupon Summer’, 5 July 1943, photo by Zoltan Glass/​Getty Images®

it was only maintaining a sufficient supply of socks that might prove difficult.11 To tip the balance in favour of those less well endowed and garner popular support for imminent further stringent restrictions as wartime production increased, in September 1941 the Utility Scheme controlling the manufacture of cloth and finished garments was introduced, coordinating coupon value with material yardage. The scheme was administered by the newly formed Civilian Clothing Directorate and was based on a number of complex acts and government orders that were regularly amended according to the changing conditions

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of militarism and fluctuations in the supply of raw materials, and in response to shifting consumer needs.12 The Board of Trade planned to work in partnership with manu­ facturers to ensure adequate provision and standardised quality of clothing and footwear for the lower end of the market and those in the most pressing need. Special releases of cloth were to be ‘made for the production of clothing of general utility’ to the Board’s precise specifications as to economy in materials and labour, in the durability and quality of cloth, and in costings. The application of the official mark CC41 (Civilian Clothing, 1941)  would ensure that standards of production had been met.13 A limited range of 40 utility cloths of various types (wool, woven rayon, cotton, lock-​knit) was initially produced and then, to improve and ensure consistent levels of quality and cater for differing needs and tastes, the scheme was progressively extended to include thousands of different and differently categorised types of fabric. Each of these was subject to Utility Specifications relating to weight of cloth, threads per warp and weft, the percentage of foreign matter that was included, the actual number of threads, the dye type and the maximum washing shrinkage per warp and weft.14 The Utility Scheme did not explicitly focus on issues of design but on simplifying production practices to reduce costs and conserve labour and materials. Speaking on the radio, Hugh Dalton referred to utility as supplying ‘standard’ clothing.15 This did little to endear the scheme to an already wary public. Key to the successful management of this raft of stringent measures controlling consumption patterns and choice was public compliancy and, by implication, the maintenance of consumer morale. In May 1942, therefore, Sir Cecil Weir of the Board of  Trade invited leading London designers –​Edward Molyneux, Charles Creed, Victor Steibel, Elspeth Champcommunal of Worth, Bianca Mosca, Hardy Amies, Peter Russell, Norman Hartnell and Digby Morton –​to join together to provide a cohesive image and design aesthetic to promote utility fashion at home and British couture and garment and textile manufacturing abroad. The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (IncSoc) was formed to build upon and further advance the growing reputation of London as an international centre of high quality fashion design and manufacture and increase the prestige of British couture overseas as a vital strand in the coalition’s wartime export drive.16

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On the home front, IncSoc defined its role as: [T]‌o identify with the National Effort and co-​operate in designing clothes which could easily be repeated in their millions: clothes which would stand up to the wear and tear of everyday life: clothes which, while retaining complete simplicity, would yet have that basic design of perfect proportion and line for which the haute couture has always been famed. In short, the best.17 IncSoc delegates met with Sir Thomas Barlow at the Board of Trade to discuss an ‘Outline for Utility Clothing’, with the aim of designing well with limited cloth, reducing the basic yardage per garment to 2.5 yards of 54-​inch wide fabric and using simple seams and darts to minimise manufacturing processes.18 Utility style templates were produced in accordance with austerity regulations for a range of women’s wear from heavy tweed topcoats to lighter suit ensembles, blouses and summer frocks.19 Editor of British Vogue Audrey Withers described the Board of Trade as, ‘a visionary and philanthropic band’ who had conceived a scheme that, however doubtful its name, would produce ‘good goods’. The IncSoc designs, Withers gushed, were

Fig. 3  ‘The first collection of utility dresses. Designed by Norman Hartnell. Modelled in Bond Street’, © Associated Newspapers/​REX Shutterstock

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evidence of great steps forward ‘to ensure the finest clothes in the best, most suitable styles at reasonable rates, and in the soundest materials available’ (Fig. 3).20

‘WARTIME CHIC’ As fashion historian Pat Kirkham points out, being ‘fashionable’ did not suddenly evaporate with the outbreak of the war. Even the briefest of glances through both popular fashion magazines and trade journals reveals a constant progression of styles and popular trends modified and motivated by shifting wartime restrictions and new attitudes to consumption.21 From the start, the requirements of the war effort and militarism strongly influenced notions of what Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor define as ‘wartime chic’.22 Military hats were immediately the ‘mode of the moment’.23 An advertisement for high street multiple C&A urged women to ‘ “Go To It” and be smart about it!’ in a ‘flattering, feminine and efficient’ business dress.24 The use of jingoistic military motifs and fashionable fads for siren suits and gas mask cases disguised as handbags were popular in the period of the ‘phoney war’. However, the mood and its fashionable embodiment swiftly changed as the effects of the war effort began to impinge on daily life and their potential longevity began to be realised; women sought to invest in more warm and practical well made garments in durable fabrics and styles that could do ‘double duty for a range of social events’.25 Militarism remained an important influence but overt ornamentation began to lose its lustre and with conscription became much more ambivalent, emphasising stoicism rather than belligerence. Vogue offered tips on how to ‘Groom to Guardsman Standard’: buttons rubbed over with beeswax, shoes cleaned to a shine, and clothes pressed with a cloth or brushed well before putting away.26 By 1943, clothes that gave ‘good service’ and ‘good value’, whether home or factory made, were desired. Hard working suits and separates suitable for the range of ‘duties’ that women now had to perform at work and domestically were symbolic of a more pragmatic, mechanistic attitude of quiet efficiency akin to the disciplined resolve of the old soldier, rather than the ‘gung-​ho’ glory hunting of the raw recruit that the rash of early wartime fashions

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epitomised. A Pathé News film titled ‘Shoulder Arms!’ featured the editor of Woman magazine, Anne Edwards, demonstrating how the ‘daily frock issue’ could be transformed with various decorative collars or the addition of a jacket or waistcoat to give the appearance of a different outfit for every day of the week.27 Shortages and progressive statutory controls stimulated creativity on the part of high-​end designers, the garment trade and consumers, and innovation flourished.28 Women’s adaptation of existing clothes and materials or the sewing and knitting of new ones took inspiration from fashionable fads and the latest wartime looks portrayed in American and British women’s magazines.29 Modern sports and leisure clothing ranges, smart, simply-​cut utility suits, dresses and skirts in durable wools and tweeds, and simple multi-​purpose rayon frocks that were all key features of high-​end and mainstream fashion trends before the war were swiftly endowed with new concepts of ‘fitness for purpose’.

‘THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE BICYCLE’ Couched in the gendered language of nationalism and fashionable desire, the virtues of ‘simple’ and durable utility dresses and wool costumes and practical bifurcated garments embodied an idealised patriotic feminine duty of making the best of oneself through strategies of self-​ presentation whatever the demands of the war effort.30 Women’s ‘slacks’ became an indispensable part of the everyday wardrobe and were often made of corduroy velveteen –​a traditional fabric in outdoor and country leisure clothing –​and worn with more masculine double-​breasted jackets. Phyl (Phyllis) Gray (née Macdonald), a teenager in the war, photographed in her back garden in South London wearing corduroy knickerbockers (Fig. 4), recalled how all kinds of trousers were appropriated to achieve a fashionable look: Oh Crikey! Corduroys they were my favourite. I think they were a fawny colour … They were sort of later on. What do you call those people … the Wardens; they had sort of felt-​type navy blue trousers. Well that was my first pair. I thought that was “it” –​they looked terrible I expect, but I liked them. That and shorts, that was all I wore …31

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Fig. 4  ‘Oh Crikey! Corduroys …’, a teenage Phyl Grey (née Macdonald) in corduroy knickerbockers c.1943, image courtesy of Phyl Grey

A pre-​war women’s recreational leisure wardrobe was easily adapted to the heightened patriotic atmosphere of   World War II and a highly romanticised idea of an unchanging British countryside that dominated popular culture and the popular imagination. British stoicism was imaged and imagined in terms of a contemporary fashionability juxtaposed with an oft-​repeated backdrop of ancient geographical features, nostalgic images of chocolate box village life and a ‘timeless’ pre-​industrial rurality as the symbol of historical continuity and spiritual renewal.32 Cecil Beaton’s photographs for Vogue and a range of wartime media promulgated a ‘natural’ British beauty, frequently posing models against rural flora and fauna or bombed out buildings to suggest an ‘organic’ relationship between the British landscape and its fashionable womenfolk. In 1942 the Spring/​Summer display of the British Colour Council was patriotically entitled ‘Colours of the English Countryside’ and

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featured fibro utility fabrics in a ‘bluish-​green caravan green’, shoes in ‘harness tan’ and gloves in ‘mellow gold’. Patriotism even extended to dress fabrics and one firm produced a ‘Country Life’ print of ‘happy little evacuees among cottages and animals’.33 Vogue in August 1942, in a special issue aimed at the younger generation, advocated ‘The Look-​ Alive Look’. A young woman with little in the way of make-​up, her short blonde hair blowing in the wind, is pictured on the summit of a hill astride a bicycle in stylish tailored shorts and a crisp white open-​necked shirt. Women’s wartime service, the article suggests, had established new standards of beauty that could not just be bought over the counter. A good night’s sleep, diet, physical exercise and healthy recreation were all vital to ‘looking glowingly healthy’. Readers were advised ‘… to look as if you cared about your looks, yes, but cared more about being able to do a full day’s work –​whether it be in a factory, on the land, coping with a day nursery, or just managing your home single-​handed as so many of us do today’.34 The autumn utility collections in October 1942 (with photographs by Norman Parkinson) provided a veritable ‘harvest’ of fashionable designs: a ‘sports utility suit’ in ‘tough white shadow herringbone tweed’ for checking the milk churns ready for delivery; simple woollen dresses from Susan Small, Dorville and Berketex ideal for fruit picking or collecting eggs; and a raspberry red wool model from Dereta to stylishly stride through the corn stubble.35 By 1944, the ‘apotheosis of the bicycle’ was a uniquely British natural femininity at one with a wartime landscape evoking a quintessential sense of Britishness. Photographed for Vogue by Cecil Beaton, the models are posed against ‘the great barn door’ or paused ‘by the wayside against the rough gold cornstack’ wearing simple dirndl skirts and buttoned blouses with cap sleeves, or side-​ fastening divided skirts that were ‘all practicality and comfort’.36 Women’s wearing of all kinds of practical bifurcated garments linked to wartime service in factories, in the armed and civilian services, as well as in the home, was not just sanctioned but celebrated in the context of ‘doing one’s bit’.37 Vital approbation was achieved through a visual and textual rhetoric that constantly iterated women’s dual roles as housewives and mothers and as war workers and servicewomen, and with which the image of a woman in trousers astride a bicycle became synonymous. Images of women in overalls and breeches driving tractors,

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wielding pickaxes, operating heavy machinery, mending trucks or manning gun posts, digging for victory and riding bicycles were frequently employed to display women’s changing social roles –​while still preserving the traditional status quo. The determination to sustain fashionable agency was extolled as the embodiment of a distinctive British female beauty achieved through internal rather than external systems of control and constraint. Physically, women needed ‘to limber up for the big push’, Vogue exhorted its readers: … only by keeping your body firm and supple can you hope to do your fair share, to be an asset rather than a liability when you help with the harvest, lift stretches for your mobile unit, stand at a factory bench.38 Neither statutory checks on clothing design, manufacture and consumption nor voluntary compliance with their restrictions were ever just simple or straightforward responses to wartime scarcity. Material shortages and state controls necessitated utility’s closely tailored lines and the use and re-​use of warm, practical clothing appropriate to the physical demands of service on the Home Front and in the forces. At an ideological level, the concept of ‘classic’ designs, simple lines and practical sports and leisurewear became fabricated embodiments of a mythical ‘unchanged’ British countryside and its dislocation. The trifold system of clothing controls –​rationing, utility, and austerity –​was a political project whose successful implementation was always commensurate to a constant ideological re-​alignment in government propaganda, and in shifting consumer understandings of what was ‘fair’ and what was fashionable. Wartime chic required the idealisation of an ambivalent performative landscape that blurred the lines between different understandings of a woman’s duty and the classed and gendered assumptions that defined them before and after war broke out.

TRANSFORMATION AND REDEMPTION The writer and broadcaster J. B. Priestley described Britain’s use of ‘woman power’ as one of the unique features of the nation’s war record in his

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propagandist British Women Go to War (1944).39 No country engaged in World War II, Priestley contended, had mobilised its women more thoroughly and efficiently. Illustrated with luridly coloured plates, Priestley’s book charts women’s incorporation into every possible arm of wartime service in transformational terms. A housemaid from a small country town in Somerset was now stationed on a gun battery near London,40 an 18-​year-​old straight out of school had immediately joined the WRNS to ‘work under the same conditions as men doing the same job’,41 a promising student at the Slade School of Art and a talented flautist ‘rapidly approaching a professional orchestral standard’ now careered up and down steep and slippery hills at all hours of the day and night as a WRNS dispatch rider.42 This transformation wrought positive physical and psychological changes: the ‘trim-​looking girl in Army khaki … used to have an awkward look as if her tunic and her skirt were not meant for her’.43 While typical of Priestley’s well-​intentioned but cloying socialist paternalism, the concept of war work and military service as offering women a form of redemption from the excesses and superficialities of their pre-​war lives was a vital element of political propaganda. The essential impulse of feminine fashion agency and the superficialities of fashion itself became a dominant narrative trope emphasising the significance of the ‘real’ woman underneath the material exigencies of wartime service. Representations of differently classed strategies of self-​ presentation were exploited as a means of addressing potential conflict through the portrayal of different life experiences, skills and knowledge –​working-​class nous, middle-​class reserve, upper-​class blissful ignorance –​wrought by enforced commonality of wartime service. In neo-​ realist docu-​drama Millions Like Us44 made to boost home front morale and address the huge drop-​out rate of women from factory work, the heroine Celia (Patricia Roc), who lives at home and looks after her widowed father, is called to the labour exchange to be interviewed and assessed for her suitability for war work. Sitting in front of a capable older woman in a severe suit, Celia’s dreams of mobilisation are materialised in the propaganda poster pinned on the wall inviting women to ‘Serve in the WAAF’. Gazing off into space, Celia is transformed through the power of uniform from mousy, dutiful daughter to dashing servicewoman as she ‘tries on’ different identities: a WAAF helping a pilot into a cockpit, an ATS driver, or a Land Army girl coyly fingering her engagement ring

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as the local squire rides by on horseback. Celia is brought down to earth by the dispassionate gaze of the assessor and persuaded to take a factory job where, as the film unfolds, her real transformation takes place. Celia operates her machine alongside respectable working-​class Gwen (Megs Jenkins), upper-​class Jennifer (Anne Crawford) and morally suspect Annie (Terry Randall); all are dressed in overalls, all have their hair tied up in the obligatory ‘glamour band’ (a scarf tied turban-​style and knotted at the front) to reinforce the message that a release from pre-​war social constraints could be realised in new ideals of fashionable femininity open to all. The khaki tunic and high-​crowned peaked cap of the ATS in particular became representative of an idealised ‘everywoman’ from every walk of life (including the young Princess Elizabeth): ‘housewives, many with husbands in the Forces, shop assistants, secretaries, mannequins, beauty specialists, university women, women with business careers, women whose interests had centred wholly on home life’.45 The greater the difference in jobs and lifestyles before the war, the greater the transformative potential of wartime service to alter women’s physical appearance and mental outlook. Military discipline Priestley suggested was especially beneficial to the average working-​class girl: The simple drill and physical exercises, the sensible and adequate food, the tough of discipline, the new healthy habit she acquires, all play their part in her health and appearance … Lectures are as frequent as film and other shows, and the girls have a chance to improve their minds, which a narrow environment in civil life has often left rusting and almost unused. Most of these girls are better mentally and physically than they were before they joined up.46 Land Army recruits were mostly ‘town-​ bred girls coming from offices, shops, warehouses, theatres … a healthy and happy bunch of girls … maidens with permanent waves and varnished fingernails’.47 In the film Tawny Pipit,48 a land girl wearing jodhpurs and a ‘wideawake’ hat driving an ancient form of solid-​ wheeled farm wagon, is asked how she copes with the heavy physical work. She replies in a clipped upper-​class accent: ‘You should have seen me five years’ ago at the Coconut Grove’; she and her fellow recruit Maisie, a

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former hairdresser, ‘[h]‌ave never felt fitter in our lives …Wonderful, so fresh’. British wartime cinema, government posters, commercial advertising, the popular press and women’s magazines, all worked hard to dramatise an unchanging coherent femininity but also, according to the dictats of moral and aesthetic wartime ‘realism’, the concurrent disintegration of pre-​war value systems.49 The universality of feminine desire for fashionable clothing, hairstyles and cosmetics was embodied in a coded bricolage of shifting wartime trends in fashionable clothes, hairstyles and make up to offer a reassuringly traditional feminine ideal. Individual tastes, physiognomies, and past lives and experiences were united by a highly politicised discourse of fashionable patriotism that functioned simultaneously to reinforce a hierarchical status quo and make clear differences between and within different social groupings.

AUSTERITY BY POLITICAL DESIGN The politics of consumption have always combined both abstract theories and practical everyday issues that constantly give rise to new political considerations, so it is only to be expected that it acts ‘as the fulcrum around which citizenship is defined and as the site through which political action takes place’.50 Tempered in the social deprivation and injustices of the 1930s and allied with an emerging British modernist aesthetic, a new moral dialectic of citizenship and anti-​citizenship had evolved that converged in the politics of the 1940s. The growing possibilities of fashionable austerity by design, and continued consumer compliance motivated by moral rather than solely material justification, lent weight to pre-​war socio-​political theories of planned economic management. Political thinkers and politicians of all shades in the 1930s and 1940s saw in the politicising of consumption the potential for a more social-​democratic form of citizenship, but also one that satisfied their moral, protestant-​inspired dilemmas around abundance and over indulgence.51 Economic depression had fuelled longstanding historical opposition to the corrupting influences of luxury and feckless leisure on both sides of the Atlantic; Marxist and right-​wing Puritan perspectives equally emphasised the relationship between morality and affluence and

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chastised excessive consumption as a barrier to ‘authentic’ selfhood. The concept of ‘chastened consumption’ and attacks on materialism were marshalled to defend democracy and humanist values against the onslaught of fascism.52 As feminist film historian Antonia Lant argues in her study of wartime cinema, ‘Rationing politicised glamour’.53 At the outbreak of war, socialising in flimsy evening frocks and frivolous hats was immediately seen as unethical when others were donning uniforms.54 The explicit spectacle of luxury was increasingly incompatible with the contemporary mood of patriotic endeavour.55 Vogue observed that the glamorous lifestyles that fashionable society once enjoyed seemed now hollow and trivial amidst the stern realities of war.56 Fashion writer Anne Scott James announced in Picture Post the ‘Death of a Dinner Gown’ in ritualistic terms –​‘alterations were the new fashion’: a fishtail evening dress could be resurrected as a short black cocktail frock, while a glamorous black velvet cloak assumed a new morality by being remodelled as a ‘simple suit’.57 Even if women did ‘shake the moth out of their pre-​ war formal gowns and go to a party all dressed up’ they would likely ‘be the only one in such an outfit and feel foolish’.58 In an article for a popular women’s magazine, Alice Hooper Beck observed: Fashion as we understood it before the war, is no longer the yardstick of good taste in dress. Slowly the essence of our attitude towards clothes has changed. Now, at the end of our third year of war, a bandbox reputation is not only unimportant, but undesirable. Let us wear our not-​so-​new clothes with the comfortable knowledge that we are in fashion after all. It’s the shiny people who are three years out of date.59 When the Queen famously said she could look the East End in the face after a bomb fell on Buckingham Palace, she did so in one of a limited repertoire of simple, plain coloured outfits she was noted for repeatedly wearing, and which the popular press frequently cited as yet further evidence of personal sacrifice and solidarity with her people. With photographs by Cecil Beaton, Vogue described the Queen’s ‘perfect sense of fitness’; she had ‘cut out all the panoply of State splendour and personal luxury, while retaining and fostering the finest manifestations of culture,

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beauty, and tradition.’60 High visibility fashionable morality operated as a check on conspicuous consumerism as powerful as other forms of physical control. One might possess a wardrobe of pre-​war opulence and luxury but it was spectacularly unethical and unfashionable for one to flaunt it. The ‘myth’ of a wartime fashion democracy has come under some scrutiny in contemporary fashion historiography. As Peter McNeil points out, the same amount of coupons could be used for a plain utility coat or one trimmed with mink; in fact, he argues, class divisions remained ‘ever visible in both service and civilian dress in this period’.61 For example, the long-​standing requirement for officers in the armed services to supply their own uniform allowed a level of fit and bespoke tailoring denied their subordinates; and while Vogue sought to patriotically reflect the spirit of the times, it did so with descriptions of air-​raid shelters at the Ritz and Dorchester Hotels and illustrations of models lounging on comfortable sofas in the latest Molyneux and Piquet satin or wool pyjamas.62 In September 1940, 40 communist protestors marched to the Savoy to demonstrate for better air-​raid shelters for the people of the East End. The police were called and the situation diffused by the conciliatory words of the hotel’s manager, who contended that there was no reason why these people should not have the same access to safe shelter as the Savoy’s guests.63 It is not entirely clear whether the manager actually meant opening up the Savoy’s facilities to all and sundry, but the protestors were shown round a huge area sectioned off into a dance hall at one end and sleeping quarters at the other divided into separate areas for men, single women and married couples. Sandbags were painted in the colours of the Union flag, mattresses and camp beds had matching sheets and pillows in pink, green and blue and in a curtained recess lay the Duke and Duchess of Kent. Having viewed how the other half lived, it seems the protestors’ demands for safety were met when a week later London Transport cut off electricity at Aldwych (the nearest station to Savoy), boarded over the tracks and installed chemical toilets. The ambiguous ‘camouflage’ offered by pre-​war leisure and wartime service provided a tried and tested recipe for the creation of new kinds of wartime identities self-​consciously fashioned in ways that subverted, challenged and conformed to shifting normative values. Fashion

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historiographical accounts of both world wars tend to focus critique on the gender dimensions of radical change embodied in women’s wearing of trousers. However, such a perspective frequently obscures the closely interlinked complexities of class and systems of social status that were an equally significant factor in the shifting propagandist discourse of wartime feminine patriotism and its reformulation as a symbol for postwar democratic change. Wartime austerity designs, both utility and non-​utility, were produced at every level of the market from couture to home and re-​made creations, and all kinds of practical bifurcated garments previously worn for sport and leisure or as industrial work wear offered an expedient wardrobe of wartime patriotism that side-​stepped rather than confronted highly contentious debates around the fashioning of appropriate feminine identities and the inequities of the British class system. High-​end designers (and their customers), Vogue reported, were ‘passionately anxious’ to contribute to the war effort; they were happy that the government recognised their importance in keeping British merchandise before the American buyers and had invited them to turn their attention to the home front and embrace ‘a wider, more democratic field than has ever been covered before’.64 Fashion was a transitory thing but elegance and taste were abiding. Utility designs, according to Vogue’s ‘intelligence’, were part of an experiment that owed nothing to elaboration, costly fabric or exotic designs: Now, the woman in the street, the next strap-​hanger on the ‘bus, the parcel-​carrier and the pram-​pusher, the government clerk and the busy housewife will all have an equal chance to buy beautifully designed clothes, suitable to their lives and incomes. It’s a revolutionary scheme and a heartening thought. It is, in fact, an outstanding example of applied democracy.’65 To illustrate the argument Vogue posed three models beside a bicycle, its saddlebag and basket stuffed with small brown paper parcels to demonstrate the virtues of ‘a nut-​brown top coat, severely tailored … a young-​ looking check suit with cut-​away jacket and gored skirt’, and a warm wool coat half-​belted behind in a ‘resounding red’. Of course, Vogue continued, the models presented were not labelled as couturier designs,

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but the effect was just as powerful. Captain Molyneux, Chairman of IncSoc’s Design Committee, waxed eloquent upon the democratic principle ‘in practice’. However, when pressed, the Captain merely shrugged and seemed noncommittal as to its immediate effects; he hinted that he agreed with Vogue that the best in good taste when widely and cheaply circulated would prevail.66 The ‘ready made’ discourse of ‘a girl and a bike’ signalled democratic social change and popular consumerism; at the turn of a wheel the demands of wartime, ideologically and stylistically, strengthened historical concepts of ‘fitness for purpose’ to sustain a belief in the fashionably moral dimensions of austerity by design rather than necessity. Howell contends that fashion in World War II became more democratic ‘by default’; shortages, rationing and clothing regulations and the conditions of war on the home front created new dress priorities and a distinctive aesthetic associated with thrift, shared sacrifice and patriotic endeavour. The purpose of clothing controls, Howell argues, was not to erode class differences but to ensure consistent supplies and quality of affordable clothing for civilian consumers while maintaining a vital export trade and servicing the demands of military production. Sartorial democracy was neither complete nor lasting, but rather ‘revealed a constant desire to neutralise an inappropriate level of social privilege on the one hand and relieve real distress and hardship on the other’.67 The desire for a distinctive quality and style that only money could buy never disappeared and Vogue, correctly, reaffirmed its faith in the ability of fashion to respond to the needs of consumers, and assured its readers that despite changed circumstances, ‘nothing could affect their inherent sense of style’.68 The Board of Trade guaranteed anonymity for the utility designs produced by couturiers.69 In contrast, IncSoc collections of up to 80 garments for export, made up of a selection from each designer, were shown at prestigious venues usually opened by a member of the Royal Family or other celebrity.70 The large percentage of outfits created by IncSoc designers were not utility and as the war progressed and non-​ utility cloth became scarcer, the price of finished ‘non-​U’ garments rose even higher, making material, economic and social and fashionable differentials between consumers even more visible.71 Ironically, one of the few benefits the Utility Scheme offered to the wartime menswear trade

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was its support of higher end tailoring, seen as vital to maintaining a wartime export trade and to ensuring readiness for the acknowledged economic difficulties that would face Britain after the war. While it would have been a good idea to assign coupons according to value to check inflation, it would have been impossible to ration low-​income groups on this basis without putting the top sectors of the clothing trade out of business.72 In her reconsideration of the wider Utility Scheme, Judy Attfield suggests that the democratising vision of ‘fair shares’ and of state and design institutional intervention in mainstream production created a set of conditions ideally suited to the principles of ‘Good Design’, i.e. the elevation of ethical principles in production and practice as the outcome of a reforming utopian vision. The exigencies of the war reinforced historical concepts of ‘fitness’ achieved through a timeless anti-​consumerist aesthetic that were then applied to the demands of reconstruction.73 From their inception, statutory controls were seen to incorporate an educative mission understood as an important opportunity to foster good citizenship, particularly among the poor and lower classes –​who, it was felt, lacked good taste, made poor judgements and, with only very limited if any experience of budgeting, possessed an often ‘feckless’ attitude to spending. The criteria of categories of goods to be rationed was inflected with ministerial moral judgements as to what constituted essential ‘needs’ rather than more superficial ‘wants’.74 Panels of upper-​class, often titled, women with little or no experience of doing without or making do were drafted in to assist various ministries in setting up rationing schemes and other propagandist missions aimed at improving women’s home crafts and domestic skills.75 Annual allowances of coupons were issued in instalments to encourage ‘planned’ expenditure; once the coupons were spent no more would be issued, barring emergency. Women were directed towards tailored designs in plain colours that would not date and could be worn in various ways and for various occasions, and were advised to allow plenty of room for movement. The development of home dressmaking and other domestic craft skills promoted through the ‘Make Do and Mend’ scheme and classes run by the Women’s Institute meant that consumers were having to constantly make calculations as to what was the best buy and how to make rations go further.76

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Designs produced under the Utility Clothing Scheme were equally influenced by the aesthetic judgements of predominantly middle-​and upper-​ middle-​ class ministers, committee members, and the design establishment as to what constituted ‘good taste’. Hardy Amies recalled fellow IncSoc member Molyneux telling him before the war that ‘plainness is all’; when the two designers heard news of the introduction of utility regulations they joked: ‘We have been making Utility clothes for years’.77 The Board of  Trade’s commission for the design of utility templates that conformed to austerity restrictions was, however, for a basic seasonal wardrobe that had to be desirable, ‘but not so new that they over-​stimulated demand’.78 As McNeil observes, appointed representatives with titles such as the Director of Civilian Hosiery did not so much dictate how garments should appear but how they might not, particularly with regard to ornamentation.79 No restrictions were directly placed on colour and pattern-​ways of utility cloth, but the Director General of Civilian Clothing, Sir Thomas Barlow, hoped that utility would correct the ‘unreasonable use of colour’ prevalent in mainstream women’s fashion ‘in normal times’.80

AUSTERITY BY (PARTY POLITICAL) DESIGN: ‘THE FREEDOM OF THE WEST END’ It is easy to see how in the collective memory the idea of clothing controls –​rationing, the Utility Scheme, and austerity regulations –​merge together into a more general concept of wartime shortages. But it is important to understand how state intervention in fashionable consumption, design and production was a tripartite system in which each differently functioning element was part of a complex juggling act by which the government balanced the demands of military production and Britain’s vital export trade, and the needs, if not necessarily the desires, of home front consumers. The successful management of clothing controls was a dynamic political project always commensurate with a constant ideological re-​alignment in government propaganda, and in shifting consumer understandings of what was ‘fair’ and what was fashionable. The coalition government and its ministries swiftly become aware that despite their stringency and the huge bureaucracy

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involved, controls boosted morale. Consumer choice was limited but supplies were guaranteed and there was a belief that state intervention at least curtailed the actions of those wealthy enough to evade hardship and those who might attempt to fraudulently profit from others’ distress.81 Almost universal consumer consent for what Peter Hennessy defines as ‘institutionalised privation’ motivated and sustained a culture of ‘conspicuous fairness’. There was, he argues, a gradual shift of opinion towards the use and re-​use value of consumer goods, embodied in a spectacle of fashionable patriotism sustained by a belief in the shared experiences of wartime sacrifice and the desire for a better fairer Britain when peace came.82 The influx of prominent Labour politicians at ministerial level in Chur­chill’s new coalition government and their high profile roles bolstered their growing personal reputation as ‘men of action’ and the party’s wider popularity as a symbol of change. Labour ministers were seen to have pushed through plans firstly for clothes rationing (only going through, according to Oliver Lyttelton, President of the Board of Trade, because it was slipped past Churchill when he was otherwise occupied with hunting down the Bismarck);83 and progressively for greater state intervention in the manufacture of cloth and clothing at every stage of production from raw materials to final garment.84 When Hugh Dalton took over from Lyttelton at the Board of Trade in February 1942, he immediately poured his energies into the Utility Scheme and was dubbed ‘Dr Dynamo’.85 Some within the Labour Party felt that state controls and prescriptive restrictions on consumerism smacked of middle-​class do-​gooding and a culture of philosophical compromise that colluded with the mechanisms of capitalism. However, the success of controls in terms of public opinion was indisputable and it was widely believed that this time the war had generated a new sense of social equality. Herbert Morrison, for example, was convinced that there was ‘an altered moral sense of the community’ and that people would never again ‘be content with limited and material aims’.86 Within a day of the Beveridge Report being published in December 1942, Mass Observation sent investigators out onto the streets in various parts of the country to gauge opinion. There was a minority who were deeply suspicious or antagonistic, but the majority of people were found to be very enthusiastic. While opinion

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was divided, the observers commented on the number and extent of arguments the topic had stimulated and concluded that the public were clearly aware of what was at stake in achieving greater equality when peace came.87 HMSO printed 70,000 copies of the report, which went on sale in December 1942 and were sold out by lunchtime.88 Labour ministers’ political orchestration of the democracy of shared sacrifice was viewed as having made clear socialism’s intent to reduce the huge class-​based and regional differentials that had characterised the economic depression and social conflict of the interwar years. Clement Attlee typified the views of many other socialists of his generation in seeking to bridge the gap between socialist principles and the free market by arguing that reform within capitalism could provide the foundations of a new kind of British society.89 The idea of ‘fair shares for all’ that was to constitute a mantra of socialist postwar reconstruction had its foundation in this lodestone of collective wartime endeavour. As importantly, continued almost universal voluntary compliance with controls was understood as indicative of the electorate’s support for Labour’s radical mandate for change. Writing in the Daily Mail in January 1943, Morrison warned that the public should not expect the ‘Promised Land’ to be handed to them on a silver plate: without cooperative effort and the shunning of individual selfish profit, plans and reforms for a better society would fail. He exhorted the readership: ‘The one fatal thing would be to relax, to go back to superficial pleasantries, to think the battle was to give us the freedom of the West End.’90 The war had cast fashion in a new light; it was essential to maintaining morale on the home front, certainly, but in ways that disrupted an historical alignment with a lack of self-​control and an inherent superficiality. Massive social and technological change set against the rise of fascism had, by the outbreak of the war, become a well-​rehearsed discourse of active democratic citizenship. The benefits of physical exercise and ‘natural’ feminine beauty functioned as uniquely British assets that could be redeployed in the fight against Nazi aggression. Since the nineteenth century the ideological power of self-​ improvement through the reform of popular leisure and consumption had always ensured its being located in a highly politicised class context; over the course of   World War II it became a much more explicitly party-​ political ideological force.

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The next chapter examines the political dimensions of controls as a three-​pronged political tool that could be manipulated to mobilise the war effort and contour the postwar settlement through a new discourse of national unity and the styling of new kinds of citizens and consumers. It questions to what extent the success of the wartime women’s utility scheme formed the material and ideological blueprint for austerity by design and the moral compass by which the Labour Party sought to reorient fashion and fashionable desire. In 1944, austerity was in a state of transition: the war effort and clothing controls had mobilised new strategies of patriotic fashionable consumerism and defined the parameters of a distinctive fashion aesthetic, but the increasing pressures of war weariness and of impending military demobilisation would redefine the parameters of both.

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2 AUSTERITY IN TRANSITION: DEMOBILISATION/​ REMOBILISATION WHERE ARE WE GOING? Joan: The people round here must be very poor Torquil: Not poor. Just haven’t got money. Joan: Isn’t that the same thing? Torquil: Not at all, they’re quite different When we first see Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) in the opening scenes of the late-​war British film I Know Where I’m Going1 she is dressed in a fashionable, close tailored, cylindrical grey costume accessorised with a perky ocelot forage cap and matching clutch bag (Fig. 5). Meeting a quiet, older man ill at ease in a noisy fashionable night club, Joan exudes an almost aggressive self-​assurance, ordering her own drink –​‘Just the usual please’ –​and unabashedly asking her guest for her money. In fact, the man is her bank manager father whom Joan is meeting to tell of her engagement to Sir Robert Bellinger, a man old enough to be her father, and owner of Consolidated Chemical Industries where she works. Joan is characterised as a young woman driven by hard-​headed ruthless ambition, both in her pragmatic rather than romantic attitude to her

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Fig. 5  Roger Livesey, Pamela Brown, Wendy Hiller, I Know Where I’m Going (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945), © Everett Collection/​REX Shutterstock

forthcoming union and in her choice of highly fashionable but sheath-​ like suit and predatory animal-​skin accessories. However, her affected checking of her appearance in a powder compact mirror elicits a stern rebuke from her father: ‘Stop acting … You haven’t married Robert Bellinger yet.’ This clash between the false and the ‘real’ Joan establishes the narrative drive of the film. Joan’s alternate prudence and profligacy –​asking her father for a receipt for her £47 10s 9d and then showing off her huge Cartier diamond engagement ring –​is constantly intermeshed in a cinematic dialogue of appropriate and inappropriate feminine desires. Setting off on her journey to the remote Scottish island of Killoran where her wedding is to be held, Joan boards a packed train, but to her father’s amazement is shown to the private sleeper her fiancé has pulled strings to acquire. Sighing ‘the war’s a million miles away’ as the train pulls away and having carefully hung up her silk wedding dress, Joan retires

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to dream of her future as Lady Bellinger in consumerist terms: flitting from one fashionable shop to another, lulled to sleep as a sycophantic assistant chants ‘charge it, charge it, charge it’ in time to the relentless rhythm of the train. When the train crosses the border into Scotland, even the very landscape is dressed in plaid cloth buttoned down to fit the rolling hills of the passing countryside to Joan’s acquisitive purpose. Thwarted in various attempts to get across to Killoran by relentless bad weather, Joan’s consumerist and romantic desires are, however, put on hold by the forces of nature. She has to wait out a storm with fellow traveller Captain Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), home on leave from the Royal Navy. Joan and Torquil’s star-​crossed romance is charted and visually organised through Joan’s changing fashion choices linked to conflicting understandings of material comfort. Despite the captain’s advice, Joan determinedly waits on the windswept jetty for a boat that is never going to sail, in what now seems a ridiculous outfit totally unsuited to her surroundings. Torquil, in contrast buttoned up in his RN gabardine, heads off to take refuge in the home of his childhood sweetheart Catriona Potts, née MacLaine, and reappears ‘at ease’ in a comfortable old tweed jacket and practical (but very short) kilt. Clearly differentiated fashionable or functional clothing and textiles reinforce the film’s diegetic construction of ‘authenticity’. The arrival of Catriona is heralded by swirling mists –​a familiar Powell and Pressburger motif symbolic of some or other ‘timeless’ quality. Shot in shadowy profile, her hair loose and her kilt swinging, Catriona strides along with two hunting hounds eerily silhouetted against the wild Highland landscape. Joan’s efficient rather than extravagantly showy town clothes immediately mark her out as out of place in contrast to the be-​tweeded natives like Torquil and Catriona, portrayed as at one with the land and its history, stretching back to antiquity. The narrative trajectory of the film is to trace the peeling back of Joan’s fashionable superficial femininity layer by layer as the Scottish weather and the Highlands, its history, and its people all work to throw her misguided ambitions and various elements in her trousseau to the wind. When Joan meets Torquil out on a walk to visit the ruined castle that has apparently cursed the McNeils for centuries, Joan clings to

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her smart ocelot clutch bag and valiantly defends the lifestyle choices of her soon-​to-​be husband Sir Robert: swimming pools over lochs, shop-​bought salmon over fresh caught, and by implication money over love. It is nevertheless noticeable that the bag’s pert matching cap has already been replaced by a warm, practical woollen snood to hint at the more down to earth personality that exists beneath Joan’s veneer of urbanity. Torquil, stirred by such ambiguity, also reveals his true credentials as the ‘real’ Laird of Killoran modestly concealed beneath the status neutrality accorded by both his naval uniform and tweed and tartan mufti. Inherent rather than superficial good taste is shown to unite the apparently mismatched couple and serves to tacitly educate Joan and the audience as to the difference between the two, accessory by accessory. Chapter 1 evidenced how, over the course of the war, the rationalisation of fashion–​its design and manufacture and as vitally, the mechanisms of fashionable desire–​was re-​evaluated by the Labour Party as a political tool in securing continued consumer compliance with clothing controls and staking out the ideological landscape of postwar austerity. The war, it was believed, had shaken up and unsettled old hierarchies of status recognition and the traditional value judgements on which they were based. The Labour Party sought to reconstruct a wartime fashion democracy ‘by design’ by making clear the new kind of fashionable meritocracy that would replace it. The appropriate fashioning of soldiers, workers, citizens and consumers like Joan and Torquil was not just an important political issue, but also a party political one. This chapter explores how differently gendered strategies of military and civilian demobilisation effectively sartorially plotted the ideological coordinates of peacetime citizenship. In 1945, the full and fashionable outfitting of ‘everyman’ for civilian life was allied in the British public’s psyche with the failures of the post-​ World War I settlement and expectations of what peace would bring. Demobilisation was a potent symbol of change embodied in Labour’s pledge of ‘Never again’ and the idea of reconstruction and the building of a better Britain. Unlike other commitments to long-​term strategic goals, the planning and operation of demobilisation could not be postponed indefinitely. Growing social unrest and continued allied military success

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demanded progress be made and be seen to be made.2 Military advance following D-​Day and the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944 fuelled not just a belief that the war was almost over. With news of the first Paris fashions seen since the outbreak of war reaching the British public, consumer expectations of a speedy ‘release’ from wartime conditions and a return to ‘normal life’ were realised in the popular imagination in a return to the luxury of fashionable choice and styles free of government restrictions. The tensions between fashionable desire and duty relentlessly rehearsed over the previous six years fought to keep pace with such understandable but essentially unrealistic expectations. Military and consumer demobilisation presented huge logistical problems and a politically volatile juggling act that required the rebalancing of materials and personnel. The ‘cost’ of release from wartime duty was the same as its conscription: personal sacrifice had to be paid for by the yard. How this was to be achieved is what this chapter seeks to unravel.

RENUNCIATION AND RECONCILIATION Wartime clothing controls were experienced differently relative to existing economic status but they were nevertheless equitably applied and enforced regardless of gender, class, or pocket. Rations were equally apportioned, all types of cloth and finished garments were equally subject to strict specifications and production quotas, all civilians had the same opportunity to access utility and non-​utility garments priced according to maximums set by the Central Price Committee. However, when fashion and dress historians describe the effects of controls on and their embodiment in distinctive wartime designs, what they are effectively referring to is women’s fashion. It is rarely acknowledged that the mechanics of state intervention and quantifiable savings on raw materials, labour, and production costs is effectively where comparisons between men’s and women’s utility clothing end. There was no high profile promotion of ‘Good Design’ or couture influences. The made-​to-​measure and bespoke tailoring trades felt their opinions as to the workability of the scheme were largely ignored by the Board of   Trade, and it swiftly became apparent

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that assurances of standards of quality fell far short of expectations. Men’s utility suits conforming to Austerity Regulations were inferior with regard to the choice and quality of cloth used and the cut and design of finished garments. With most men serving in the armed forces or wartime civilian services, the impact was relatively limited. The acquisition of poor quality, ill-​fitting utility suits was effectively confined to ‘bombees’ (civilians whose homes or belongings had been destroyed in the Blitz) and medically discharged service personnel –​both groups assumed to be grateful just to be alive to wear anything. A  Ministry of Information photograph reinforced the message that other than this only growing adolescent boys would actually need a new suit (Fig. 6). Between 1941

Fig. 6  Ministry of Information, ‘Men’s utility suitings’, 1943, Imperial War Museum, © IWM

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and 1944 the only real choice open to male consumers wishing to acquire a utility suit was one of colour: blue, grey or brown were on offer. Suits were sold under the government CC41 mark, most without a manufacturers’ own label, which arguably allowed the production of poor quality garments while leaving the maker’s reputation in tact.3 In his daily diary entry, Anthony Heap,4 a clerical officer working in department store Peter Robinson’s Oxford Circus, reflected: ‘Men’s fashions look like being set back thirty years or so when the new “utility suit” is introduced.’5 The firm of Montague Burton was a major supplier. In 1939 Burton had acquired factory premises in Bradford that were converted into one of the largest uniform-​producing units in the country, alongside which the production of minimalist designed austerity suits was expanded. The suits were of poorer quality and used cloth, comparative to pre-​war suitings, with relatively low wool content supplemented with cotton.6 The Utility Scheme’s pricing policies and directives controlling profit margins encouraged manufacturers of cheap clothing before the war to turn to utility production; firms like Burton, who had expanded and practiced ‘Fordist’ methods of production, were able to adapt to long runs of 1,000 or more garments within and sometimes even below the cut-​to-​the-​bone ceiling prices set by the Board of Trade.7 ‘Austerity suits’ –​whether cut from utility or non-​utility cloth –​did not sell. As one Labour MP put it: ‘[T]‌he only man who would buy one of those suits was the man who was obliged to have a suit.’ He observed: Anyone who was used to having four pockets in his waistcoat to hold his pen, watch-​chain and diary found it very difficult to get used to two pockets, he would have to carry his fountain pen horizontally in a jacket side pocket and probably find it leaking.8 Hoping to inject some stylistic flexibility and a modicum of trade and consumer agency into the scheme, the Bespoke Tailors’ Guild had applied to the Board of Trade for permission to make men’s double-​breasted suits without waistcoats to save materials and to be allowed to distribute the restricted amount of pockets about a suit as desired. President of the Board of Trade Hugh Dalton’s response to such suggestions was

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categorical: there would be no relaxation of any of the restrictions on men’s clothing.9 Dalton publicly declared: There is no serious case at all for restoring turn-​ups whilst the need for war economy lasts. There are no turn-​ups to the trousers of officers or other ranks in either the Army, Navy or Air Force, and I should have thought a style good enough for the Fighting Forces should have been good enough for the civilian population. Nor do the police and other wears of uniform have turn-​ups. Nor, as I am glad to see the Daily Mail points out this morning did many men who take a special pride in their appearance wear turn-​ups in pre-​war days.10 Some men were officially spared. Diarist Anthony Heap noted ‘an interesting sidelight’ on the utility clothing regulations: members of the diplomatic corps enjoyed the privilege of having their suits ‘made exactly as they like. So too … actors (provided they use such clothes for stage purposes)’.11 Others seemed to adapt or in other ways evade restrictions. Heap observed that ‘a man wearing an austerity suit today would still be regarded as an oddity. One never sees trousers without turn-​ups and there are just as many double breasted jackets to be discerned as there ever were’.12 The almost universally popular solution for most male civilians on the home front was in fact to adopt some form of uniform. The establishment of local civil defence organisations such as the Home Guard and the ARP created new kinds of masculine spaces that simultaneously reinforced existing gendered and classed hierarchies and created an alternative form of contemporary patriotic masculine display.13 In World War II there was a conspicuous ‘renunciation’ of fashion on the part of male consumers, but arguably this needs to be considered not as evidence of a lack of interest in style or consumerism but, as much as its female counterpart, a self-​conscious strategy of fashionable morality and its spectacular display. Implicit in Hugh Dalton’s comparative defence of the austerity suit was the maintenance of pre-​war standards of men’s dress, not as in womenswear as an impetus to wartime fashion change, but the reverse: to reinforce a culture of patriotic sartorial stasis ‘on’ and ‘off duty’. The sustenance of women’s fashionable agency in which the coalition had invested so heavily –​and which informed every morale-​ boosting aspect of government propaganda  –​was not reciprocated in

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the idealisation of men’s wartime consumerism. An explicit expression of fashionable desire would be considered beyond the boundaries of ‘good taste’, morally suspect and indicative of ‘foreign’ or continental show, sexual deviancy, idleness or the pernicious effects of the black market embodied in the figure of the ‘spiv’, a distinctively dressed character that emerged correlate to plans for demobilisation. The term derived from the slang ‘spivving’, meaning smart, and entered popular currency in 1944 in a short story, ‘Willie the Spiv’, by crime writer Peter Cheyne, published in Sunday Dispatch to describe a ‘wise guy, clever boy or right guy’ who made his living by dubious means. Civilian uniforms, overalls and workwear, and visibly dated styles or well-​worn tweeds offered men on the home front an expedient lexicon of patriotic fashionable sacrifice to match that of their womenfolk. But it seems no coincidence that the spiv, instantly recognised by his fashionable display, first appeared as plans for demobilisation gained momentum and the end of the wartime masculine renunciation of fashionable desire seemed nigh. The restoration of civilian lifestyles in the context of military demobilisation revealed the significance actually accorded the appropriate styling of war and postwar masculinities. The conspicuous culture of patriotic masculine renunciation masked a powerful fashionable consumerism, albeit one expressed in the subtle details of cut, cloth, personal preferences as to the siting and size of pockets and lapels on coats and waistcoats whose loss had been the cause of such lamentation since 1941.

‘MONSTROSITY’ SUITS Speaking in the House of Commons in late 1942, the Hon. Frederick Bellenger (Labour MP, Bassetlaw) asked Labour minister Arthur Henderson, Joint Under-​Secretary of State for War in the coalition, whether he was content to set up men in ‘what amounts to a suit of clothes which, generally speaking, any self-​respecting man, soldier or civilian, would not wish to wear?’14 Military personnel discharged on grounds of ill health since the introduction of the Utility Scheme in 1942 had been offered the alternative of either a set of clothes provided by army contractors (a utility suit, plus cap, tie and collar, and if

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discharged between October and March, an overcoat) or its equivalent in cash, £2 15s. They were also allowed to retain one pair of boots and seasonal issue underclothing.15 Most men opted for the cash grant, a paltry sum raised by only four shillings since 1919. As John Dugdale (Labour MP for Leicester South and Private Secretary to Clement Attlee) pointed out, ‘that was clearly insufficient to set a man up with a suit of clothes to make a presentable appearance and get decent employment after he leaves the Service’. In his diary, Anthony Heap observed that upon studying the windows of tailors and hosiers shops in London, he found the cost of men’s clothing to be about twice that before the war: the cheapest ready-​made utility suit obtainable was £4 5s and a decent made-​to-​measure version more in the region of ten or 11 guineas ‘even at the most unfashionable and normally inexpensive tailors’.16 In the House, Mr Dugdale pressed the point. If the Secretary of State refused to increase the cash value of discharge suits, would it be possible for the army to produce better clothes, ‘not a Savile Row model, but a suit that compares favourably with the Fifty Shilling Tailor suit?’17 In reply, Henderson explained that the cash grant was calculated on trade estimates, and that the suit was produced with cloth from ‘one of the better quality Utility ranges’; in fact, anticipating members’ questions, an example had been brought to his room at the War Office so he could see exactly what was being offered to soldiers. He was assured that it was of a good standard and available in the usual range of numbered sizes allocated to existing ready-​made suits. When questioned if he himself would wear one in the House, the Minister declined to respond directly but suggested that the design and quality of the suits was such that ‘even my Hon. Friend, with all his usual elegance, might be by no means unashamed to wear’.18 The Minister’s staunch defence belied the reality of both the poor quality of men’s utility suits and the almost universal intent of civilian consumers of all classes and pocket of never having to acquire one. Plans for demobilisation had been discussed throughout the war but gained momentum after the tide began to turn in favour of the allies in North Africa in 1943. William Lemkin, Director of Clothing and Textiles at the Ministry of Supply, recalled how following the Eighth Army’s drive from El Alamein to Tunis, the word ‘demobilisation’ began to be mentioned, ‘distant and problematical as it seemed’.19 A conference ensued

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to discuss what could be done and the scheme that would eventually come into operation was conceived. Lemkin observed that while men were often unconscious of their real motives, he believed that ‘it was gratitude that moved those present at that conference towards a new and better vision of what might be done this time … only the best the country could provide would do’. In the last war men had the choice of a ‘workhouse suit’ or a paltry cash allowance ‘and no-​one worried much about it’.20 In 1919, men were treated very shoddily and issued with a poor quality standard suit made by army clothing factories such as the one at Pimlico.21 This time it was going to be different. However, in 1943, when such pledges were being made, little appeared to have changed. One soldier, discharged on medical grounds, complained to John Bull (a popular illustrated Sunday magazine) of the embarrassing hotchpotch of clothing he was issued: a brick-​red overcoat, a brown suit, a grey cap, an Army shirt with a collar that was mauve in colour and two-​and-​a-​half sizes too big, one blue and silver tie, a pair of Army socks and a pair of Army boots. Returning home to Glasgow in this ‘hideous outfit’ he didn’t think it was his crutches that were drawing so many looks of pity from his fellow passengers.22

‘FREE STYLE’ SUITS FOR ALL Great news! The unpopular austerity restrictions on men’s clothes, in force since May ‘42 have been lifted … My heart leapt up when I beheld these tidings in the newspapers. I fact I could hardly have been more overjoyed if peace had broken out. I’ve been in desperate need of a new suit and a sports jacket for some time, but loath to waste my precious coupons–​and money–​on hideously looking ‘austerity’ garments …23 In early 1944, clearly anticipating an imminent announcement by the Board of Trade, Evelyn Walkden (Labour MP, Doncaster) returned to the subject of the unpopularity of the ‘austerity suit’ and its inadequacies as

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a just reward for returning soldiers. He asked Sir John Grigg, Secretary of State for War, whether he was ‘prepared to make drastic changes and improvements in the existing scheme and relate it to the pre-​war needs of the average citizen?’ Grigg replied that the number of complaints received from discharged men was in fact very small, but offered the House reassurance that the nature and extent of supplying civilian clothing to discharged soldiers had been subject to full and careful consideration for many months. Only one or two points were remaining unsettled, but it was not possible to make any announcements about changes to the scheme. When it was, he was sure that members would be ‘agreeably surprised both in regard to the quality and variety and to the scope of the outfit’.24 A week later, on 25 January 1944, fulfilling Grigg’s coded prophecy of imminent government action, and indicative of Walkden’s self-​evident knowledge of impending change, Hugh Dalton announced the introduction of ‘free style’ suits, i.e. free from austerity restrictions, made from high quality utility cloth, to be issued to all soldiers on demobilisation. Furthermore, such freedom would of course include the manufacture of all suits for civilian consumption. From 1 February 1944, all men’s suits could again be made without any restriction on style and would be available to the public on 1 March. The coupon pointing of these ‘non-​austerity’ suits was to be 26 in comparison with existing ‘austerity suits’ that would now be downpointed to 20; the pointing of austerity coats, waistcoats and trousers would also be reduced by two coupons. The Hon. Mr Thomas asked Mr Dalton if he was aware that he and many other men would now be able to buy a new suit for the first time during the war and enjoy once more having pockets inside their waistcoats. The Hon. Mr Gallacher wryly asked why the minister had waited until he himself had finally bought a suit without pockets before announcing the change.25 The demob clothing scheme had its first official practice run just over a month later, when The Times reported a demonstration with 150 soldiers at Olympia attended by MPs. The design of the clothing and the process by which it was issued was the result of a desire to ensure that all ranks had an equal start in civilian life. The principle of ‘individuality’ had led to the idea of providing a complete outfit of under-​ and outerwear, a well-​designed suit in good quality cloth in a design

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free of austerity restrictions in ‘a variety of material, pattern and style’; and of organising the dispersal depot as a self-​ service clothing centre with ample selection, freedom of choice, expert and courteous advice and all the amenities of the departmental store. The spirit of the old-​time quartermaster sergeant it was stressed was to be … exorcised completely from the proceedings.26 Men were to be offered 400 patterns of cloth, in 11 sizes with three subdivisions to every size. The design for the double-​breasted suit jacket included wide lapels, six buttons, two hip pockets and a breast pocket, and a matching waistcoat. The single-​breasted jacket had flapped hip pockets and a breast pocket, was lined with matching artificial silk, and the cuffs featured pairs of decorative buttons.27 Styles and colours of demob outfits were displayed in a ‘shop window’ from which each man could make his selection, then pass on to be measured by a professional tailor, before collecting his chosen suit, as well as shoes, hat, shirt, collars, tie and raincoat, and finally emerging as a civilian (Fig 7). The utmost care was taken to ensure quality of materials, and that there were ‘no misfits … the most efficient system of fitting known in the tailoring trade’ was an integral part of the scheme.28 In the House of Commons, the Hon. Mr Walkden praised the Secretary of State for War and the Ministry of Supply for their efforts in ensuring that the ‘square deal’ he and others had sought in 1942 was to be given to those who had fought so gallantly. The men he had seen at the Olympia were well pleased with what they called their ‘rig-​out’, and despite the misgivings expressed in some quarters, he urged members to see for themselves the fine quality of clothing being provided. In fact, if the most immaculately dressed Cabinet Minister was looking for a new tailor, Mr Walkden could recommend they visit the Outfit Depot at Olympia. He concluded: [T]‌he pledges given by the respective ministries had been honoured to the last collar stud or button … The old workhouse suit, or monstrosity suit, has gone completely, and the austerity suit has also gone.

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Fig. 7  War Office Official Collection, ‘Demobilisation of British service personnel’, Olympia, Imperial War Museum, © IWM

There are no austerity suits at Olympia and the quality is as good as one could expect. In fact, I would say that in no shape or form can the suits be confused with austerity.29 Mr Peat, Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, declared that he was indeed wearing one of the suits that he had obtained ‘straight off the peg’ and which had not been altered in any way. The word ‘utility’ to describe the suit Peat suggested was perhaps badly chosen because of its links with the inferior cloth and garments provided previously; a first-​class standard of cloth, ‘as good as you could possibly get in the circumstances of to-​day’ was now being used. Mr Peat was at pains to emphasise that the austerity suits issued up to March had not been issued since and there was no question of men getting austerity suits in the future. Mr Walkden asked how his Hon. Friend had obtained his suit, as he himself would like one. Mr Peat replied that unfortunately, it was only on loan. ‘For the purposes of the debate?’, asked Lt Commander Gurney Braithwaite; ‘Yes’, replied Mr Peat. ‘Show business’, interjected Mr Walkden.30

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AT LAST WE CAN SEE IT … At last we can see it. At last we can think and talk of what lies at the end of it. At last we can tread it. The way ahead …31 As much as wartime utility clothing designs and fashions have become synonymous with the war on the home front, so general demobilisation is conceptualised as almost entirely a masculine affair. The fear of men returning home as in World War I in shoddy institutional garb or, because of contemporary shortages, being faced with ‘Hobson’s choice’ was the defining force in the design and execution of what was a huge undertaking and, historian Rex Pope argues, one whose logistics presented a major political predicament.32 At an ideological level, ‘austerity free’ suits fulfilled the government’s commitment to ensuring equality of access for all men and all ranks to fashionable clothing suitable to equip them for a return to civilian life. But by the end of the war just under a million women were also serving in the armed services, and millions more were war workers in the Women’s Land Army, in factories, munitions, offices, transport and communications services. In a debate over the quality of clothing being offered to men discharged from the services, the Rt Hon. Mr Reakes, Member for Wallasey, pondered the fate of women in the forces in the matter of reclothing: Women in the Forces have never looked better than they do to-​day –​ a ‘Wren’ is a joy to gaze upon –​and I think that that applies equally to members of the ATS and the WAAF, who have become accustomed to being well dressed, whatever their station in life before they joined the Forces. I do not think they will relish being treated differently from other sections of His Majesty’s Forces. They have benefited physically as the result of their training and have developed physiques beyond all imagination and it will not be an easy matter to reclothe these women after the war.33 J. B. Priestly similarly considered what women’s attitude to life would be after the war. He suggested that although they had not travelled as far as men in uniform, ‘or known the same stress and strain’, women were nevertheless not unchanged by their years of service, in fact they

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might have moved further from their pre-​war outlook than their menfolk, with obvious social consequences for their demobilisation when it finally arrived: ‘this may be of the very highest importance … nobody can tell what will be the shape and colour of their minds when at last they begin to emerge from it’.34 Despite the patriotic rhetoric and jingoistic propaganda there were shortages of virtually everything and the annual clothing rationing had again been cut, this time from 44 to 41 coupons, almost a third less than their initial allocation.35 In the face of continued shortages, The Times declared that the high public and social morality that Britain had demonstrated in the war ‘must not snap’.36 After six long years of war, what was needed was ‘[a]‌suit that works 18 hours a day’.37 The features of this late-​war look were a ‘cylinder silhouette’, created with narrow hips, slim legs, ‘skin-​sleek’ hats and ‘sheath-​like’ dinner suits, ‘telling you are pared down to its fit … clean lines need no camouflage’.38 Women’s fashions in 1944 reflected a new kind of machine aesthetic in a visual and textual rhetoric that likened women’s bodies and their fashionable adornment to vital elements in the well-​oiled machinery of war. Style and beauty trends functioned like cogs driving the war effort on the home front. For Vogue, contemporary beauty in 1944 was: [A]‌n alchemy part fashion, part health, part person, plus a new magic –​the fitness of things: the way a head fits a hat; a hand fits a glove; a fashion fits a time, a place, a figure (or a figure fits a fashion); the way a beauty schedule fits a hard-​working schedule. Smooth fit is beauty at work in 1944.39 The female body and its appropriate fashioning had come to stand in for the body of the nation itself at a time of crisis –​but it was one symbolically and materially subject to constant adjustment according to the shifting conditions of the war and expectations of what might be reasonably expected in terms of sacrifice. Penny Summerfield’s study of women’s lives in World War II based on oral testament suggests that women constructed narratives of their wartime experiences in two ways, either ‘heroic’ or ‘stoical’.40 As peace seemed imminent, new versions of both were needed.

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Following the liberation of Paris, news of the first Paris fashions began to emerge. The Times described exaggerated styles in hats that rose to a height twice the length of the face, dresses with voluminous sleeves, draped shoulders, and skirts with gathers and pleats that used ‘enough material for two austerity models’. With undisguised patriotic distaste, the article concluded that in the face of such extravagance ‘the women of the allied nations would wish to retain the calm, dignified simplicity and beauty symbolised by British designers during the war even when they turn to the gayer clothes of peace-​time’.41 Picture Post expressed surprise at how quick off the mark Paris fashions appeared; images of fashionable Parisiennes in voluminous costumes seemed to contradict those who thought the ‘glum Boche’ would kill off the industry, and both Germans and wealthy French collaborators were clearly willing and able to pay fabulous prices for model gowns and hats’.42 Picture Post reader Marie Stopes, DSC, PhD, FLS, FRSLitt wrote in response: Why are you so unpatriotic this week as to give publicity to Paris ‘fashions’? They are vulgar, crudely inartistic and make the girls who wear them look like old frumps. What ulterior reasons are there behind this pushing of Paris corruptions on to our country?43 Fashion journalist Alison Settle also greeted the ‘sudden’ return of Paris fashions with suspicion, and questioned the ascription of these lavish displays as somehow ‘patriotic’.44 Most women in Britain, Settle believed, would be unimpressed by the pleas of dressmakers that their designs were activated by a desire to divert materials away from the German war effort, or by the suggestion that extravagant fashions maintained French morale, or that ‘heavy pleats were put in dresses costing 50 guineas because the wearers had no other means of keeping warm’.45 The suddenness and the extravagance of such a display suggested that ‘despite the hardships of some, others have enjoyed life as usual’. Settle concluded the streets of Paris revealed a ‘grave cleavage’ between Nazi collaborators and brave resistance fighters, and a large body of ‘passive spectators’ in-​between who could be seen everywhere ‘wearing exotic hats of feathers, velvet, satin and net 20 inches high, wearing coats the length of which is enormous, and with every luxurious appendage of fashion, always according to the mode of the day, in outsize models’.46

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RECALLED TO DUTY: THE GENDER POLITICS OF POSTWAR AUSTERITY BY DESIGN It is not the world they want into which men and women are preparing to fit their post-​war lives. It is the world they expect. Demobilisation is the bridge into the future … And more important, perhaps than the bridge itself is what people expect to find on the other side.47 Settle’s assessment of the mechanics of wartime fashionable patriotism as a diegetic of self-​serving desire and collective duty is a useful one. The cinematic narrative and costuming of Joan and Torquil’s ‘authenticity’ in films like I Know Where I’m Going with which this chapter began, keyed into the widespread mix of anxiety and anticipation that surrounded the thorny problem of demobilisation’s still abstract imagining, rather than material delivery. Made in the dreary late-​war period and released on the cusp of peace, such films problematised the uncertainties faced by the British people in fashioning a new kind of postwar society. Film historian Pam Cook’s detailed analysis of the film argues that the character of Joan embodied the figure of the ‘mobile woman’. At a symbolic level this image of patriotic female service became a focus for contemporary understandings of the transformation of traditional gender ideals.48 Played by classically trained theatrical rather than film actress Wendy Hiller, Joan offered an amalgamation of independence and resourcefulness expressed in ambition and its eschewal. Cook argues that the film and Joan assume that she will be returning to her job and Manchester; when she says goodbye to her father, Joan adds that she will be back in a week; there was no indication that marriage will put an end to her professional life, or to her independence. Cook evidences how in director Emeric Pressburger’s first handwritten draft, Joan is an architect serving in the WRNS, how her occupational status in her fiancé’s large corporation becomes less clear in the final script, and is finally in the book of the film written by Eric Britton redefined as an analytical chemist. Joan is a ‘mobile woman’ in several senses …49 This understanding of Joan’s future career path is arguably undermined somewhat; the point of the film is after all to question the soundness of

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Joan’s apparently unassailable assumptions that she knows what’s best for her or where she’s going. As Cook suggests, Joan’s plans to combine work and marriage and Hiller’s complex portrayal of altruistic and self-​ interested feminine desire for ‘true’ love, glamour and luxury offer an ambiguous range of options that clearly appealed to a contemporary female audience. However, the narrative drive was cemented with Powell and Pressburger’s familiar symbolism laid on with a trowel so that Joan’s direction was arguably always heading back to the home –​although her inner compass of fashionable agency remains intact. Austerity by design was being repackaged. By the end of I Know Where I’m Going, Joan’s old criteria of wealth and happiness is all at sea. Whether the audience bought the idea that the future wife of the Laird of Kiloran’s ‘true’ nature would be exercised in returning to her job in the lab is open to question. A much bedraggled Joan, almost drowned in a foolhardy final attempt to get to Kiloran (she bribes a simple young fisherman with a £20 note) is guided back to shore by Torquil, who expertly takes the helm of her floundering boat. In the final scene, dressed once more in the fashionable outfit in which we first saw her, Joan strides off up the hillside to meet Torquil with a renewed sense of purpose, but she is both the same and a different Joan. Her future lies with the ‘real’ Laird of Kiloran, whose island and identity can be leased but not owned by wealthy industrialists like Sir Robert Bellinger. Fashion, and the cinema audience, are left in a ‘realist’ state of patriotic and fashionable ambivalence. Those who had served on the home front were heartily sick of clothing controls. Those about to be demobilised from the services were keen to hang up their uniforms and be free of all the regulations on self-​ presentation this implied. Welcoming in the New Year in 1945, Alison Settle suggested that the time had come for women’s fashions to, ‘move away from the straight-​ line-​without deviation, so that the softer and more feminine life of after-​ war may develop and ideas be stimulated’.50 Vogue too sensed the ‘wind was changing’; fashion for the duration of the war had been narrowed down to a purely national perspective, but was now once more looking upon wider horizons. There was a ‘strange sensitivity, a telepathic communication of ideas. In spite of different conditions, varying restrictions, the new trend in fashion is international  –​and is away from masterful serenity towards a greater femininity’.51 The sustenance of voluntary

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compliance with continued statutory intervention and the strictures of austerity was reliant on the continued need to blur the lines between duty and desire correlative to those that separated institutional control from consumer agency: a female version of the demob suit was never seen as a viable option. The transient and multifarious nature of fashionable femininity suggested that a demob scheme that could provide sufficient variety of styles and range of cloths to satisfy feminine taste was ‘impossible’.52 Of course, there were shortages but the ‘natural’ ingenuity and stoicism of British women in overcoming such difficulties had been demonstrated over the past six years. As Chapter 1 has argued, the driving force of wartime statutory controls and, significantly, their postwar retention, was the power to balance out home and export, civilian and military production and consumption according to politically as much as materially motivated concepts of shifting ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. Under the new scheme, male and female demobees would be issued with increased cash clothing grants of £12 10s 0d and an additional 90 coupons supplementary to the standard ration issue. Women demobees would also receive 56 coupons in lieu of the full outfit provided for returning servicemen.53 Throughout the last year of the war, discussions were going on in secret between the Board of Trade, the Ministries of Supply and War and government ministers and officials as to how and when austerity regulations, primarily on women’s outerwear (a few still applied to men’s socks, shirts and ties), might be lifted. It was felt that de-​control had to be ‘neck or nothing’ but that March 1946 rather than August or September 1945 was a more likely date for achieving this, and thus problems were anticipated in justifying the delay. The psychological benefits inferred by the security of supplies and their egalitarian distribution would continue to apply until hostilities ceased, but as far as women’s clothing went, the Board of Trade believed it would be difficult to maintain savings on labour as a reason for continued controls after VE Day. The Board was well aware of the clothing industry’s attitude to what they saw as overly stringent controls and their belief that these could not be held more than a few months longer. They concluded that it was vital to diffuse any pressure for the removal of austerity controls that were clearly still essential to ensuring adequate stocks and maintaining priority production targets for demobilisation and export: but it had

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to be made clear to the public that they were not merely ‘maintaining controls for control’s sake’.54

PEACE BUT NOT PLENTY On the cover of Picture Post on the cusp of peace another mobile woman, this time a young WAAF, makes ready for a new postwar identity carrying such ideas in and on her head (Fig. 8). Trying on a new hat constructed of a bowl of luscious tropical fruits juxtaposed with the formality of her uniform, such a figure offered mixed messages of potential abundance and doubts around the ability of consumers to enjoy it.55 Fruits that the British public had not seen for years were to become a retrospective measure of wartime rationing and its eventual end, but in 1945 they assumed a central place in the public imagination as a signifier of both continued shortages and austerity and the possibility of future affluence. Transposed here on to an idealised image of patriotic femininity discursively circulated throughout the war, women’s bodies now functioned as a vehicle through which postwar appetites and desires and their ambiguous fulfilment and constraint were to be rehearsed and reformed. Journalist Lesley Blanch, writing in Vogue about what she wanted to see after the war, suggested: The end of the war marks women’s big chance to get what they want from the New Order. Let’s hope they don’t pass it up in a temporary fit of floosie femininity … one in which we feel the more reactionary forces are continuity.56 Expressed in the popular currency of the day, postwar life was anticipated as a time of ‘peace, but not plenty’. The two main political parties, the press and popular culture all battled it out to redefine just what peacetime plenty might mean. A  poll organised by the British Institute shortly before the General Election in July 1945 concluded that the British people ‘were fully conversant with the issues and able to make a political choice’,57 party manifestos were understood in sharply etched form: a Labour Party programme of government control of various phases of British economic and social life, versus the Conservative position that free enterprise could put the nation back

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Fig. 8  Picture Post cover, 6 January 1945, ‘Problems of 1945’, photo by Felix Man/​Picture Post/​IPC Magazines/​Getty Images®

on the road to economic success.58 Labour’s electioneering rhetoric in 1945 placed huge emphasis on the collective benefits of full employment, the security of a future welfare state free to all and a collective prosperity no longer reliant on the happenstance of birth or prior fortune. New clothes, plenty to eat, luxury goods and holidays were not

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simply equated with political action; rather, the Labour Party under Attlee recognised how the idea of their potential acquisition or lack functioned as an important barometer of socialism’s aim to build a ‘better’ Britain and British society: fair shares for all in the good things in life as well as the basic necessities. With Germany’s surrender, increasing public expectations of an imminent and speedy demobilisation, and a General Election approaching, the timing of any public announcement about rationing and continued austerity restrictions on womenswear was a delicate juggling act. Clearly savings would have to be made in order to equip returning servicemen and women adequately; a further cut to the ration was imminent. Confirming the clothing trade’s belief in government disdain for their contribution to the Utility Clothing Scheme, the Board of Trade decided they could be fobbed off with excuses of staff shortages and seasonality as to why restrictions would continue and what was termed a ‘by and by’ letter was drafted by the Board of Trade to buy time.59 As for the wider public, ‘[o]‌n political and general grounds’ Hugh Dalton –​at that time still President of the Board of Trade in the wartime coalition  –​felt it was impolitic to announce that austerity restrictions were being removed shortly after announcing a further reduction of the clothing ration.60 It was therefore seen as desirable to postpone any announcement until after polling day on 5 July (but delay it no later than the 20 July) and simultaneously announce ‘a show of Non-​Austerity and better Utility ranges … something really worth seeing’ to be released in the Spring.61 The aim was to link the need for an announcement before the end of July with the promise of the lifting of austerity restrictions at the earliest possible date.62 As an olive branch to the trade, concessions were to be granted on the new ranges: a 10 per cent increase on the maximum price of women’s ‘good class’ tailored suits, ‘probably made-​to-​measure’ and sold ‘in one of the big stores’ was agreed, and this, by accident or design, would bring the price up to £12 10s 0d (the exact figure of the planned clothing grant to be issued to female service demobees). Further, not wanting to ‘screw the trade down too much’ on the pricing of popular lines of clothing that possessed the greatest scope for styling (women’s dresses, skirts and cardigan suits) an additional £1 would be able to be charged, bringing the maximum price of the utility lines up to £7 0s 0d.63

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The wartime success of stringent rationing and regulations reinforced a belief in the intrinsic buoyancy of feminine fashion desire and its political potential. Austerity by design had acquired a new cultural potency. This was the paradox of demobilisation: suits free from austerity restrictions embodied the political commitment to honour men’s sacrifice to ‘the last collar stud and button’,64 fashions and style trends constrained by continued austerity restrictions were the price women consumers were being asked to pay to in order to fulfil it. The rationalisation of feminine fashionable desire was the basis upon which the new kind of socio-​sartorial status quo, so central to the discursive socialist rhetoric of postwar consensus, was to be established. In a radio broadcast on the anniversary of D Day, Clement Attlee called on the British people to elect the Labour Party to power and ensure the country ‘a happier and secure future with a socialist economy based on state control of certain commodities and nationalisation of certain basic industries’.65 As peace approached, the sustenance of fashionable consumer agency on the one hand and a consensus on sartorial self-​control on the other was integrated into Labour’s agenda for change. The election manifesto, ‘Let us face the future’, written by Herbert Morrison, spelt out what this required: ‘We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years.’ The Labour Party’s programme was widely seen as a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace. People’s major concerns for the future were not formulated around abstract concepts like free enterprise or the political dimensions of socialism ‘but about specific, concrete realities such as jobs, homes, and food … Britons … would rather have the security of government controls’ rather than ‘wait for the mills of free enterprise to grind a slow and by no means certain programme of social betterment’.66 Above all else ‘the people’ were desirous of change, and in spite of or because of its mythical status, the idea, if not the reality, of a new kind of political and social consensus was pivotal in bringing about such change. Clement Attlee represented a sense of reassuring modesty and quiet determination that Churchill’s confidence and comparatively eccentric charisma paradoxically only served to enhance further. Attlee, quietly puffing on his pipe, toured the country electioneering in an unassuming Standard Eight car driven by his wife Violet. Holed up in Claridges, Churchill smoked cigars and drank champagne and made brief

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appearances on the hustings with fur-​coated Clementine by his side and raised his hand in the wartime ‘V for Victory’ salute. The Conservative idea of consensus was made manifest in the exercise of individualism and the freedom of choice that Hitler had sought to deny and Britain had stood and fought for.67 The Conservative election manifesto declared: This is a time for freeing energies, not stifling them. Britain’s greatness has been built on character and daring, not on docility to a State machine, Conservative policies would seek to guard the people of this country against those who, under guise of war necessity, would like to impose upon Britain for their own purposes a permanent system of bureaucratic control, reeking of totalitarianism.68 A moderate programme of reform was envisioned that would see the progressive removal of wartime barriers to free trade and of state intervention in matters of personal consumption. In a radio broadcast kicking off the Tory campaign, Winston Churchill suggested that the alternative facing the British people was a sinister socialist state thriving on scarcity, policed by a British ‘Gestapo’.69 Conservative free market belligerence as the cornerstone of postwar economic recovery was contested by Labour’s version of a nation fighting against pre-​war social injustice and old systems of capitalist self-​interest. This was the ideological battleground upon which the 1945 election was fought, and won. When it came to the ballot box it was believed Attlee would put ‘the needs of the people above mink coats’.70 With a majority of 148 seats, Attlee accepted the king’s commission to form a government. The impression of Douglas Jay, his economic adviser at the time, was not of the Prime Minister as a ‘great man, sitting down in his office, pulling great levers, issuing edicts and shaping events’;71 Attlee was hemmed in by relentless economic pressures and apparently insoluble problems that somehow had to be solved: the dollar crisis, world food shortages, and a rate of demobilisation that met the public’s unrealistic expectations.72 Sir Stafford Cripps, a teetotaller, vegetarian and high-​minded ascetic with a deep religious conviction, was appointed President of the Board of Trade. Nicknamed ‘Austerity Cripps’, a personal moral imperative to control consumption was combined with a commitment to Keynesian economics to herald a new ‘Age of Austerity’.

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3 AUSTERITY BY CONSENSUS: DEMOCRATISING DESIRE ‘WHERE DID YOU GET THAT TERRIBLE SUIT?’ ‘You look wonderful darling’ said his mother, ‘but where did you get that terrible suit? It reminds me of somebody absurd we had here lately. Who was it?’ His sister Diana remembered, ‘It was the man who came about the coal. All right, Alan, you don’t look a bit like him. Only his clothes were rather like yours. He must have been dressed in his best Utility.’1 J. B. Priestley was the voice of popular socialism in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. In a typically moralistic novella, Priestley explored military demobilisation through the metaphor of identical austerity suits issued to three returning servicemen: upper-​class Alan Strete in blue, the son of the late Sir William and Lady Strete, who could have been an officer but ‘preferred to stay with the chaps he knew’; Herbert Kenford in grey, the son of a local farmer who ‘worked it’ so that he could stay a corporal and be with Alan; and finally Eddie Mold, ‘burly not much brains’, in brown, who was employed as a quarryman before the war.2 Written in 1943 before, as the author is at pains to point out, the introduction of the new

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outfitting scheme, the ill-​fitting, skimpily cut suits serve as a vital narrative device, unifying potential class differences between the three men in the shared experience of mobilisation and demobilisation. The suits made visible the ‘sharpened, hard masculinity’ wrought by army service that all three had brought back with them, ‘they had all come from the same place and been doing the same things there’.3 Upper-​class socially principled Alan, middle-​brow out-​of-​place Herbert, ill-​educated but basically good-​hearted low-​class Eddie all face the same problem: readjusting to a changing postwar world and a civilian home front equally having to readjust to these changed citizens who are returning. Lady Strete does not at first recognise her son because her only point of reference as to who a man might be was inferred from what he was wearing, in this case a suit identical to that worn by the man who came about the coal. Uncle Rodney is similarly aghast at his nephew’s changed appearance, which he likens to that of ‘a little insurance tout’; Alan is advised to get rid of the suit as soon as possible and see the family’s tailor who Rodney hopes has survived the war. He doesn’t know because he hasn’t had any new clothes made since the war began, and didn’t intend to. At first, ‘the thought that a fella’s waistcoats and boots, hairbrushes and razors’ would outlast him had given Rodney ‘the creeps’ but he had now got used to the idea. Situated lower down the social scale betwixt and between blue-​ blooded Alan and the earthy Eddie, the faithful Herbert’s grey suit characterises an essential prudence altered by the experiences of the war. The son of a farmer and Sunday School supervisor, Herbert’s natural lack of appetite for excess is now at odds with the abundant home-​grown, homecoming feast laid out on the farmhouse table by his mother, his sister Phyllis and her friend Edna. To Herbert’s eyes toughened by wartime service ‘[t]‌he three women all seemed to have the same fatness and richness’.4 Edna was younger than Phyllis and was still a girl, ‘but even she looked almost massive, a solid weight of female flesh, a rich harvest of pink-​and-​white girlhood, a huge extra course of jam pudding and cream’. It was all too much for Herbert: ‘He couldn’t fancy Edna, just like he couldn’t fancy his supper. There was too much of it, and too much of her, for his taste.’5

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In contrast, Eddie, in his brown suit, discovers his wife Nellie has left him and immediately sets off for the pub, where he downs as many pints as he can as quickly as he can. Popping in to buy an evening paper as he finally heads home, the local gossip observes what a strapping chap Eddie now was: ‘Given yer a nice suit to come back in too, ‘avent they? Take care yer don’t spoil it, young man. Them big shoulders o’ yours look like bursting out of it –​so be careful.’ Strolling around the village feeling ‘peculiar in his brand new civvy suit’, Eddie eventually returns to his labourer’s cottage to find his errant wife has now returned; he has a row and is then sick, ‘all the night’s beer returning in a stinking flood. Down his new suit too, some of it’.6 Throughout the novel the clash of old and new attitudes to postwar social formations is figuratively exploited through conflicting concepts of appropriate consumption, here embodied in differences between pre-​war, war and now postwar suits and their wearers. Lady Strete and Sir Rodney, labelled as ‘dinosaurs’ by Alan, symbolise an upper-​class pre-​war generation on the brink of extinction, along with a system of exploitation and status recognition that Alan believes the war and the new suits have rendered impotent and irrelevant. What frightens Sir Rodney was not the likes of lowly brown-​suited Eddie Mold, nor the grey aspirations of puritanical Herbert, but Alan’s misguided democratic leanings and the dangerous threat this posed to society. Sir Rodney describes the life that awaits the deluded Alan in a socialist state: [Y]‌ou can come home to some numbered cubbyhold (sic) at night, gobble some mess out of tins, and either go to the moving pictures to see how pins are made or sit listening to some government bully on the wireless telling you to hurry up and fill in Form Nine-​thousand-​and-​thirty-​eight (original italics). Once a year you and your wife, who’ll be as plain as a suet pudding, and all your brats, who’ll have been vaccinated against everything but stupidity and dreariness, will be given a ticket to a holiday camp, along with five thousand other clerks and mechanics and their women and kids, and there you’ll have physical drill, stew and rice pudding, round games, and evening talks on tropical diseases and aeroplane engines. And I’ll be dead –​and delighted.7

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Government intervention in health, education and welfare provision, full employment, mass produced clothing, access to popular leisure activities and holidays, all are seen by Sir Rodney as destructive of the culture of individualism that defined British society before the war. Priestley’s use of the austerity suit as a motif of political change is typically heavy-​ handed, but it is also accurate in its portrayal of the vital role the notion of democratic consumption played in socialism’s fashioning of postwar society, starting with demobilisation.

‘WE’VE BEEN A LONG TIME GONE’ The process officially began a month before the General Election on 18 June 1945. Sailors discharged under the scheme in operation at Portsmouth were reported as ‘becoming civilians at a rate of one per minute’.8 The Times noted the ‘almost a garden party atmosphere’ at Guildford.9 The band of the Royal Artillery played on the square, films were shown in the camp theatre and high-​ranking visitors were present to oversee the process, which was not at all rushed; there was ‘no suggestion of haste’ and in addition to receiving their demob clothing, the men were allowed to buy eight weeks’ supply of cigarettes or tobacco and two weeks’ of sweets.10 The film George in Civvy Street,11 made as a vehicle for popular entertainer George Formby to revive his failing film career, opens on a troop ship full of soldiers en route to demobilisation having a sing song, finishing with a solo performed by George and his ukulele, ‘We’ve Been a Long Time Gone’. While typical of the corny, slapstick comedies and hapless characters associated with Formby, the film offers a useful glimpse of demobilisation in action as the camera lingers on the rows and rows of differently sized jacket and trouser combinations on offer to George and his best mate ‘Fingers’ (Ronald Shiner). After having been measured from top to toe, they make their selections –​in Fingers’ case, four different styles that he wears one upon another, a ruse discovered by the watchful eye of an officious female ATS sergeant who is overseeing the operation. The atmosphere of unhurried browsing reported by The Times and the belief that military officiousness had been exorcised from the

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transaction were both rather rose-​tinted versions of a huge logistical undertaking. Nevertheless, the intent was sincere: at the end of a war fought to maintain individual freedom it was thought ex-​servicemen should, ‘in the matter of clothing at any rate, be treated as an individual’.12 The employment of civilian specialists was a key element in making sure that men moved swiftly through to avoid crowding but it also added weight to the concept of ‘shopping’ for a new identity (Fig. 9). In the re-​clothing depots there were racks and racks of suitings, long rows of shoes, hats, ties in a range of patterns and colourways, and shirts and collars in shades of blue, cream and grey were laid out in tiers on angled shelves. After numerous timed trials it was found that with the help of expert tailoring and retail staff to take measurements and supervise the operation, three men could be measured in

Fig. 9  ‘Demobilisation of the British Army’, Imperial War Museum, © IWM

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two minutes at a rate of 90 men an hour. The Royal Army Ordnance Corps delivered daily to 18 depots set up all over the country through which the needs of up to 100,000 men could be accommodated each week. By September, 332,627 men and 98,682 women had been demobilised.13

MARKED MEN Everybody seems to know our history sheets by these ‘ere togs. Pity the government didn’t rig us out in plus fours and sports suits. Might just as well ‘ave put a broad arrow on our backs instead of a chalk stripe in our flannels. Marked men, that’s what we are in this rig.14 In his recent in-​depth study of demobilisation, Allan Allport observes that all the powerful hopes and fears that the experience generated have ‘curiously vanished from our collective memory … the story is regarded as hardly a story at all’.15 It is, he suggests, taken for granted that British servicemen simply returned home without fuss and ‘exchanged their military for their civilian identities as effortlessly as they slipped on the famous demob suits which they were issued with on their discharge’.16 Allport’s arguments centre on the complex human consequences of the huge psychological and cultural readjustment to civilian and domestic life that demobilisation required for men, and their families. Using a range of primary sources, Allport’s sensitive analyses chart a society and its people facing difficult social and psychological challenges: marital strife, divorce, couples and fathers who had become strangers, the boring routine of work after the excitement of army service, and the uncertainties of work after the boring routine of the army. Ernest Bevin’s plan for a carefully timed release of millions of men was the epitome of simplicity and transparency. Servicemen were divided into two categories, Class A, which covered 90 per cent of men, and Class B, whose pre-​war occupations –​miners, engineers, teachers, policemen –​rendered their services vital to reconstruction. Those in Class B would be discharged ahead of those in Class A, whose

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date of release would be calculated according to two factors: their date of birth and the month in which their service began. The older you were and the longer you had served, the sooner you would be released. The response was overwhelmingly favourable. The scheme’s straightforwardness defied favouritism or dodges and was associated with left-​leaning principles of ‘fair shares’ that the planning and successful introduction of wartime rationing schemes had followed.17 Whatever most servicemen thought of the style and cut of the demob suit, the scheme as a whole was not held up as a repeat of the mistakes and humiliations made after World War I. Bevin’s plan strengthened the links between the two, and with the Labour Party as a force for change. The demob suit, as the previous chapter has sought to demonstrate, was not merely a superficial gesture to aid servicemen start the journey from A to a vague but ‘better’ B. From the production side, in the assessment of the Ministry of Supply, demobilisation ‘was a huge experiment that it was believed had raised the standard of ready-​to-​wear clothing manufacture ‘to an extent it never would have reached by the everyday methods of production’, with the exception of a handful of producers making the better type of suit before the war.18 The Utility Scheme was based on exact specifications and quotas that enabled the government to ‘borrow’ materials and production from the civilian programme for urgent war purposes. This simplified the problem of demobilisation by making it easy to transfer many surplus government cloths comparable to those allocated for civilian use.19 From a consumer perspective, the demob suit has come to be retrospectively associated with poor quality cloth and ill-​ fitting, poorly designed garments dished out on a mass scale. Quality was sometimes patchy because of the impossibility of ensuring that adequate levels of the same qualities of cloth and made up garments were available in all sizes and ranges in every demobilisation depot any one time. For the new government, within months of taking office demobilisation was seen even by Labour Party MPs as the Attlee administration’s Achilles heel: soldiers held as responsible for Labour’s unexpectedly large majority in the House were dissatisfied with the slow pace of discharge, and many saw this as the Party’s failure of the first test of their commitment to ‘the ordinary solider’. The armed forces, the wider public and key

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supporters in the media were unconvinced by Attlee’s pleas for patience and over optimistic expectations of the speed at which mass releases could proceed.20 For many consumers, peacetime life seemed to require an even greater level of sacrifice than that demanded during the war, although without the bloodshed. In his diary Anthony Heap, unfit for conscription because of health problems, reflected with rancour on the injustices of demobilisation: How many [sic] longer is this pampering of servicemen and women at the expense of the sorely tried civilian population going on? … there’s no getting away from the fact that the civilians–​especially the Londoners–​have had to endure much greater privations and hardships in the way of food and clothing shortages … And now in addition to the payment of huge cash gratuity and the issue of complete civilian clothing outfit … a further 90 coupons (as many as we get in two years) on top of that. Meanwhile, we poor unfavoured civilians go about in rags and tatters … there’s nothing fair or equitable about this. It’s a downright disgrace.21 Unsurprisingly, many returning servicemen in their new suits felt like ‘marked men’ because their appearance emphasised how shabby and worn the civilians who had endured seven years’ of austerity and wartime rationing were, and many found the whole experience only increased their feelings of isolation and alienation. Most, like Len Perry, aged 22, discharged from duty on the Arctic Convoys, saw it as just the last bureaucratic hurdle of wartime service to be got over before a new life could begin. Len emerged on ‘Civvy Street’ uncomfortable and out of place in his new suit, a ‘brown tweed affair’ that he didn’t particularly like, in a ‘really good mac’, a hat he definitely didn’t want but which was unceremoniously plonked on his head, and the rest of his demob issue tied up with string in a cardboard box. Rather than being the object of either pity or admiration, some demobees were on the sharp end of feelings of bitterness that they had somehow had it easy and enjoyed a cushy life with plentiful food and everything provided for.22 However, Len recalled returning home to a community where his appearance was regarded with pride not hostility: he was urged to wear the suit to local

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dances so that his soon-​to-​be fiancée could show him off. Len did not like the suit and would not have chosen to buy it, nor to wear it in preference to his existing civilian wardrobe, but he also appreciated how the suit operated as a signal that you were a ‘good sort’ and as an important form of recognition, a sort of emblem of club membership connoting the shared experiences of service when in the company of other ex-​servicemen.23 It is fair to say that the demob outfitting scheme achieved the best standard of quality in utility cloth and finished garments in the circumstances, with the resources in materials and personnel available and on the massive human and limited time scale the situation demanded. Mass Observation concluded that even the heady champagne of victory could not obscure the fact that the mass transfer of millions of men and women back into civilian life was not going to be easy; it was one of ‘those major social operations which ought not to be performed with any other anaesthetic than the will and consent of the people affected’.24 Whatever many servicemen thought of the style and quality of their demob suits, the failures of the scheme were not held as repeating the betrayal and humiliation experienced by those returning after World War I. More than this, from the perspective of a new Labour government and for many of the electorate, self-​and statutory control over consumerism was symbolic of aspirations for a new kind of affluent postwar society. The ambiguous ideals of reconstruction demanded ‘better’  –​better clothes, better designs, a better society, and a better British people.

FREE … BUT FREE FOR WHAT? It is easy to make an equation between the continuation of clothing controls after 1945 and continued shortages and ensuing economic crises, but as much as their wartime antecedents, such decisions were always also driven by powerful ideological spurs. Controls over production and consumption were pivotal to Labour Party policy objectives and their organisation, and regulation formed a ‘central element of the relationship between the State and British society’.25 The political project of achieving a postwar consensus on consumerism made no sense without

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a correlate vision of postwar citizen consumers formulated around a wartime culture of ‘conspicuous fairness’ that the Labour Party believed would continue to blossom, with the right encouragement. The gendered politics of fashionable control and self-​control remained central to a discursive rhetoric of postwar political consensus. The egalitarian aim of the demob outfitting scheme was to ensure that all men, civilian and service, started peacetime life on the same footing. Men’s suiting was liberated from austerity restrictions on style to emphasise a return to individuality after the patriotic sartorial stasis of wartime military uniformity and civilian discretion. Conveying a sense of autonomy was the philosophy behind the ‘shop window’ design of the clothing depots and the employment of civilian tailors and outfitters measuring and adjusting clothing to individual proportions. The need to supply fashionable clothing was also seen as paramount and the lifting of austerity restrictions hugely symbolic of this commitment. One of the earliest disputes in the first session of parliament in Attlee’s term of office blew up over ‘demob shirts’. A  Labour member complained that soldiers were being ‘fobbed off’ with button-​down collar shirts, no longer considered fashionable by the outfitting trade. The MP called for a wider range of choice to be available, and although eyebrows were raised at socialism’s clear regard for sartorial distinction, changes were made to what was being issued. As Anthony Howard points out: ‘all the more impressive an achievement, as the King himself was to complain in vain shortly afterwards to Mr Attlee: “We must all have new clothes –​ my family is down to the lowest ebb”.’26 While clearly humorous, this last comment underlines the inherent problems and paradoxes that the demob suit brought to the surface. Allport comments on the irony of wearing a suit that he argues ‘had been dreamed up in order to help ex-​servicemen blend imperceptibly in the crowd’ but that in reality made them all too conspicuous. Men felt strange to be dressed, as one demobee put it, ‘like bookends’, in identical clothes.27 The government attempted to reorient the differently gendered dimensions of wartime utility and austerity designs to the conditions of peacetime, but this always arguably made more sense as a political strategy than a fashionable one. Government efforts were channelled into designs that almost too conspicuously displayed the hard-​won lifting of austerity restrictions that had so occupied debates

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in the House and life on the home front: wider trousers with turn-​ ups, double-​breasted jackets with numerous buttons, larger lapels and added pockets and the use of good rather than poor quality utility cloth diverted from civilian production (Fig 10). Some men complained of exaggerated patterns: one remarked on a pin stripe ‘that fairly screams at you’; others described the suit as ‘gaudy’, ‘like walking around in a pair of pyjamas’, ‘a ghastly garment of stiff brown serge with purple stripes which made me look like an old-​time gangster’, ‘not any sort of suit I would buy … foul’, and ‘obviously a pre-​war 75 bob effort’.28 There were also men, particularly those who had joined up at 18, excited to be kitted out with their first ever tailored suit; many others too were very pleased with their demob issue and wore the suits to weddings, their own and other people’s. However, whether liked or not, the full extent and significance of the cash, coupon and austerity-free nature of the suit was largely lost on most returning servicemen inexperienced, unaware or indifferent to the sacrifices of home front consumerism for the past six years.

Fig. 10  Grey Pin Stripe ‘demob’ suit, Imperial War Museum, © IWM

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A Mass Observation report on servicemen’s desires for demobilisation summed up the feeling on the ground: Civvy Street is at once the conscript’s peace dream and his nightmare. He longs for the comfort and warmth and personal affection of it, after the cold, impersonal, regimented life of forces or factory. He dreads the insecurity of job-​scrambling, money worries and personal responsibility after the safe job on a labour market where nobs are so plentiful that is difficult not to get in and almost impossible to get out. From the point of view of demobilisation the dream and the nightmare both pull the same way.29 Millions of young men tried on their new demob suits for size and stood before makeshift mirrors set up on army easels above which a sign was attached urging them to ‘Choose wisely and do not hurry in your choice’. Yet despite such good intentions, the demob suit pulled in different directions fashionably and as a result fulfilled few expectations of many different constituencies. For those of conservative taste, it looked like something a gangster would wear; for those used to something better, its flamboyance screamed cheap and nasty; for those wishing to look like gangsters it smacked of stifling conformity; for the majority its statutory origins implied uniformity, reinforced by a government arrow marked on the interior back of the suit to confirm its official credentials, and a continued lack of individuality; for many it was irrelevant as a form of workwear, and inappropriate for leisure. Pushing and pulling in two contradictory directions the demobilisation suit and its fashioning in many ways embodied the wider problems of resettlement –​‘free … but free for what?’30

FEMININE FRILLS AND FRIPPERIES The success of the wartime Utility Scheme and government controls in maintaining fashionable feminine morale and sustaining consumer agency formed the ideological and material blueprint for men’s sartorial demob. However, this required a huge concentration of production on a limited range of styles in a very short space of time and attracted

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enormous media attention at a time of heightened expectations. Well-​ intentioned but inseparable from its military and bureaucratic administration, the success of the suit as symbolic of a return to individuality and freedom was hampered by scales always weighted too far towards structure rather than agency. The demob suit struggled to mirror the successes of wartime womenswear because of the impossibility of reproducing a distinctive fashion aesthetic that had continually shifted and been subject to constant alteration, adaption, and most significantly, subversion over a number of years by the trade and by consumers themselves. While the legislative impulse of controls to ensure standardisation of pricing and production practices remained relatively unchanged, their interpretation according to fashion and fashionable tastes and in response that of the mass manufacturing trade never did. Utility production impelled simplification and economy but paradoxically it also exacerbated commercial and personal customisation. Many consumers followed the principles of make do and mend by either making their own clothes or modifying utility lines seen to lack individuality with the addition of home-​made frills and fripperies. Most large scale manufacturers of utility lines were drawn from a pre-​war mass clothing industry that had focused on short production runs of a huge range of designs to service a retail industry that insisted on ‘exclusive’ designs. This forced a ‘making through’ method of production allied to the incorporation of fussy details and ornamentation to add distinction and stimulate and follow style trends. Discussing the future of clothing controls, the Board of Trade acknowledged that since their introduction, they had contained numerous technical diktats as to the design and manufacture of women’s fashions seen by the trade as virtually unenforceable. Thousands of cloth-​to-​garment type specifications (i.e. what kinds of garments could be made from different types and weights of cloth) could be exploited by all arms of the fashion industry. Various other loopholes had also swiftly become apparent, largely due to the ambiguous wording of Clothing Orders. Certain features were prohibited by name (e.g. pleating) others by inference (e.g. ‘ruching and gauging except to give necessary fullness’). Such anomalies had multiplied so that style restrictions on women’s dresses and blouses had ‘become almost a laughing stock … even reputable manufacturers had ceased to observe the spirit and … merely followed the letter of the Order’.31

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Just three technical officers were based in London to oversee the compliance of hundreds of garment manufacturers. This effectively amounted to issuing warnings that it was clear ‘from shop windows’ were not effective and often involved attempting to enforce orders that the trade had found ‘ingenious but perfectly legal ways round’. Popular style trends reflected women’s desire for fashionable change, expressed in the use of trimmings and ornamentation and designs incorporating legal ‘fullness’ in faux pleats and apron fronts. By the end of the war even the Board of Trade felt it would be more helpful if instructions be given to technical officers to ‘turn a blind’ eye to such infringements rather than give the offending articles ­further publicity by prosecution.32 The Secretary of the Retail Distributors Association, writing to newly appointed Sir Stafford Cripps in 1945, pleaded for some sort of official revocation of austerity restrictions on women’s dresses to outlaw the ‘banned frippery features’ of the lower echelons of the trade, and avoid the problems that would ensue in selling current stocks of tailored outerwear once the new ‘free style’ was announced.33 Elizabeth Wilkinson, Director of Fashion Buying at Lewis’s, wrote to the Board of Trade to arrange an ‘informal private talk’; she was ‘very troubled about the attitude of mind which women are adopting to many of the problems which seem insoluble for the foreseeable future’.34 Sir Stafford Cripps remained unmoved; restrictions would not be retained any longer than necessary and the government would be ‘ready for plans for removal for particular classes of garments at whatever may prove to be the most appropriate psychological and practical moment’.35

‘WISE SHOPPING IS A SKILLED JOB’ A Ministry of Information booklet summarising the success of clothing controls argued that the ‘orderly reduction in civilian consumption’ had played an important part in raising the general level of public taste and educating people how to make the most of limited supplies: ‘as observers from other countries have frequently pointed out, most women appear to be better dressed, and are certainly dressed in better taste, than they were five years ago’ –​and this improvement had ‘come to stay’.36 French

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girls dressed their new top-​heavy, tight-​waisted silhouettes with built-​ up Pompadour-​front hair styles and waving tresses.37 On the cusp of peace in Europe, Vogue in response promoted springtime utility designs as a continued investment, and offered British consumers a ‘Portfolio of Wartime Economies’ with different versions of the utility cotton frock.38 In September 1945, just over a month after Labour’s victory at the polls, Picture Post observed that the Paris styles for the coming autumn were made for ‘a different type of figure from the one whose smartness set the vogue in 1939 … the Parisienne has developed an amazingly small waist’. The few British and American women not in uniform in Paris, the feature continued, ‘are not only wearing démodé clothes, but according to Parisians, they also have démodé figures’.39 The Post blamed the influence of Paris on the display of a net bustle by the Guild of British Creative Designers and argued that such styles and designs were out of touch with modern life and with British consumers who were far too sensible to fall for the ridiculous excesses so loved by foreigners. ‘Tight lacing’ was also ‘another novelty’ not likely to succeed with a generation of women who have done Army PT’. Picture Post concluded: They bought the example of the tight-​waist corset from France, but all its lace and silk ribbon couldn’t make the modern English girl accept it. She knows so much more than the fashion designers suppose about comfort, freedom and health.40 Throughout the war, women’s unpreparedness for military discipline had been caricatured in the popular press and illustrated magazines like Punch with bosomy girls in uniform caps precariously perched atop fashionable, usually blonde, curls. Now, like their male counterparts, their heads and their bodies carried multivalent messages of a reverse transformation in preparation for a return to civilian life. A Pathé News film followed a former WRNS going from ‘Service into Civvies’41 with £12 10s to spend on clothes and emphasising the generosity of the scheme the clipped tones of Pathé joked: ‘We won’t show you the coupons she’s been given as well, but she’s here to spend 30 of them’ (in 1945, almost three-​quarters of year’s rations). The camera tracks the young woman as she enters a shop to see how far her clothing grant will go: ‘As she’s going for a job she’s decided

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to go for one new outfit throughout.’ First there’s the frock to choose and ‘she picks herself a utility one in blue and white striped rayon linen for 53s 6d’. Then there’s gloves –​navy blue crochet ‘in place of the WRN ones she’s been wearing so long’ –​then rayon satin undies ‘known as step-​ins, correct me if I’m wrong’ (9s 8d), a new bag (30s) and a hat in navy blue straw (29s 8d). Soon she’s out of uniform and ‘those legs have been transformed by smart stockings –​three pairs at 12s 3d and some shoes for 30 bob … The way she’s looking now that job’s a cert and all for £8 17s 6d with £3 12s odd to put in that new bag!’42 Many department stores across the country  –​for example Selfridges, Lewis’s and Peter Robinson in London, Lewis’s in Leeds and Buckley’s in Harrogate –​put on mannequin parades for the benefit of demobilised women (Fig. 11).43 In popular women’s magazines and the fashion press, shopping for a new identity was portrayed as a military operation –​the analogy was an apt one. Leeds manufacturers Wilkinson and Warburton sought to break the news and tell ‘the little dears’ about to be demobbed from HM Forces what their rehabilitation lecturer forgot to mention  –​there was very little in the shops on which to spend their coupons. Soon they would be leaving the

Fig. 11  Fashion show at Selfridges, 1945, © Associated Newspapers/​REX Shutterstock

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sheltered walls of the ‘Waafery’ or ‘Wrennery’ for ‘the big wide world of Civvy Street, venturing even into the grim vortex of its shopping centres  –​a brave and defenceless girl, unarmed except for 50 extra coupons’. However, demobees should not be alarmed, there was no fear of a shark-​like draper attempting to filch them of their well-​ earned coupons.44 Vogue aligned the exercise of fashionable choice with the need for careful planning and strategic purchases informed by consumer ‘intelligence’. New civilian consumers needed to draw on a range of sophisticated surveillance techniques, implicitly suggested as acquired in the war, to evaluate what was on offer and objectively scrutinise what would or would not be best suited to their individual peacetime physiognomies and lifestyles. Readers were advised: ‘Study your type, figure and personality before making your choice, giving special thought to your height, build and colouring.’45 The magazine’s ‘fashion experts’ were sent out with four ‘Service Girls’ to help put together capsule wardrobes of flexible costumes in styles that were en vogue but would not date. The result was a collection of nine ‘excellent’ utility suits, coats and dresses, each offering qualities of cut and cloth to accentuate and ‘camouflage’ curves and fuller figures; flexibility as to where and when clothes might be worn according to location, weather and season; comfort and practicality of wear and care; and fashion status. Whatever their shape or preferences, simplicity was seen as the keynote for every look, accessories the ‘means of giving it spice and variety’.46 In a similarly military inspired feature titled ‘Operation Trousseau,’ Good Taste offered suggestions to young women returning home either about to get married or return to civilian occupations, the two postwar career options being apparently interchangeable.47 The essential needs of a peacetime identity were set out in a ‘kit list’ strategically tabulated as to price and quality. Emphasis was again placed on developing skills of consumer surveillance and planning to ensure that purchases were based on sound judgment: ‘One mistake –​one impulsive slip into buying an apparent bargain “which is sure to come in useful” would be enough to wreck the whole Operation’.48 After considering how the list and costs might be trimmed –​cutting down on underwear (inadvisable), providing patterns for home-​made slippers, handbag, and hat

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(sailor’s beret), and pinafore with bib –​Good Taste concluded with the following advice: Look out for clean, simple lines and turn down anything which uses frilly-​frippery to disguise bad cut. As for colour, be gay, by all means, but don’t be glaring. In our times, when clothes have to last –​and then last a little longer  –​its best, don’t you think to keep off big splashes of very bright colours. A scarlet coat, say, or a sky-​blue suit, may set the town agog for a week or so. But how tired the world and our mirror will be of the outfit by the time months have turned into a year … Finally, do take a good look around before you begin buying. But wise shopping is a skilled job; and, like most skilled jobs, skilled preliminary research plays a big part in it.49 Female consumers were constantly urged to take a candid look at themselves and assess their good and bad points, the latest dolman style coat for example, ask yourself ‘[i]‌s it really you?  –​not if you’re short and plump, it’s a fashion for a girl with long legs’. Colourful ornamented styles might be popular, but how much more effective a plain, slim and neat coat frock with a small Peter Pan collar buttoned up down the front would be ‘as a foil for that well-​brushed hair, those nicely-​kept hands, those neat ankles’.50 Fashion writer Eve Cavendish suggested that demobilisation gave girls ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’: a chance to create a whole new wardrobe from scratch. The ‘demobbed girl’ might not have the cash possessed by the old inhabitants of Civvy Street but on the other hand ‘they had a whole lot more coupons to play with’.51 However, ‘total peace’ like a lot of other things viewed from a distance had not turned out to be ‘nearly as rosy as we’d imagined’. Fashionable female consumers certainly hadn’t bargained for a continuance of austerity; neither had they reckoned on having to stretch their coupons even further. Cavendish spelt it out: ‘1946 will demand more from us in the way of dress … this doesn’t mean more clothes, rather that we have to sharpen our wits. We have to learn to conjure chic from the ordinary –​elegance from austerity’.52 As demobilisation reached its peak, the young female readers of Good Taste were advised to see their austerity wardrobe as a film producer might view players in a show: ‘[R]‌ecast your company in an entirely new production, and

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introduce one newcomer to understudy the star’, for example using sequins to ornament or adding a crocheted or silk yoke collar.53 Later in the same issue, reviewing the newly released film Brief Encounter, the magazine offered the following platitude: It is a common fallacy that the only true form of relaxation is escape from life: a holiday from thinking about your problems. This film submits another sort of relaxation. It discovers a common human problem that might easily happen to you or me and discusses and meets it frankly and fairly. Do see this film.54 Postwar austerity required careful styling, sartorially, politically, culturally and cinematically. All forms of cultural production had to find a way of knitting together differences of nation, class and gender, and pre-​ war and wartime experiences, through a new repertoire of fashionable morality.

A LONG-​T ERM RELATIONSHIP Now a cinematic icon of wartime sacrifice and stoical self-​control, the plot of Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean (based on a play by Noel Coward first performed in 1936), needs little rehearsal, but it is the political potential of the film as a propagandist parable of postwar austerity fashion and consumerism that this chapter is interested in. Film historian Pam Cook suggests that the dislocated temporal narrative served to arouse in a middle-​class audience a sense of mourning for a pre-​war world now gone forever –​but describes how it was unpopular with a working-​class audience who dissolved into fits of giggles at the outdated stereotypes of British sexual and social morés portrayed.55 Antonia Lant too argues that the film conspicuously reinforced the class rift in its portrayal of the social mores and problems of affluent, pre-​war middle-​class life while the film’s staging, props and costuming visibly worked to maintain class differences. Considering the film was released a few months after Labour came to power with promises of a new kind of democratic affluence, Lant concludes that it is unsurprising that, ‘this kind of representation might alienate the largely working-​class audience’.56

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The heroine Laura Jesson, famously played by Celia Johnson, appears in a dowdy wardrobe of dated utility styles that by the time the film released, Cook suggests, was clearly and deliberately anachronistic. However, seen through the lens of postwar rather than wartime realism, alternative interpretations of lovable or laughable utility styles, and of fashionable pre-​war middle-​class bodies frozen in time, emerge. Anachronism operates not merely to evoke a pre-​war world of plenty either lost or never enjoyed, but to problematise the continued contemporary deferment of desire as a crucial part of Britain’s reconstruction. In its costuming and characterisations Brief Encounter aligned simplicity of line and quality of cloth with a distinctive national identity that held fast on the home front and could be exported. Laura’s wardrobe was the embodiment of an understated unique design aesthetic vindicated by the wartime service of a British fashion industry and its consumers. According to the critics, the national distinctiveness of the film was largely achieved through the ‘honesty’ of its characterisation and non-​ fetishised appearance of its leading players, whose lack of manufactured glamour and austerity clothes were seen to positively reinforce essential differences between British (high) and American (low) cultures.57 British and French designers were now working in parallel within the means at their disposal to move away from the severity of wartime styles. There was an overwhelming desire for change not only in the visual appearance of clothing but also in what that clothing stood for.58 Nascent British, American and French postwar fashion industries all sought to promote qualitative differences and build on differently interpreted creative, political, economic and social gains made over the course of the war. Paris salons no longer had access to the fabrics and yardage afforded by the Nazis, stocks of virtually all staple fabrics were nil and French textile production was running at only 14 per cent of its pre-​war levels.59 Vogue’s assessment of the Paris Spring Collections in 1945 concluded that ‘[a]‌ll houses desire a basically straight look to the skirt, but the poor quality of the fabrics and the constant cycling enforce fullness (sic)’.60 When war broke out, the American fashion industry had immediately sought to fill the void left by Paris and seized the opportunity to produce easy-​to-​wear suits, softly draped afternoon dresses and modern, casual clothes that could be produced on a mass scale; with peace they now sought to build on this and replace France as the world f­ashion leader.61

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Initial disquiet at the extravagant styles displayed in Paris after the liberation was soon dissipated by an overwhelming desire on the part of the international fashion world to return to business as usual and the reformulation of accusations of collusion as a form of courageous resistance to the Occupation.62 It was argued that patriotism, not collusion, had motivated efforts to maintain the traditions of French couture and by wasting valuable resources rather than conserving them for the Nazis to enjoy. Such arguments (however shaky) became a standard response to the problematic negotiation of Paris’s return to the international stage and a politically expedient way of British and American industries acknowledging that full skirts and tiny waists as signifiers of a new kind of glamorous femininity were to be a key features of postwar fashion.63 The Ministry of Information believed that ‘high quality British materials combined with present standards of taste’, would ‘greatly enhance London’s importance as a centre of fashion not only for tailored clothes, but for every variety of women’s dress’.64 There were worries that continued controls would place British couturiers at a disadvantage and encourage black market activity and illegal evasion by a mainstream audience unable to control their appetite for ornamentation and superficial glamour, particularly now austerity restrictions had been lifted. A two-​pronged approach for producing quality clothing and promoting good taste abroad was adopted in line with Labour’s long-​term plans for economic recovery. British couture’s natural aesthetic discretion, combined with the use of high quality British materials and traditional craft skills, would continue to boost an export trade that over the course of the war had risen from £98,000 in 1938 to £507,000 by 1946.65 A revised Utility Scheme that incorporated innovations in mass manufacture and textile production would form the basis of a postwar fashion and textiles industry attempting to survive, and flourish in an increasingly competitive international market. Utility lines were seen to have opened up ‘English classic design’ to the wartime mass market.66 Over the course of the war, export figures for British fashion rose; Laura Jesson’s anachronistic utility costumes and furs attempted to showcase British fashions and textiles to a war weary home audience now being mobilised to support the peacetime export drive –​a task described by Vogue as the ‘second Battle of Britain’.67

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Couturier Norman Hartnell believed that the collective talents of the IncSoc might help gain ‘world-​wide recognition for clothes based on a native style and dignity’.68 Because of its isolation in the war, Paris was believed to have lost touch with demands for a new realism that had seen key British designers like Peter Russell work in factories as well as Mayfair, and couturiers like Norman Hartnell produce utility designs and ‘many of the finest industrial outfits in the country’. During the war one of Digby Morton’s uniform designs was run off every ten minutes, ‘as good looking and correct as a garment can be’.69 The limitations of constraints on cloth and ornamentation were in no way resented: ‘It falls into a plan they have already for their future. They are more than anxious to eliminate the dressy Christmas-​tree-​with-​everything-​on-​it type of dress, and to foster the classical lines of fine tailoring.’70 In a history of English fashion written just after the war, Alison Settle described the role of wartime utility designs as that of upholding British democracy and fighting the war militarily and sartorially: ‘these were the garments in which English makers had always excelled, the workers looked far better dressed than they had ever yet appeared, while the moneyed women looked much as they had always done in the open air’.71 Classic costumes, traditional ‘quiet’ tweeds and ‘soft’ wools were the staple of a pre-​war fashionable middle-​class wardrobe that the Labour government wanted to emphasise was not just a ‘brief encounter’ but a form of long-​term investment in good taste that the war and socialism had opened up to everywoman.

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4 LESSONS IN AUSTERITY: STYLING POSTWAR CITIZENSHIP THE RIGHT USE OF VICTORY One historical fact is absolutely clear, that our concentration upon material values has led us into the most appalling tragedies, and bids fair to destroy all that we value in our civilization … The more I  have seen the difficulties the more convinced I  become that the one way to their solution lies along the road of practical Christianity.1 In the film I Know Where I’m Going, discussed in the previous chapter, the costuming and characterisation of Joan Webster embodied a series of late-​war philosophical dilemmas about the nature of democratic consumerism as central to the reconstruction of a fairer, healthier and better Britain. The tensions and problems apparent in Joan’s tricky negotiation of differences between past and future identities cinematically narrated those faced by most women in their daily life: choosing an outfit that appropriately matched the shifting emotional, social and physical landscapes in which one found oneself. The same year, Ealing Studios released They Came to a City,2 a film adapted from another of J. B. Priestley’s morality tales, a play where

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nine men and women from all walks of life find themselves mysteriously transported to the citadel of a strange utopian city (Fig. 12). The play was adapted for the screen by Deardon and union activist and vice-​president of the ACT Sidney Cole, ‘the most notable leftist at Ealing’. The plot envisioned Priestley’s passionate belief in the possibility of social change brought about not through revolution but through the good common sense of the British people.3 Priestley emphasised that it was a play not about a city but ‘the respective attitudes of the character towards it … [T]‌hey’ve had the privilege … of seeing a city entirely owned and run by people who live in it … where everybody has a reasonable chance but no special privileges’.4 Described as the first socialist propaganda film, it presented an odd mixture of modernist aesthetics and oft-​repeated dreary reductive characterisations of various social ‘types’. Unfortunately, this was a utopian vision embodied in a nightmare of contrived costumes, made all the more visible by the staginess of the

Fig. 12  They Came to a City (dir. Basil Deardon, 1945), © ITV/​REX Shutterstock

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script and the unchanging starkly minimalist set, laid out like a chess board, that the characters wander around deciding which way to go. Poor old Mrs Barley (Ada Reeve) wears two floral aprons, the first she takes off when she finishes charring at the bank, the second she keeps on in preparation for all the cleaning she’s still got to do when she gets home. The snobbish middle-​class Strittons (Raymond Huntley and Renee Gadd) wear bland uniforms of respectability: she a dark coat and half-​veiled hat accessorised with a tightly clasped (in both senses) handbag; he, a bank clerk, wears a suitably distressed pre-​war worsted suit with waistcoat, shirt and old school tie. Sir George Gidney (A. E. Matthews), the ineffective but harmless old upper-​class twit, of course sports a battered tweed jacket and porkpie hat, while the stiffly formal Lady Loxfield (Flora Robson) wears a hideous dark costume with a high-​necked ruffled blouse and rows of pearls to symbolise an austere Queen Mary-​like pre-​war generation. Her spinster daughter Philippa (Fanny Rowe) is tightly buttoned up in a tailored tweed costume and sensible shoes in contrast with the wisecracking brash ex-​waitress Alice (Googie Withers) in slouchy pleated jacket, open-​necked shirt and simple utility-​line skirt. Joe, the darkly brooding working-​class hero who, it is hinted, has fought in Spain, mans the barricades in a black wool ‘peacoat’, a zip-​necked leisure shirt, corduroy trousers held up with a thick 4-​inch belt that, along with the inevitable boots rather than shoes, all proclaim his proletarian credentials and those of British neo-​realism. As with much neo-​realist output, the audience was invited to contemplate two worlds that denied the very sense of individual agency and potential for personal transformation that radical change was supposed to bring about. Clichés and finger wagging rather than a beckoning invitation to emulation inflected the narratives of such explicitly propagandist offerings. It is unsurprising that they failed to appeal to audiences –​by accurately representing what the ‘ordinary man or woman in the street’ actually looked like and in failing to understand what they might want to look like. War weariness inflected the popular mood. Eve Cavendish, writing in Good Taste, pleaded for a move away from wartime stoicism: ‘surely the time has come to call a halt to the charming and convenient custom to wear peasant scarves, refugee shawls and what-​have-​you?’5 London collections (for export only) were evidencing the demise of

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the pencil-​slim silhouette, so long the staple of fashionable wartime looks; a trend for softer, fuller, more feminine clothes with ‘romantic touches’ was emerging.6 Angular lines, lean, cylinder-​like silhouettes, and ‘hardwearing’ textiles like tweed were being variously softened with rounded revers and jacket edgings, soft satin blouses, and ‘Peter Pan’ collars; a new sense of ‘fullness’ was evoked in belted skirts and coats that emphasised a narrow waist through the addition of inserts, gathering and pleats.7 British fashion, Vogue noted, would of course continue to export a tradition ‘of look, of line’ but one tendency was clear: ‘Hips … hips are no longer flattened, forgotten, camouflaged, hidden –​or ignored. Hips are, for the first time since their drastic disappearance in the 20s, back in fashion.’8 These shifts in mood were reflected in popular culture, in luridly illustrated weekly magazines and, for example, in the notable cycle of stagey melodramas in the Victorian theatrical tradition produced by Gainsborough Studios in the later 1940s. Gainsborough’s extravagant excesses never vouchsafed historical accuracy, contemporary fashions in hair and make up merged with costumes and settings belonging to various indeterminate, ‘bygone’ ages. Nevertheless, the trials and tribulations of the films’ female characters reflected the experiences of their spectators: times of huge and radical change, the return or absence of husbands and boyfriends, desire and its denial, material and emotional loss and lack.9 Gainsborough countered neo-​realist misty Scottish islands and misty-​eyed English meadows with imaginary exotic locations, swashbuckling action and overblown emotion to equally problematise the tricky transition from war to peace. Certainly, Gainsborough created a mise en scène of opulence valued more for its fantastical quality than for any intrinsic aesthetic validity; but the studio’s representation of the essential dichotomous dilemmas that drove the narrative accurately mirrored the interpretations offered by their more lofty artistic counterparts. The costuming of Gainsborough’s The Wicked Lady,10 for example, released within months of the stoical Brief Encounter, embodied the transgressive potential of an unchecked feminine sexuality in a showy spectacle of artifice and excess: plunging necklines, feathered plumes, furs, jewels, laces, silks and satins (Fig.  13). The film’s protagonist, Lady Barbara (Margaret Lockwood), exudes a dangerous sexuality in rustling satin gowns that

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drape in luxurious ‘labial folds’.11 Colourful, flamboyant and glamorous, Gainsborough’s costumes sought to satiate rather than constrain contemporary appetites ‘hungry’ for luxury. Billed as ‘the most daring pair danger ever designed’, at one point Lady Barbara’s highwayman lover, the darkly brooding Jerry Jackson (James Mason), with obvious sexual connotations drawlingly compares her to a ‘gina (giant) meal’ that he has ‘to eat and eat and cannot stop’. Through a mix of escapism and emotion these cinematic fantasies fabricated fashionable consumerism in ways that directly referenced both contemporary desires and style trends and their denial and negotiation. Regency themes had run through the London collections for export in 1945 and included a ‘dashing violet coat’ from Siegel, belted tunics with a Russian air, ‘jackets with bellows pockets like those of an officer’s uniform and wide batwing sleeves’.12 The autumn range of designer Aage Tharp showed hats based on heraldic motifs: ‘a knight’s helmet, the biretta of a sixteenth century cardinal’ and ‘the plumed cap of a

Fig. 13  Margaret Lockwood, The Wicked Lady (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945), © ITV/​REX Shutterstock

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Tudor herald’.13 London shows reflected a trend for softer, fuller, more feminine clothes with ‘romantic touches’.14 Eve Cavendish in Good Taste welcomed the new fashions for 1946: severely plain, single breasted loose swagger coats buttoning up to a ‘modified highwayman collar’ that offered a ‘swashbuckling militarism’ and a ‘nice get-​away from the belted heavily shouldered models of which we have seen more than enough of these past years’.15 The government thought a little differently. Clement Attlee, asked by Picture Post on the anniversary of his election to power to assess the government’s success in overcoming the problems of the transition, felt that on the whole things had gone far more smoothly than was anticipated. About six million people had been demobilised from the armed or civilian forces, to the credit of government planning and the support of the British people. Of course, Attlee acknowledged, there was still a good deal of grumbling about controls, but in fact many had been or were in the process of being relaxed. The government intended to retain the essential controls that remained as long as necessary, indeed he fervently believed that there would be a public outcry if these were to be lifted and economic chaos would ensue. He concluded that serious inflation would be avoided in Britain only ‘if we are firm with ourselves’.16 Further lessons in austerity were clearly needed.

BRITAIN WILL MAKE IT The Council has no intention of organising an exhibition of ‘best sellers’; the purpose of the Exhibition is to give a lead to manufacturers, retailers and the public alike, and the judgement of the market is itself something which is capable of education and development.17 Stringent rationing had to remain in operation to weather successive economic crises and global shortages but, as planned, austerity regulations across the board were revoked as general demobilisation reached its peak in the spring of 1946. The lifting of the most proscriptive arm of wartime clothing controls was timed to coincide with the release of a new range of higher quality, ‘austerity-​free’ utility clothing

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and textiles. Top quality men’s ready-​to-​wear suits were now available priced at £8 (compared to £5 6s 11d, the top end of the old range); austerity-​free designs in women’s outerwear offered round collars, gracefully flared coats with a more pronounced waist in high quality cloth aimed at customers prepared to pay higher prices.18 Veronica Scott introduced the readers of Woman to the ‘first of the delightful non-​austerity clothes … not for export, but designed for you’, and welcomed the return of ‘those feminine touches which make them an excitement to buy and a joy to wear’. Pockets (with false and ‘true’ pleats) were ‘the big news’, jackets were cuffed, and after years of straight and narrow skirts, dresses with pleats, width and ‘swing’ were very welcome.19 A Fabian Society Quiz was published to promote the new ranges that, it declared, demonstrated both the continued advantages of postwar utility and the government’s commitment to meet consumer needs to the same high standards they had achieved during the war. The Quiz informed readers that 75 per cent of garments sold were now utility.20 This was a little misleading, since 75 per cent of all cotton-​rayon production for example had to be utility.21 However, the main purpose of the Quiz was to serve as a propaganda exercise extolling the virtues of British-​made goods to be displayed at the Britain Can Make It exhibition to be staged by the Victoria and Albert Museum later in the year. Also previewing the forthcoming exhibition, the editor of Woman urged readers to visit and assess the high quality goods that would be on offer from reputable British manufacturers. The exhibition, jointly organised by the Council of Industrial Design (COID), founded in 1944, would stop unscrupulous ‘profit snatchers’ from flooding the market with shoddy goods and brought the ‘full weight and importance of Government backing to beauty, serviceability and quality’.22 The COID, led by designer Sir Gordon Russell, saw Britain Can Make It as an important expression of the Council’s aim to reconcile good design with popular taste. Described as ‘British industry’s first great post-​war gesture to the British people and the world’, 1.4 million people visited the display of over 600 products from 1,300 British firms. ‘Queues of colour-​starved Britons, six deep, wound around the Victoria and Albert Museum … waiting patiently for a chance to feast their eyes on fabrics and materials that had come into existence since the war ….’23 Goods

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were divided into two categories: those based on existing designs likely to be in production for the next five years and those ‘of a more imaginative kind’, based on developments taking place over a longer period, using new techniques, processes and materials.24 Almost half the exhibition was devoted to British fashion and textiles output, divided into three main areas: ‘Dress’, the largest section, was devoted to womenswear (and a limited range of children’s wear), ‘men’s wear’, and ‘dress fabrics’.25 Women’s utility and non-​utility designs were displayed in large tableaux with mannequins posed ‘naturally’ enjoying country walks, taking the air in Hyde Park or shopping (Fig. 14). There was an

Fig. 14  Hyde Park Scene, Fashion Hall, Britain Can Make It, 1946, photo by COID, courtesy of VADS University of Brighton Design Archives

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emphasis on practical, durable British corduroy, wool and tweed cloth and ‘classic’ country coats and costumes. Audrey Withers, editor of Vogue (who had played an important role in selecting and promoting the exhibited designs), observed that the austerity-​free offerings of British couture and wholesale fashion industries were entirely admirable. The collections demonstrated ‘dress design in its true sense’ and seemed to have ‘recaptured the complexity of cut practiced until after World War I; totally lost in the twenties, and only gradually acquired again’.26 According to Withers, this arose from the new feeling for feminine rounded lines which really follow the contours of the body. The complexity of the clothes, that is to say, is not for its own sake or to produce an effect of elaboration –​quite the reverse but in order skilfully to set off the women who wear them.27 Wrap-​over skirts with up-​curved hems, ‘soft’ movements created from hip yokes, ‘graceful’ accordion, knife or box pleating, excellent details in piping, seaming, and welting, and interesting combinations of texture and pattern and a restrained use of jewellery all offered interest without excess. Designs celebrated their new found freedom from austerity restrictions in previously banned combinations of silk and wool, the discreet use of black velvet on collars, scalloped applique details, and fur trimming, for example ‘an occasional small collar of nutria (the fur of the coypu) to flute the edge of a black accordion pleated skirt’.28 The menswear section was much smaller and tucked away in a somewhat gloomy corner –​a spatial limitation designer Ashley Havinden sought to overcome by staging the display as a modern shop interior and incorporating a curved cantilevered stand (Fig. 15). Nevertheless, the exhibition was also viewed as an important opportunity to advertise the qualities of British design and craft skills and the stand, according to Havinden, was built around showing ‘only the selected examples typical of the clothes worn by the well-​dressed man today, or likely to be worn by him during the next few years’. Havinden justified his choice by arguing that ‘[a]‌ny attempt to exhibit outré examples would only have been misleading and would not give a true picture of Britain’s present contribution to design in men’s wear’.29 Examples, chosen by a selection committee of the COID,

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Fig. 15  Britain Can Make It 1946, men’s fashion stand designed by Ashley Havinden, photo by COID, courtesy of VADS University of Brighton Design Archives

were displayed in an esoteric series of themed bays that once again reproduced a ‘shop window’ effect but, unlike the frenzied atmosphere of the demob depot, exuded the hushed atmosphere of high-​end masculine shopping. Dismembered, headless torsos were dressed in casual shirts, V-​necked

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jumpers and zipped jackets were erected on poles, overcoats and jackets were hung from cantilevered curved stands that incorporated an irregularly shaped display board of woollen hand knitted sweaters, riding breeches, hunting toppers, boots and crops, caps, and a range of other accessories from gloves to belts and braces. Set against a backdrop of pastel sketches of models in formal and informal styles underneath which the words ‘town’, ‘country’, ‘day’, ‘night’, evening,’ appeared in relief, to offer illumination to any spectator unsure of the temporal and spatial geography of masculine good taste. British fashionable masculinity here was a very reserved and rather exclusive affair. Professor Robert Darwin in his introduction to the accompanying illustrated review of the exhibition argued: A fresh wind is blowing throughout England and is gathering force. Men and women are accepting a new scale of values, or rather, an old one, lost and rediscovered. Among these values, is a demand for beauty in our surroundings and in the things which touch us every day … A good chef will only cook well for the particular and greedy.30 A commitment to rationality remained the hallmark of a modern British design aesthetic and underpinned the overall impetus of the fashion stands, and the exhibition as a whole. Picture Post too informed its readers how important this was to Britain’s economic recovery and, of the need to continue the educative mission of good taste established in the war, it suggested: Anything which can stem the terrifying flood of bad taste and excruciating design let loose every year in Britain by manufacturers and designers with no other guiding star than profit is a blessing. Anything is good which helps to raise, instead of debauching the standards of the nation’s taste in clothes, furniture, cups-​and-​saucers, and all the objects we must spend our lives among.31 Mass Observation conducted one of their largest surveys to gauge public attitudes to design and register their reaction to the various exhibits and displays. Popularly dubbed ‘Britain Can’t Have It’ because most of the goods on display were either prototypes or for export,

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people’s responses indicated a sense of detachment and a lack of enthusiasm even for the most popular sections, the furnished rooms and ‘Shopwindow Street’.32 The survey concluded, the majority of people who attended wanted ‘more excitement, decoration and fun’; an essential gap existed between the attitudes of the design establishment ‘and the desires and aspirations of the public’.33 Unfortunately, Vogue editor Audrey Withers observed, the further one went down the scale of fashion production the more the old problem of confusing ‘liberty with license (sic)’ occurred. Withers hoped that ‘one’ was just seeing ‘the first fling of reaction …’ and concluded that it would be a sad thing if after four years of clothes that have at least been clean and uncluttered (enabling English-​women to live down their –​deserved –​pre-​ war reputation for being all bits and pieces), manufacturers were unable to replace the discipline of official restrictions by the discipline of taste.34

‘THE NEW BLOOD OF IRRATIONAL DESIRE …’ National identity figuratively articulated through the body and its fashionable adornment clearly continued to constitute a central discourse of political propaganda and cultural production in postwar austerity Britain. Woman magazine, bringing its readers up-​ to-​ date with contemporary trends, noted certain characteristics were common to the new designs appearing in Paris and London –​very square shoulders were disappearing. However, the article emphasised, a graphic comparison between designers on both sides of the channel demonstrated that distinctive interpretive differences along national lines were emerging. IncSoc member Victor Steibel at Jacqmar had taken the padding out of a new tulip-​line dress while Paquin in Paris moulded the figure with large velvet drapes; British designer Angela Delanghe’s tulle dress with soft pleated frills contrasted with Jacque Fath’s pink satin and velvet black crinoline; Peter Russell offered a smart top coat, belted and buttoned with plenty of pockets, Madeleine Vraman a coat with ‘enormous double cuffs’; Lelong (Christian Dior)

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introduced a new wraparound suit style with drooping shoulders and hobble skirt while Digby Morton’s famous suits featured a ‘classic, deep-​pleated skirt and interesting plan of buttons’.35 A luridly illustrated romance in the same magazine a week later tells the story of a young fashion journalist, Sarah, sent to London to sketch the latest designs. However, nothing seemed very inspiring: ‘there was very little new, a line here, a new button there. Austerity had groomed fashion like a well-​pruned tree. Utility had poured figures into frocks instead of putting frocks on figures’. Dressed in a smart closely-​tailored grey suit and matching pillbox hat, Sarah’s ‘body was naturally relaxed, for she had mercifully escaped the hard immaculateness of women who work successfully’ but when a red dress appears on the catwalk Sarah ‘nearly swoons’. Made from lush red velvet sourced from an old bale of fabric left in the box room of the designer’s granny, the dress combined a pre-​war extravagance with ‘a new sheen and glamour with every movement’. Sketching quickly, Sarah ‘could feel the new blood of irrational desire pounding in her veins. Her whole mind, like a magnet, was fixed on the frock … Export … Export … Of course we must export to survive, winning wasn’t enough’.36 A month later, Veronica Scott introduced the same readers to some more ‘little frocks from Paris’ and offered suggestions on how they might go about ‘borrowing the best ideas of the French fashion shows … you have read about the new lines, you have seen the pictures …’.37 Vogue reported that in Paris ‘the figure is the fashion’, sculpted by a new kind of modern corset described visually and textually in physiognomic detail. Surrealist-​ inspired photographs by Horst revealed ‘[v]‌eins of tiny wires and delicate bones make a whole new way to let a woman look like a woman … Boning in this sense is not shocking. Its (sic) 1946, supple, inspired, Paris’.38 All the Paris collections were now ‘emphasising bosoms, waists, stomachs, and derriéres’.39 Nothing was left untrimmed –​collars were fringed, lapels were ornamented with clusters of fruit, pheasant breasts and tails appeared on hats, boleros were studded with real diamonds, and everywhere there were extravagant, ‘little bejewelled (sic) hats, pillboxes and toques … tiny frothy bonnets with quills and ribbons’.40 The winds of change were equally blowing through British menswear.

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THE DEMOB BOOM Three youths of a ‘Spiv’ type have sauntered in. They are all wearing grey pin striped flannels and the ‘House coat’ type of jacket. Two of them are wearing white shirts with a vivid paisley tie, whilst the other is in a brilliant open necked sports shirt. All these have carefully cared for hair –​long, with artificial waves and a heavily greased ‘Boston slash back’ in two cases.41 At the end of the war, the trade journal Tailor and Cutter printed an abridged version of lecture by Arthur Shaw given to the American Merchant Tailors’ Design Association about the latest styles in double-​breasted full drape jackets, and printed patterns of lounge suits and overcoats to keep its readers up-​to-​date with current developments and enable them to respond to growing demand for American-​style suits.42 There was a ‘demob boom’ in double-​breasted, wide-​shouldered, draped jackets, often in lighter coloured or wide chalk striped cloths popularised in Hollywood gangster movies in the late 1930s, imported American shirts with ‘spearpoint’ collars worn with colourful or hand painted wide ties (customised to the men’s own designs and pictures) tied in a huge ‘Windsor’ knots, renamed the ‘spiv knot’, finished off with wide-​ brimmed fedoras.43 Spiv scouts and wide boys hung around clothing centres buying up demob suits for cash, which many young ex-​servicemen then spent on ‘American look’ suits, notably from Cecil Gee in London’s Charing Cross Road. Gee catered for a working-​class clientele and recognised a growing demand for styles he repackaged as the ‘American Look’. In an interview with style theorist Nik Cohn, he explained the appeal: The war had changed everything, you see. Everyone had been in khaki, cooped up until they were sick of it. So when they got out they went a bit mad. Before they were called up, they might have been as conservative as anything. But now there was no stopping them.44 Spivs were defined by fashion and dress; their attitude to wider society and their corrupting influence on other young and impressionable consumers were embodied in distinctive styles that made them immediately

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recognisable social deviants. The look was ‘pure gangster’: a trilby hat with the brim pulled down, pinstriped double-​breasted suits with padded shoulders, over-​sized collars and ‘kipper’ ties and pointed often patent shoes (Fig. 16).45 When the figure first entered popular imagination in 1944 it was representative of petty criminality and a black market trade in ‘luxury’ goods. The character was the object of much condemnation, indicating a widespread collective moral indignation at such goings on. But the spiv’s frequent comical lampooning in the press and popular culture in the late-​war period also in many ways boosted morale and continued compliance. Viewed with humorous resignation as an aspect

Fig. 16  ‘George the spiv, 21 August 1947: George Elms, a spiv’, photo by Express/​Getty Images®

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of everyday wartime life, ‘spivvery’ allowed a space for acknowledging that some degree of evasion was committed by virtually everyone. An Osbert Lancaster cartoon in the Daily Express showed a middle-​aged, middle-​class wife scolding her husband: ‘Don’t be so stuffy, Henry! I’m sure the that if you asked him nicely the young man would be only too pleased to give you the name of a really GOOD tailor who doesn’t worry about coupons!’46 Difficulties in policing the enforcement of clothing controls created opportunities for ‘legal’ evasion by clothing manufacturers pushing orders to the limit. Four tailors from Whitechapel and Hackney were threatened with imprisonment if they repeated their offences, making trousers and various other garments in a ‘non-​austerity’ style.47 The dependence of the garment trade on outside workers also created loopholes and difficulties. Attempts to control the north of England cloth trade were thought ‘almost impossible’ and it was not uncommon to see textile workers standing in bus queues with rolls of rationed cloth under their arms.48 A thriving black market trade was established after the war that used army and navy lorries travelling between Britain and Germany as transport. Smugglers would ask customers for their measurements, show patterns of cloth available, and bring the suit back in about a fortnight; a made-​to-​measure suit of best quality cloth could be bought for £12 with no need for coupons.49 The Tailor and Cutter reported postwar trends in men’s fashions were not revolutionary but reflected changes that had been progressively manifesting themselves over the last year: one-​button fastenings were finding a large following, even where a two-​button was traditionally used; jackets were longer and the fashion waist was lower down, reflecting the popularity of the drape; less-​defined fronts showed a narrower cross-​over; lapels were narrower and longer; and trousers were tighter all the way with the addition of one pleat instead of two becoming increasingly popular (the average measurement at the bottom being as little as 18 inches).50 With the benefit of hindsight, it is noticeable that in virtually every sartorial detail style trends were in direct opposition to those incorporated into the ‘free style’ suits the Labour government had so assiduously furnished to 5 million demobilised service men. The trade, however, was concerned about the effects of socialism on the high-​end trade of recent changes in the uniforming of the armed

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services, the traditional playground of upper-​class sartorial fancy. Colour was being ‘demobilised’ and the army and its uniform ‘democratised’. The article mournfully concluded that all the ‘tiny touches’ that once brightened drab lives were drifting away in a melancholy fog of sameness. Utility had joined the army and Whitehall followed ‘willy-​nilly along the path trodden but a few weeks ago by the moguls of Kingsway’. Radical changes being made were ‘not merely acquiescent to the cold God of Austerity’, nor were they instituted for practicality’s sake: Whereas once you could be elegant only if you were an officer, now you can be elegant only if you are a senior officer. The Levellers have been at work –​and all soldiers below the rank of full colonel will work and parade in battledress, and seat equally. And itch equally. And look equally shapeless … In an effort to reduce discrimination they have chosen that all the officers shall look like private soldiers rather than that all the private soldiers shall look like officers. They cannot seem to grasp that what is needed is a smarter uniform for the ranker rather than a dowdier one for the junior officers.51 As a defence against the levelling effects of socialism and mass consumerism, the upper classes and their tailors sought to emphasise their superior physical and aesthetic qualities. Savile Row, looking to re-​establish itself after the war, offered their bespoke clients elongated single-​breasted jackets with narrow sleeves and velvet collars and narrow trousers with frivolous waistcoats.52 New slim-​line designs harping back to the nineteenth century marked out the elite wearer’s status, in opposition to the demob suits of the rank and file and the flashy American gangster styles favoured by young working-​class spivs and ‘wide boys’ –​the latter two species of consumer often described as identical but whose dissimilarities the Tailor and Cutter was at pains to point out.53 Wide boys lurked furtively in dark corners of the Elephant and Castle and wore ridiculously wide trousers, short, tight, jackets with padded shoulders, and a skimpy tie –​ if one was worn at all –​draped by two exceedingly long collar points. The wide boy’s waist was ‘so suppressed as to allow a silhouette of his braces buttons to appear through the cheap material of his unusually bright blue suit’. Sartorially his influence was negligible. However, the ‘True Spiv’ found in packs around Soho and the Charing Cross Road was

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of a different breed and whose threat to the respectable trade was clear: ‘his appearance really interests him … he is “all abaht on fashion” … Unlike the wide boy, he is almost fastidious. But he does not follow fashion –​ he is way ahead of it.’54 The Tailor and Cutter noted that the wide and sloping shoulder currently en vogue was rejected by spivs in favour of a yoke-​like almost vertical style, draping so that the jacket hangs like a curtain; the wide tie knot accepted almost everywhere was replaced by a ‘Gordian Spiv tie knot’, and trousers so narrow that wearers had to point their toe to gain admittance. The trade should be at great pains to exterminate the spiv, for he was, ‘if anything, even more disruptive to the good name of the clothing trade than is that exasperating character who just doesn’t care’.55 As a counterpoint, a new exhibition Man and His Dress tracing ‘600 Years of Men’s Clothing’ opened in October 1947 at the V&A. Anthony Heap, ever keen on keeping up with the latest developments in men’s fashion, went along but found the display ‘[m]‌odest to say the most of it. Only about half a dozen sets of actual clothes on show … Still, it was all very interesting–​what there was of it’.56 A review in The Times observed: ‘[A]t another moment in time, men would be able to go and look, and emerge ‘as a generation of butterflies …’, but added with a note of regret, ‘there are coupons. There is austerity. The visitor can only go to South Kensington in a spirit of investigation and detachment, or of remorseful envy’.57 This assessment wasn’t strictly true; times were hard and rationing was still in force but fashion was, at least in terms of statutory controls, ‘austerity-​free’. Men might not yet have emerged as butterflies, but by 1947 they were definitely beginning to move beyond the chrysalis stage. The Times noted a rash of gay additions to manly chests. An epidemic of ‘canary yellow and bottle green’, and hints of brighter trousers and hats had appeared and the paper wondered if there could be a deeper meaning to such display? Was it more than just a straightforward reaction to continued austerity, the editorial asked: Is it that the men, spoiled by the easy conquests of wartime, can no longer make headway on mere mufti and must invoke the aid of brass buttons and brighter plumage? … Is this outward show in waistcoats the symptom of an inward weakness, ‘the careless spirit of the gamester’. The amber light of warning glows on new chests every day.58

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Economists, it was suggested, could try to rush the alluring gaudery out of the country ‘before it tempts the people farther from the strait-​waistcoat path’ but concluded that the rest of humanity, loving a splash of colour, would remain unpersuaded, ‘If bacon and bonuses are incentives why not coloured waistcoats?’59 The joking tone of this piece belies a less benign sense of fashionable anxiety underpinning upper-​class masculine display. Social psychologist T. R. Fyvel, in his study of working-​ class criminality Insecure Offenders, related this revolt of young upper-​class dandies in this new sharp style and curled bowler hats strolling through the West End to the need to make a proclamation ‘against the despised social levelling brought in by the Labour government and the new mass culture from America’.60

THE LEGACY OF WAR By 1947, spiv fashions and the culture of ‘spivdom’ had both begun to take on more threatening connotations. The British public had not expected rationing and restrictions to somehow disappear overnight, but two years on from the end of the war there was a gloomy atmosphere of disillusion more dangerous than mere discontent as controls dragged on with little sign of relief.61 The Times reflected that the national character seemed to be ‘suffering lamentably’ as a result of scarcity and restrictions. Persons of hitherto irreproachable character’ were graduating into crime; the evasion of what were believed to be arbitrary deprivations was the ‘slippery step’ taken ‘into the region where the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-​illusion and voluntary “fraud” ’. Being greedy and taking more than a man’s fair share was one thing; beyond this lay ‘naked theft’, and ‘this class of crime has been swollen ominously’.62 The physical and emotional problems of demobilisation and resettlement, allied with not just continued but in some instances even greater material shortages, were seen as the primary source of ordinary men’s degeneration into petty and more organised criminality. In a short-​lived cinematic genre of British ‘spiv films’ –​nine were released over a period of 14 months –​a slippage into crime was linked to a sense of general malaise around wartime pasts and postwar futures.

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Narratives centred on the struggles of ex-​servicemen to construct new identities and adapt to their changing status as civilians rather than soldiers and their return to a ‘socially disrupted world where their sacrifice is unrewarded and their status is in stark contrast to that of the black marketeers who have exploited scarcity’.63 Films like Dancing With Crime64 constructed dualistic forces of individual agency and wider social structures through similarly and differently gendered ‘other halves’ acculturated to war and its aftermath. In Dancing With Crime, moral weakness rather than outright villainy is enacted in the diverging paths taken by two veterans of  Tobruk when they return to Civvy Street. The stoical Ted (Richard Attenborough) marries solidly reliable sweetheart Joy (Sheila Sim), settles down and becomes a hard-​working cab driver; his best friend Dave (Bill Owen) turns to thieving to finance a hedonistic lifestyle, living it up and throwing his money around in London’s clubs and dancehalls. Reviewing the film, the The Times suggested that it successfully illustrated a contemporary preoccupation with the black market and ‘the more sinister and dubious ways of living indulged in both by ex-​service men and those who never wore a uniform’. However, the review also advised that Dancing With Crime should not be taken seriously as a documentary but rather a film ‘well cut to its own “spiv” fashion and authoritative in its comments on London, palais de dance, “pub”, and garage’.65 Spivs were no longer comical figures but a distinctive postwar social ‘type’, men who either had failed to make good use of the potential benefits offered by wartime service –​comradeship, new skills and knowledge, the rewards of ‘doing one’s bit’ –​or who had exploited the hardships and opportunities for evasion that war brought for their own self-​interest rather than for the collective good. The moral hyperbole that now surrounded their spectacular presence, as The Times implied, continued to perform an important function as an oppositional discourse of citizenship against which other, more appropriate versions of idealised British masculinity might be fashioned. One respondent in a Mass Observation report on ‘hat wearing’ told how he had chosen a grey trilby when being demobbed but his wife wouldn’t let him wear it: ‘the large continental brim brands the wearer as a Spiv type, so it is stored until the flash boys take to wearing the

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fes (sic), or any other headgear that may suit them’.66 Criminals and black marketeers were portrayed as weaklings reliant on a superficial gloss of excitement and glamour that real men who had served their country and seen action didn’t need. The mainstream clothing trade targeted the latter group by emphasising the positive effects of the war; military service was a source of knowledge and practicality that could now be drawn upon as a key to future success. A young man ‘looking ahead’ wanted a style that was ‘the result of the freedom that men found during the war. Leisure to them will mean that they will want to slip on a loose, easy-​fitting lumber jacket like the Adastra’.67 The same jacket –​aimed at a slightly older demobee, pipe in hand –​was promoted in terms of an ease of fit, a ‘legacy of war’ that by necessity many of the millions of men who had returned home would desire in a ‘leisure coat’.68 These ‘smart, practical coats offered ‘everything a man of action could wish for’.69 Eight young men returning from the forces to their old jobs at Austin Reed, a high-​end menswear retailer in London’s West End, were ‘given their heads and allowed to conceive some clothes styling ideas’70 for an exhibition to be staged in the firm’s flagship Regent Street showroom. The purpose was to show off new styles and gauge customer reactions and, according to Douglas Reed, director of the store, ‘to dispel the illusion that this country is rapidly going down-​hill. Rather let it be said that our young men have definite ideas about the future’.71 Opened by Sir Stafford Cripps, the exhibition ran for a month, during which thousands of people visited. The garments, with a few exceptions, could have been sold many times over, particularly the updated versions of the traditional Norfolk jacket in blue lovat hopsack.72 Over 500 garments were shown, ranging from jackets and two-​piece ‘safari’ ensembles, to a one-​piece suit of underwear in sky-​blue rayon and ‘the old Cossack’ pyjamas in bold stripes, to ‘picture blue’ hats, berets in small check patterns, and a beach suit in an outstanding ‘native warrior design pattern’. All the designs incorporated aesthetic and functional aspects of battledress: side pleats running the full length of the jacket from the yoke, buckles at the side to allow for comfort, fronts with closed pleats, and belted waists. Various items of military kit, such as suede ‘desert boots’ and battledress blousons, were appropriated and transformed through the use of contrasting colours, patterns and materials. Creating great interest at the

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show was ‘an evening ensemble in midnight blue based in design on the British Army’s battledress’. With a silk-​faced shawl collar and buckled waistband, it offered a comfortable style that seamlessly bridged the gap between ‘the battleground and the ballroom’ (Fig. 17).73 At a number of levels, the link between wartime pasts and peacetime futures operated as a key conduit in the development and expansion of the postwar menswear market. The demands of military

Fig. 17  ‘From battleground to ballroom’, The Outfitter Export, July 1947, image courtesy of the Emap Archive at the London College of Fashion Archive, University of the Arts London

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production impelled creativity and resourcefulness on the part of manufacturers to improve the styles and ranges of affordable good quality clothes aimed at a popular market.74 Textile and garment manufacturers sought to capitalise on innovations in production and in textile technologies made during the war. For example, Ventile, a new kind of ‘breathable’ fabric similar to Grenfell cloth, was developed by the British Cotton Industry Research Association (known as the Shirley Institute) and dramatically improved the survival rate of British servicemen. These far-​reaching developments were paralleled in the USA, particularly with regard to the use of synthetic fibres; both these advances would transform the postwar sports and leisure clothing market.75 The exhibition at Austin Reed featured a golfing suit made of nylon that could be folded up into an envelope and carried in a pocket.76 An advertisement announcing the return of the Windac jacket (a multipurpose lightweight weatherproof blouson) declared: ‘A thing has to be good when the Services use it … Now here it is for civilian wear … a simplified, idealised version of the official Government Airborne Smock.’77 A Cravenette raincoat in water-​and rot-​proofed cloth that had offered comfort and security to paratroopers about to embark on bombing raids and mountain troops in high altitudes needing slipovers with ‘parka’ hoods now kept demobees like ‘Driver Allen of 77 Bedford Road, East Ham, London’ dry. After five years’ driving trucks he declared: Weather … I’ve had all kinds … I’m back in my old job now as a tally clerk at the docks. But I’m still out in the open every day, wet or fine. It stands to reason that I’m sticking to ‘Cravenette’.78 Demobilisation had exposed some of the pitfalls of attempting to style ideal citizenship by political example, but clearly the effects of the war for good or ill were for one reason or another ever present in people’s lives. The war and its sacrifices continued to serve as the backdrop against which progress could be measured by different social groups with different and differently fulfilled expectations of what peace would bring. A whole generation of returning young male consumers of all classes sought to channel their desires into new expressions of fashionable masculinity. London’s Charing Cross Road became a mecca for demobees seeking spiv fashions and American style clothes. Influences on fashions

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and style trends, as they had always been, were multifarious. Recalling his return to civilian life in South London after the war, Len Perry remembered turning his collar up and wearing a cravat, likening the style to that popularised by spitfire pilots and airmen in wartime popular culture. Pictured on a weekend cycle ride taken soon after being demobbed, Len wears a polo-​neck sweater tucked into belted flannel trousers. His hair is carefully styled and he holds a pipe (Fig. 18). When asked about this very stylised look Len recalled the importance of the pipe: It was a lot of old swank. I never enjoyed the pipe. But it was the thing to have. I mean, we all had pipes goodness knows why. And we used to say ‘Puff, puff. What have you got? I’ve got ‘Nosegay’ ‘Have you? So try this one’ [referring to different types of pipe tobacco]. That sort of set it off [the look]. You know … And I think we probably tried to impress the women as well … And that’s how you were. And I think you were recognised as that sort of bloke.79

Fig. 18  ‘That kind of bloke …’, a recently demobbed Len Perry, c. 1947, image courtesy of Len Perry

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There were still shortages, and rationing and numerous clothing controls in some degree were still in force, but so too was the power of consumer agency. For mainstream consumers what was affordable, accessible and available might also be aspirational. Rarely if ever acknowledged as a fashion-​forward social grouping or initiators of style trends, upper-​ working-​and lower-​middle-​class men like Len and his group of friends and girlfriends constituted a younger generation well placed to capitalise on gains made before and after World War II in terms of raised standards of living, better and more secure paid work, better holidays, and greater access to home and car ownership. Society was still in a state of flux but demobilisation was virtually complete and austerity restrictions on women’s clothing lifted: there was the feeling that the wheels were turning and things were beginning to change. In her feminist history of women’s lives in the twentieth century Ruth Adam, a novelist who worked in the Ministry of Information during the war, describes the desires of ordinary young consumers for such change after the war: To them, Labour MPs who lectured them about wearing ‘sensible’ clothing, suitable for productive work, were the same breed as the women officers who had rooted them out of doorways where they were having a goodnight kiss, and sent them back to camp, and as the forewoman who had shouted at them for spending too long in the Ladies while Russia was waiting for aeroplane parts. Now they did not have to listen to lectures about hard work and freedom any more, but could think about being feminine and glamorous.80 Design and cultural historian Angela Partington argues that clothing restrictions and attempts to educate consumers and ‘train affluence’ such as the Britain Can Make It exhibition in fact provided a fertile terrain for the material expression of more transgressive forms of class difference. The legacy of wartime controls combined with welfare reform and full employment had created the conditions by which new consumer skills could be articulated in new ways; a postwar fashionable dynamic evolved, stimulated by the consumer’s own capacity for symbolic investment, to which marketing industries responded.81

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In government propaganda and much popular cultural output, ideal citizenship was stylised, employing a tired series of sartorial clues that formed a recognisable wartime repertoire of conspicuous fashionable morality pointedly incompatible with pre-​war notions of glamour and luxury that, even by 1944, were being reformulated as the foundation of postwar aspirational consumerism. Between the end of the war and the introduction of the New Look, Pathé News highlighted the shortage of mill girls in Bradford, ‘a serious matter for all of us’, and reported on the efforts of one woollen manufacturer to attract them by putting on a fashion show to give ‘workers a look at some of the smart clothes made from the wool they weaved’.82 Famous designers had joined in the scheme by sending some of their latest creations in wool and well-​known mannequins to wear them, and girls in the factory were also given a chance to act as mannequins. In the clipped accents of the Pathé News voice over, the show was a great success: ‘all their folk turned up to see them. Ay, we’re a rare do and there’s plenty of talk going round in Bradford which shows there’s still a lot of common sense left in Yorkshire’. The designs on show were very uninspiring and the patronising tone of the film was not unusual, but rather typified a propagandised version of childlike working-​class women, unreliable in their attitude to work and feckless in their consumerist desires. Partington’s work evidences how working-​ class women did not need to be persuaded to consume, nor did they need to be educated in how to consume;​they needed the mass market to provide new opportunities for the expression of their desire to consume. Professor Darwin, in his introduction to the Britain Can Make It, was right; postwar consumers were particular and greedy for new designs –​ just not necessarily for the plain fare the Labour government, the British design establishment and British cinema thought they needed. Lessons in how to dress for austerity, as the imminent introduction of Dior’s ‘New Look’, the focus of the next chapter, was to make only too visible, were never a one-​way exchange.

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5 AUSTERITY AND AFFLUENCE: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE NEW LOOK WHY NEW? All the new lines were OLD FASHIONABLE.1 The New Look rightly casts a long shadow over the history of fashion after World War II. In 1947, the House of Dior’s debut collection c­reated an overtly feminine silhouette with nipped-​in corseted waists and long, full flowing skirts reaching to the ankles. Nostalgic and backward looking, Dior’s New Look Corolle line gestured towards a more leisurely ­elegant age that ‘suited the gloomy, decadent romanticism of the times’.2 Fashion journalist Marjorie Beckett in Picture Post described Dior as ‘a season ahead of everybody else’.3 Beckett’s alternately indignant and gushing exposé of the latest controversial Paris fashions was illustrated with numerous examples of extravagantly full evening dresses, elegantly boned corsets and from Lelong, ‘crippling’ long hobble skirts. Five Parisian seamstresses were shown sewing the hem of an afternoon dress with an 18-​ inch waist and an enormous skirt of almost 50 yards of material, which for British women ‘would require the hoarding of coupons of several years’.4 Yards and yards of pleated tulle were used for evening crinolines, layers of petticoats rustled under ankle-​length taffeta afternoon dresses,

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and even Dior’s tweed suits and coats shockingly ended a mere ten inches from the ground. Paris had launched a fashion ‘straight from the indolent and wealthy years before 1914’ upon a world lacking the materials to copy it, and upon women with neither the money to buy, the time to enjoy or ‘in some designs, even the strength to support [these] masses of material’.5 The purpose of this chapter is not to add further evidence that Dior’s look was not exactly new. Both Paris and London were reprising romantic themes that had heavily influenced couture collections in the late 1930s. Paris fashion had continued to evolve during the period of Nazi occupation, drawing on historical themes and ‘patriotically’ producing extravagant silk gowns with huge yardage.6 By the end of the war London collections, too, were already trending away from a slim-​line machine aesthetic towards historical flamboyance and military motifs. After the Liberation, Paris had tried to make simpler, casual clothes on the new ‘American lines’ developed in the war, but American buyers were not interested in paying extravagant prices and heavy taxes for models similar to those already being made in New York.7 Dior’s New Look was new in assertively staking out a place in a postwar global fashion arena with clothes that in their proportions, scale and luxury reclaimed the primary status of Paris in the craft-​based couture hierarchy.8 Dior’s defiance of austerity was a carefully calculated challenge to both a purist British pre-​war and wartime aesthetic and its American easy-​to-​wear alternative equally looking to regain or newly establish their peacetime couture credentials. The desire to be feminine and glamorous was not suddenly reinvented in 1947. Rather, Dior’s carefully timed debut provided a distinctive and recognisable form upon which the idea of peace could be hung. A young British woman who attended the unveiling said she heard the sound of a petticoat rustling for the first time in her life; it was then she realised that the war was over.9 Janey Ironside, a young student (and future head of the Royal College), likened her first meeting with the new style to the feelings invoked by ‘a new love affair … a new look at life’ and an almost fairytale ending to the war: ‘Women had the chance to transform themselves from Cinders to Cinderella.’10 The New Look, design historian Angela Partington argues, effectively signalled the end of World War II for the majority of women in Britain.

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The style stimulated the opening up of a range of high fashion commodities marketed specifically for mainstream consumers in possession of a power now seen as essential to capitalism’s survival. Dior introduced a revolutionary design ‘whose impact extended far beyond the hallowed environs of international couture houses to a new body of working-​class women consumers in Britain’.11 This new vista of consumerism did not offer an illusion of a classless society, but neither did it simply reinforce already established class relations, ‘Rather it transformed the material relations between classes, and altered the conditions, means and processes through which class struggles were to be conducted.’12 This chapter examines the New Look and its impact on the wider trajectory of postwar style trends in Britain in the context of the difficult transition from war to peace. From the start, ‘the Look’ on and off the catwalk in Paris as well as London always encompassed a multivalent and mobile set of meanings. How were these contradictory impulses embodied in fashionable consumerism at the high-​end and on the high street and a symbolic signature style itself constantly evolving along gender, class and generational lines?

‘JOIN THE REVOLUTION GIRLS!’ On a bus in the rush hour when a few people were allowed to stand a girl in a long, swinging, tightly waisted garment got off and the conductress said, ‘Now Queen Elizabeth has got off there’ll be more room for the rest of us’.13 Nineteen forty-​seven was a hard year for Britain and British consumers: freezing weather, a fuel shortage, a balance of payment crisis, import cuts, further reductions in the ration, and increased shortages. Shoppers in Oxford Street were pictured trying on hats by candlelight because of power cuts (Fig. 19). Nancy Matthews, wife of the American Ambassador to London, recalled: ‘[P]‌eering through the glass peephole of the boarded-​up windows broken by bombing, little could be bought, not as before because we lacked the means, but because we did not have the coupons.’14 It is unsurprising, therefore,

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Fig. 19  Shopping by candlelight, power cut in London’s Oxford Street, © Planet News/​ Science and Society Picture Library

that the introduction of the New Look initially provoked a torrent of patriotic criticism. Sir Stafford Cripps (President of the Board of Trade) urged the British Guild of Creative Designers to reject the trend; women Labour MPs spoke out against its attack on women’s freedom. Mabel Ridelagh (Ilford) denounced the ‘over sexiness’ of a style that confined women like ‘caged birds’ and Bessie Braddock deemed it ‘the ridiculous whim of idle people’;15 political commentators like ‘Critic’ commented on the sheep-​like mentality of women in following this ‘uncomely’ new fashion; journalists like Jill Craigie (wife of Labour MP and future PM Michael Foot) felt that if the New Look prevailed, it would widen the gulf between the classes rather than continue the breaking down of barriers that it was believed the war had brought about; the ‘well-​to-​do would find the labour and the means to renovate their wardrobe while the majority of working girls would not’.16 A deputation of small and large manufacturing firms went to speak to the Board of Trade about a

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possible ban on longer skirts. Somewhat ingenuously (considering the only very recent lifting of austerity restrictions on women’s outerwear), the Board declined, arguing that even in wartime controls had allowed a high degree of discretion to individual makers-​up.17 Perhaps the government believed that the public’s ‘inner austerity’ could be relied upon. A Mass Observation Survey carried out in 1947 to gauge public opinion found that three-​quarters of the members of the National Observer Panel were hostile to the style.18 Vogue acknowledged that fashion had changed fundamentally, but believed England would ‘not partake of it very far or very fast for the present’.19 The responses of the readers of Picture Post were swift and for the most part, condemnatory. ‘Three Dissatisfied Typists’ from Nottingham were appalled at the ‘unhealthy’ and extravagant waste of material; another contributor, signed simply ‘Disgusted’, suggested the style desecrated motherhood, ‘one of the sacred things left in the world’, in imitating ‘a pregnant look purely for fashion’. ‘An ordinary housewife’ called for a boycott to demonstrate that women were not slaves to fashion, and a Mr Rannel from Liverpool labelled the fashion an example of ‘criminal stupidity’ that should be made illegal. ‘Six short skirts, Liverpool’ were equally outraged at the ‘ridiculous, stupid looking idea’ and suggested their own  –​and strangely prophetic  –​ form of protest. They resolved to put up their skirts for every inch of longer skirt introduced in England and didn’t care declaring: ‘even if, in the end, we are showing our stocking tops and panties … Join the revolution, girls’.20 Amongst this outpouring of righteous indignation, a letter from Mr Alan Sutcliffe offered probably the most accurate assessment of the style’s immediate impact on fashion-​conscious British consumers. There was no need for girls short of money and coupons to get in a bother about long skirts; they knew they were ‘jolly well … going to wear ’em and like ‘em’. With careful attention to detail Mr Sutcliffe, anticipated the strategies the fashion-​conscious would adopt: … run upstairs and start at once unpicking that fawn coat with the spiv shoulders, and bring out the little fur fabric jacket which every one of you possesses, and by combining the two you can have a full-​skirted coat of the fashionable cut, with oodles of fur fabric

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round the hem and the dinkiest little peplum protruding from the rear. To get the fashionable swing, tuck in those little spiv pads from the shoulders underneath the peplum. Oh, and don’t forget to ask mother for that old velvet tea cosy. Squash it out of shape, stick a feather duster on one side and wear it on the back of your head and you’ll look ravishing. Alan C. Sutcliffe, Guildhall Chambers, EC2.21 In September 1947 Harold Wilson, newly appointed as President of the Board of Trade and Britain’s youngest ever Cabinet Minister, was filmed at home by Pathé News relaxing in an armchair, pipe in hand. Asked whether he favoured a ‘short or long skirt policy’, Wilson replied that of course he had his own private views on the style but that, so far as the Board of Trade policy was concerned, stood exactly where Sir Stafford Cripps stood: ‘At a time like this when materials are necessarily so short, I think most people would agree, there’s no sense in making skirts longer, and if people do there’ll be fewer of them.’22 Stringent rationing was still in force (and would remain in some form for some years) and utility continued to constitute a vital strand of Attleean economic policies. Nevertheless, a year on from the introduction of ‘austerity-​free’ womenswear, with general demobilisation largely completed and with various controls and Clothing Orders being lifted or simplified, what the Board of Trade termed ‘stylistic licence’ continued to flourish. The propagandist rhetoric of ‘trained affluence’ was well rehearsed by the 1940s, but as Mr Sutcliffe predicted, so too were strategies of individual and collective consumer agency and commercial enterprise. Those who could afford to do so –​in terms of cash and coupons –​and those reliant on their own resources all swiftly adopted the New Look style. Working-​class women transformed Dior’s new silhouette into a hybrid style by appropriating it for work and for leisure, ‘not to uphold distinctions between the two but to undermine them’.23 A mix of practicality and glamour found material form in cotton frocks in loud colours and patterns accessorised with romantic large-​brimmed hats and ankle-​strap shoes that disrupted concepts of good taste and of the upper classes as its sole arbiters. Symbolic and sartorial hybridisation disrupted the distinctions between fashionable desire and utilitarian

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function that were the foundation of institutional strategies to structure working-​class preferences and choices into stable and politically expedient demands. Partington argues that the ‘inappropriate’ mixing and matching of style influences rejected utility’s durable heavy-​duty wools and tweeds and demure cotton frocks symbolic of a middle-​class desire for domesticity promoted by the government and the British design establishment.24 The New Look was a site of conflicting meanings, but its transformational properties were part of a much more complex clash of ideals than that simply waged between glamour and utility along class lines. Sladen argues that it is too simplistic to think in terms of a battle that the New Look somehow won: ‘[G]‌iven time the industry was well able to produce designs using Utility fabrics and based on skirt lengths and curves that had so startled Paris in February 1947.’25 The dresses that appeared in shops were perhaps less dramatic than couture models, but they were affordable and accessible; surveys revealed that a majority of consumers questioned were in favour of retaining utility because it guaranteed low prices.26 The Utility Scheme was always ‘a collection of hybrid forms and practices made manifest at particular moments’.27 For a number of reasons utility fashions should not be seen as the New Look’s polarised ‘other’: either by choice or necessity utility was the means by which many consumers across classes and generations in Britain appropriated the Look and made it their own.

‘… VERY SIMPLE BUT OF THE TYPE THAT MOST YOUNG GIRLS COULD WEAR AND AFFORD’ Assessing the potential role of utility in the postwar modern clothing industry in Britain, economist Henry Wadsworth described the type of consumer that, to be successful, utility had to appeal to: ‘Miss Seventeen’ bought a new pair of ten-​ shilling shoes every month and three or four cheap frocks a year out of her wages, living at home. She had a new look every season. Who are we to judge her strategy and say that she must have a worsted costume but no party

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frock and no beachwear? Some desire to live showily and wastefully is found in all periods and all classes of society.28 The mainstream mass market that emerged in the 1920s, Wadsworth argued, was one whose desires had to form the blueprint of the Labour Party’s plans for continued clothing controls. Innovations in mass manufacture of clothing and synthetic fabrics had evolved alongside greater demands for new democratic freedoms. Accelerated by chain and department store distribution and by cinema and the expansion of the women’s weekly magazine market, there was a shift of emphasis from durability and quality to ‘style, variety, and cheapness’, and modern transient styles particularly aimed at young female, working-​class consumers.29 A rapid turnover of styles and fashions for all occasions and seasons was promoted in advertisements, magazines and cinema whose consumption was made possible by stores such as Marks & Spencer Ltd. The ready-​to-​wear market grew exponentially in volume and market prominence in the 1930s, particularly in America. The effects of the Great Depression began to ripple out to all classes of consumer. New York developed a distinctive style that incorporated sportswear designs into a multifunctional, interchangeable wardrobe that could be expanded and updated with new colourways and style variations each season.30 Marks & Spencer Ltd’s reappraisal of the traditional relationship between manufacturers and retailers led to a ‘hands on’ approach that cut out the wholesaler and facilitated negotiations on price, quality and, eventually, design that set the company apart from its competitors. A dialogue was established between the store’s own textile experts and those of its suppliers and the benefits were passed on to consumers in terms of guaranteed better value for money, from 1928, by the St Michael label and a fixed ceiling price of five shillings for all clothing.31 Simon Marks had learnt from American entrepreneurs the importance of creating imposing, spacious premises that reflected the prestige of the shop and its consumers, whatever the price of goods on display.  The store introduced its hallmark green and gold fascia in the 1920s and the new shops opened in the 1930s were elegant, bright and well lit with oak floors, walnut panelling and wide aisles.32 The flagship Pantheon store was opened in

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Oxford Street in the 1930s and by 1939 there were 234 Marks & Spencer Ltd stores nationwide, with a total of 44 miles of countering.33 Simon Marks and Israel Smith drew heavily on innovations in technology and design in the American ready-​to-​wear clothing and retailing industries where fashionable, easy to wear, and multipurpose separates and lightweight dresses had established an important stake in an increasingly important younger mainstream market. During the war, after watching Gainsborough Studio’s contemporary melodrama Love Story,34 a young chemist assistant remarked: I think can honestly admit that no dresses have ever attracted me as much as those worn in Love Story by Margaret Lockwood. They were very simple but were of the type that most young girls could wear and afford.35 In the late-​war film, famous concert pianist Lissa (Lockwood) abandons the classical music circuit and seeks refuge on the wild Cornwall coast,having been diagnosed with terminal cancer at an army medical. Escaping the constraints of her past life, Lissa discards the business suit she wore on stage in favour of a variety of simple cotton frocks. Faced with imminent death, she is free to express her ‘true’ self. ‘Shirtwaisters’ and button-​through belted frocks in practical fabrics like cotton and rayon were a staple of wartime utility designs aimed at a younger generation of consumers. Easy to wash and wear and available in an almost infinite range of colour and patternways, the style was seen to convey an attitude of youthful practicality rather than sophistication and ‘an ingénue, girlish feel’ suited to busy active wartime lives. Women were ‘beginning to take advantage of an evolving sense of aesthetic freedom within dress, where new combinations and configurations were justifiable in the name of austerity’.36 The ‘very simple’ cotton frock remained ‘what most girls wanted and could afford’. Its ubiquity and an overwhelming focus on the cylindrical square-​shouldered costume in wools and tweeds that has come to represent the wartime utility aesthetic has sidelined its significance to the postwar textile industries and British fashion on the high street. With some justification, the British clothing and fashion trades put the real success of utility down to the innovations and advances made

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by textile technology, mass manufacturing and retailing expertise aimed at a popular market in the 1920s, which they believed the government had exploited, at best undervalued and frequently disregarded. The trade had always been resentful that the Board of  Trade had gone outside the clothing industry to find designers for mass-​produced utility clothing lines. The Couturier Scheme attracted constant recognition and raised the profile of utility but produced designs that needed amendment to make standardised manufacture on a large scale possible and profitable and the Board of Trade recommended experimentation with fabrics to see what worked before embarking on a long run.37 Throughout the war there was little consultation between the Board and industry as to the advocacy of various legislative changes and amendments to Clothing Orders, little notice was given of such changes, and the timing of announcements seemed governed by political rather than pragmatic commercial considerations. Helen Reynolds challenges the assumption that the Couturier Pattern Scheme was a major influence on utility production. The Utility Scheme forced manufacturers to rethink their designs not as a result of IncSoc’s m ­ inimalist templates  –​of which there was very little take-​up in the trade  –​but because economic survival dictated that they change. The scheme provided a rigid structure of pricing and enforced policies that cut profit margins to a minimum. Allied with the Board of Trade’s Designated List of suppliers, made up of factories that used mass production methods, firms were forced to shift to make long runs of more garments of simpler styles.38 The cotton frock offered the most flexible of utility templates that, combined with advances in manufacturing process and textile technology, allowed constant style modifications in response to the tastes of mass consumers and transients fashion trends. Cotton rayon production was not disrupted by the war, as was the case for other textiles, and throughout, blouses and dresses were the focus of the mass manufacturing trade’s exploitation of loopholes in austerity specifications. These garments, as they had been since the 1920s, were the product of innovations in manufacture and textile design that sought to create affordable, fashionable style trends for young working-​class consumers and an emerging mass market. Responsive to transient style trends and influences, and above all affordable,

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utility cotton rayon dresses were not the ‘heavyweight’ investment that ‘classic’ designs in wool and tweed represented. It is not surprising that they formed an important part of postwar trends in mainstream fashion and arguably served as the foundation for popular versions of the New Look. Over the course of World War II, the aesthetic ideals of a British design establishment were incorporated into a socialist vision of a new kind of fashion democracy and circulated through a discourse of egalitarianism that failed to acknowledge the power of mainstream consumer agency to shape what this might, and should mean in terms of style and style trends. Many of the popular light cloths that were the staple of pre-​war working-​class wardrobes had been needed by the services, and substitutes, sometimes ‘rather stodgy for their purposes’, took their place. Now free from austerity restrictions and the more implicitly coloured conceptual constraints of wartime morality, lightweight cotton production offered improved finishing and colourfastness with little increase in cost. The facility to offer a range of opportunities for both producers and consumers to adapt style trends and utility specifications to postwar desires and pockets assured the place of the printed cotton rayon frock in the vanguard of popular fashion choice and change for a younger home market.39 Mrs Edwards, a young customer in the late 1940s, recalled buying a Marks & Spencer brand Marspun dress with the ‘CC41’ mark from the Dudley store and wearing it when she first met her husband-​to – ​be: ‘I loved that dress and wore it many times’ (Fig. 20). The government had invested heavily in textile design during the war, encouraging leading artists such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, and Feliks Topoloski to produce designs for clothing and furnishing fabrics and a variety of propaganda scarves that were enormously popular. Innovations in reproducing intricate designs and vibrant fade-​resistant colours on long runs of mass-​produced cotton rayon provided a constant source of new trends; for example ‘picture frocks’ that could be seen as ‘complete “canvases” for landscape vistas, city scenes, story-​book characters, portrait miniatures and figure groups … to satisfy the craving for glamour and fantasy’.40 Cheap to produce (prices of spun rayon cloth remained stable at 1s 8d per yard in 1943, rising by a mere halfpenny by 1948), it offered the consumer value for money and a great

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Fig. 20  Mrs Edwards, who worked for Marks & Spencer, aged 18, in 1948, wearing Marks & Spencer brand utility frock, image courtesy of M&S Company Archive

deal of choice. British cotton was, as far as fashion was concerned, ‘right on the 1947 map’. All the major dress collections by leading couturiers included dresses, suits and evening gowns made of cottons; shoemakers, milliners and makers of costume jewellery were all using it in their designs; and ‘when it was chosen for formal dresses in Royal wardrobes and for glamour in films and on the stage, silk and satin must step down’.41 The Cotton Board’s Colour and Design and Style Centres in Manchester held numerous exhibitions and enthusiastically promoted printed cottons as part of the export drive, aided by features in patriotic publications such as The Ambassador and British Export Magazine showing the young British royals in dresses made of British cotton fabrics designed

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by Brigitte Dehnert for Horrocks and Zika Ascher.42 The latest summer styles featured ‘[d]‌resses under 50/​-​… All utility, all mass produced, these sparkling new creations have been designed to prove that a British girl on a British budget can dress every bit as stylishly as her American cousin’. With frills and a popular ‘apron top’ the dresses were ‘easy on the eye and kind to the pocket’; a wrapover ‘safari dress’ in tomato red crêpe with a bold white flower was ‘in perfect harmony with that outdoor girl personality’. All the British designs featured the season’s new ‘youthful and gay’ colours, and came ‘in American sizes’.43

NEW LOOKS, NEW LINES, NEW LIVES We live, we have always lived, in our own way – ​we have not even been particularly conscious that it is our own way … The Britain of this year is way-​of-​life conscious. Or perhaps, better, conscious of the desire to know what this ‘way of life’ really is.44 Recalling her first sight of Dior’s debut collection, journalist Leonora Curry noted that she had at first been sceptical about the physical aspects of translating French extravagance onto British bodies, but concluded that there was a lot to thank Paris designers for: ‘they shake us out of ourselves and force us into at least changing the shape of the mould’. However, Curry ended with a note of warning for the British fashion industry: ‘let us make sure that the mould we use next time is not a poor imitation of the original or a watered down version of French models … presented en bloc with alteration’.45 British couture and ready-​to-​wear trades responded to the New Look with new designs that offered a compromise between Parisian chic and American cosmopolitanism. A tailored London version appeared in the spring collections for 1948; it had a swagger, but was characteristically more practical with noticeably wide shoulders and a less constricted waist. Norman Hartnell’s latest designs (for export only) had dropped hemlines to ten inches from the ground and were more exaggerated in line and more elaborate in accessory and detail than the simpler styles produced for the home market, but they had ‘the same basic feeling’ (original italics) of compromise.46 For leading fashion commentator

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Alison Settle, ‘unselfconsciousness’ was English fashion’s most enduring characteristic. Settle argued: Fashion dresses thoughts when it dresses bodies … England finding it heartless to make luxury clothes for display and the social life in a world still torn by care and trouble, concentrates on clothes for the active life, for the open air and for the comfort of home.47 In an advertisement sponsored by Shielana woollen and worsted fabrics, Ann Seymour, editor of Woman and Beauty, in conversation with couturier Digby Morton, discussed the possibilities for ‘tremendous elegance’ offered in ‘what used to be loosely described as “tweeds” ’.48 Morton argued that British wool was the best in the world, with wonderful draping qualities; with the right sort of designs combined with good styling its muted tones (Morton disliked ‘any crude colours for clothes’) would ensure Britain’s place in international fashions.49 The timeless quality of a uniquely British minimalist design aesthetic and the durability of homespun textiles were promoted as marketable assets that could be deployed to counteract the foolishness of sections of the manufacturing trade slavishly copying French models. Leonora Curry suggested that ‘with American buying and copying from the French as well, the business of exporting fashion will be almost as difficult as carrying coals to Newcastle’.50 Curry advocated that the trade should target women between the ages of 30 and 40 who had learnt the art of moderation and ‘did not expect the impossible in the fitting room’.51 The older, more mature clientele of London couture initially viewed the New Look style, with its emphasis on youth and glamour, as one inappropriate and unsuited to their age and shape. Designs were modified and adapted to styles modelled on a ‘womanly’ figure and the advantages of corsetry began to be appreciated by older women consumers in Britain –​a consumer group who enjoyed a short spell of prominence when Vogue created a fictional character, Mrs Exeter, to promote more sombre, toned-​down interpretations. British couture’s more discreet version of Parisian flamboyance reassured a traditional middle-​and upper-​middle-​ class customer base that remained an important source of revenue for the high-​end international trade and for the government’s precarious balance of payments (Fig. 21). A continued emphasis on high-​class quality

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Fig. 21  Digby Morton and Angela Delanghe, wool suits, 1948, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion

of cut and cloth was incorporated into designs that were a mix of tailoring and practical femininity, with flattering longer skirts and a discreet amount of padding to shoulders marketed to appeal to more mature or conformist sensitivities through the use of terms such as ‘sophisticated,’ ‘poised’ or ‘soignée’.52 Dior radically modernised haute couture by pioneering a system through which manufacturers and retailers could sell an ‘Original-​ Christian-​Dior-​Copy’, garments made from paper patterns produced under licence. Just a month after the House’s debut, exact drawings and reproductions were allowed to appear.53 Ready-​to-​wear became the means by which many international couture houses survived, by diversifying into a changing top-​level end of the market and existing customers suffering hardship after the war particularly in England, where they faced crippling taxes.54 The idea of an affordable elegant upper-​ class chic was also heavily marketed at a mid-​range, department store

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clientele with ‘good taste’, willing to pay more for good quality, a sector whose custom the new and improved austerity-​free utility ranges were also looking to secure. The recently formed London Model House Group (LMHG), representing the interests of 14 top-​quality firms such as Berketex, Deréta, Dorville and Matita, assumed an increasingly prominent position in the British home market. Pathé News reported crowds of shoppers ‘who never have time to see a real mannequin show’ gathered outside the window of a big store in Oxford Street to watch a fashion parade: ‘the typist with only an hour for lunch, the housewife up in town for a day’s bargain hunting … this way everyone gets a look in at the New Look Styles on offer’.55 In the spring of 1948, Deréta offered New Look grey flannel suits that were hugely popular; in one London store 700 were sold within a fortnight.56 Ailsa Garland, later editor of Vogue, wore one in Regent Street and recalled that ‘never in my life have I caused more heads to turn. It aroused as much interest as the first mini-​skirts’.57 Advertisements for brands with a reputation for refined but fashionable styles featured heavily in magazines like Vogue but also the more popular Woman (read by one in three women in the 1940s and 1950s). Woman magazine offered patterns for the ‘New Line’ of cotton frocks that were Right up-​to-​date … pretty, easy-​to-​wear and easy-​to-​make … specially designed for the home dressmakers who want the new fashion look in wearable lines … Small waists, nipped in by a belt; a rounded hipline accentuated by fullness or pockets or a peplum, and the slightly longer skirt. Readers who were a little reluctant to wear the full-​length skirts were advised to cut the dress fairly long and acclimatise themselves to the new length by gradually letting down the hem to, say, mid-​calf.58

CHAIN STORE DEMOCRACY The over-​valorisation of the New Look as a revolutionary high-​end fashion moment free from historical influences and divorced from pre-​ existing style trends, and the telescoping of the Utility Scheme into a

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misguided idea of clothing controls as entirely a wartime phenomenon, have overshadowed the continued importance of utility production in disseminating ‘new looks’ at every level of the market. The New Look style for all kinds of consumers was a multivalent space of mediation through which desire for change and for glamour could be fashionably realised. Sladen argues that the Utility Scheme was never a once-​and-​for-​all set of government specs and quotas, nor did it ever remain the purist austerity aesthetic discursively circulated throughout government and popular cultural propaganda. Utility and the New Look of 1947 were not opposites, but examples of the same trend –​the spread of fashion to an ever-​widening market –​a market served by the chain stores’.59 A series of Pathé News films in 1948 promoted the latest utility styles, mixing and matching the design influences that the scheme now incorporated. A Utility Fashion Show, held in Selfridges and aimed at younger consumers, promoted a comfortable outdoor look for autumn with a long check blanket cloth coat, a large-​check belted wool suit with peplum jacket with ‘pussy bow’ blouse and full skirt, a jersey jumper suit with narrow pleated skirt, and a tweed check golfing suit with plus fours and socks.60 For those on limited budgets, Vogue suggested a range of smart utility fashions ‘Chosen to Play Many Parts’:61 wool dresses with elbow-​ length sleeves and gathered skirts by Deréta and Dorville and other smaller manufacturers like Dalstyl, Brilkie, Lyndale –​all available at leading department stores across Britain.62 Wool and wool mix utility costumes, coats, jackets and lighter dresses, skirts and blouses conformed to a neat and perky aspirational aesthetic that mixed and matched different influences to suit contemporary tastes (Fig. 22). Utility was incorporated into a patriotic rhetoric that emphasised the qualities of British cloth and British manufacturing and its role in putting industry and the nation back on its feet. A Mass Observation survey investigating attitudes to utility published in 1948 found the public largely supportive; just under 90 per cent had bought utility goods in the last year and felt they offered reasonable quality at a fair price, and a majority were in favour of standardised styles if it would keep prices down.63 Utility, while inextricably linked to wartime austerity, had kept pace with changing circumstances and style trends, particularly in popular ranges sold by multiples such as Marks & Spencer Ltd (Fig. 23).

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Fig. 22  Dorville royal blue worsted utility suit, 1950, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion

The production of utility clothing contributed to the greater part of Marks & Spencer’s turnover, which virtually doubled in the period between 1945 and 1948.64 Marks & Spencer Ltd had, on balance, benefited from the war. There had been a sharp decline in turnover following the introduction of controls in 1941 and through huge shortages, quota restrictions, and, for example, the store’s major suppliers having to switch production from men’s and boys’ trousers to army battledress and trench coats.65 However, the war accelerated the scientific and technological progress already made in the British textile and clothing industries in the 1920s and 1930s. Marks & Spencer Ltd built on its pre-​war strategies of investment in textile technology linked to new

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Fig. 23  Marks & Spencer brand cotton rayon, floral print utility frock, c. 1947, image courtesy of M&S Company Archive

American approaches and kept its eye firmly on postwar expansion. The store established a merchandising development research com­ mittee in 1943 and continued to place technical innovation and consumer choice at the centre of its retailing philosophy. A new laboratory was set up in 1946 to keep abreast of ‘the wonders of nylon’, plastics and other revolutionary materials that enhanced Marks & Spencer Ltd’s reputation for affordable, desirable fashions. At the cutting edge of

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mass manufacturing and modern retailing, the store began selling nylon stockings and nylon waist slips around 1947, and a large range of nylon lingerie followed. Drawing on the lessons learnt from the manufacturing, retailing and pricing strategies impelled by wartime production and the Utility Scheme, the merchandising department was re-​organised into three sections: cloth buying, colour and print, and technology.66 Postwar austerity offered a multiple like Marks & Spencer Ltd new and profitable opportunities for expansion: total selling space was more than doubled and the introduction of synthetic fabrics was integral to selling fashionable good taste and value for money to a middle-​class customer as well as to the company’s long-​standing working-​class customer.67 The reconstruction of the business after the war, the advances made by the Utility Scheme in long run production lines and quality control were combined with the development and marketing of modern styles exploiting synthetic fibre technology. This meant that Marks & Spencer was able to introduce new kinds of fabrics at a far greater pace and standard of quality than their competitors.68 Advances in the mass manufacture of cheap, good quality cottons and rayons in a huge variety of colours, patternways and designs was arguably the means by which the New Look was modified and adapted to a range of budgets, needs and desires, not least those of the aspirant postwar working and suburban lower-​middle classes.

MY GENERATION Oh Mother! … This is my generation … We’ve earned the right not to have a career if we don’t want it. If we want to get married and have children and darn men’s socks, surely we’re entitled to it?’ Some of us want that. If we don’t want it we can be anything, but if we do want it … why I’ve earned the right to have a home and children. Mother darling, I’m going out tonight to get myself that little house and those children if I’m lucky. THE END.69 On the front cover of Woman, a beautiful young blonde secretary in blouse and pinafore top looks up from her typewriter and smiles; on the back cover a fashionable young housewife in high heels and a frilly

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apron advertising the meat extract Bovril is juxtaposed with a glamorous, sophisticated woman, ‘lithe and graceful as a leopard’, in an ocelot fur coat and matching hat promoting Snowfire cosmetics.70 As in the war, postwar austerity did not simply impose a rigid ideology of femininity dressed up in new clothes; rather, an ambiguous landscape of constraint and escape that could be navigated through the exercise of female agency. Resettlement Advice Bureaux had been opened up all over the country to help ex-​service women find jobs and give advice on opportunities for postwar occupations. An article in Picture Post explained how Selfridges, the top-​end London store, was working with labour exchanges interviewing women and girls who were ex-​officers and non-​commissioned officers who had shown ‘marked ability in other kinds of war work’. What could been the same capable woman shown four years earlier interviewing girls like Celia in the propagandist film Millions Like Us (cited in Chapter 1) was now shown hard at work finding a Miss Joan Quinn ‘a job that suits her’. Joan was 24, the daughter of a doctor in West Kensington; her lack of previous experience in shop work was no hindrance, in fact it was seen as preferable, ‘she had nothing to “unlearn”, none of the “we-​didn’t-​do-​it-​like-​that-​at-​Blank’s” attitude towards new ideas’. Personality, manner, appearance, and health were all taken into consideration, as were ‘ambition and enthusiasm’.71 After being medically examined and declared fit, Joan was taken on as one of Selfridge’s new ‘floating staff’ where recruits experienced every department so that they could fill in when and where they were needed. Each new entrant underwent staff training every morning for ten days in company policy on dress –​‘simple and black’ –​and behaviour –​no smoking during working hours. The article goes on to show Joan learning how to dress a window; selling perfume to a naval officer and then demonstrating a little kayak to him in the sports department; enjoying a spell in ‘costume’ and a day among the toys; and finally taking part in the PT classes organised for staff on the roof, where she is shown enthusiastically skipping in shorts and high heels.72 Feminist critiques of a postwar ‘return to domesticity’ make clear the continuing power of patriarchal authority and the political dimensions of institutional systems of inequality in Britain based on traditional notions of class and gender. Many women believed that the war

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had expedited demands for new kinds of democratic and social freedom and their long-​term fulfilment, but women’s wartime service was swiftly incorporated into a traditional patriarchal discourse of idealised femininity that defined the gender-​biased parameters of its postwar expression.73 Deals had been struck between the TUC and the government that women’s taking over men’s jobs was premised on this being only for the duration of the war. The Control of Employment Act 1945 ensured women took second place at the Labour Exchange and reinforced the assumption that there was an unproblematic classification of gendered job types. There were regular meetings between government ministers and the editors of women’s magazines to propagandise women’s war work, and this collaboration continued with the new Labour government.74 For ‘career women’, i.e. those employed in the professions, the Civil Service, or teaching for example, the marriage bar was still extant –​work and marriage were regarded as polarised alternatives. The government and wider society discouraged mothers with young children from working; nursery places were severely limited, private care was very expensive, and moral panics around juvenile delinquency and the ‘problem family’ were linked to ‘latch key kids’ in popular culture and political and social commentary.75 However, shortages of labour and the desperate demands of social and economic recovery meant that the Attleean administration had to attempt an ideological juggling act, promulgating the idea of homemaking as a career while attempting to recruit women workers urgently needed for the reconstruction. The government made a special appeal to ‘the only large reserve of labour left’ and women were encouraged to take on work in factories, agriculture, hospitals, domestic service and transport to fill the gap. This effectively defined the limits within which women’s employment was understood: temporary, part-​ time, unskilled, poorly paid, and not disruptive to traditional divisions of paid labour.76 The high marriage rate in 1945 and the baby boom that followed seemed to confirm that women sought a return to domestic life, but in fact over three-​quarters of married women wanted to continue in their jobs after the war, a good 10 per cent more than their single colleagues.77 The Central Office of Information launched a campaign to recruit women workers, who were needed to boost production –​at least

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75,000 were wanted in the textile industry alone, the ‘heat was being turned on Mrs John Bull’. Women with previous experience and school-​ age children were seen as the likeliest recruits; it was not contemplated that women with infants ‘should put aside their duties as mothers’.78 The home and motherhood, its management and planning was idealised as a career for aspiring women of all classes. The beneficiaries of the new welfare state, full employment, improved standards of living and new advances in modern life would make housework and washing easier, which meant that when their children were older women would have the time and desire to take up or return to jobs as an emotional and financial supplement to their domestic duties. The number of married women working outside the home increased considerably and there was an unprecedented demand for part-​time work. Married women and mothers were not debarred from paid work in the same way as they had been before the war, and despite a strongly marginalising rhetoric that positioned women as central to the maintenance of family life, ‘there had been a redefinition of what that meant: the housewife was now a financial as well as a moral, material and emotional cornerstone’.79 Dolly Smith Wilson argues that women were beginning to see work differently than they had before the war. Work outside the home was recognised as important both for mental well being and as an important source of extra income to provide goods and leisure activities for their own and their family’s enjoyment that were otherwise out of reach. This, of course, reinforced man’s role as breadwinner and the patriarchal status quo, but it does not necessarily mean that women were passive receptacles of gender ideology in the early postwar period, nor should women’s motivation for part-​time work contribute to its continued debasement by being categorised as mere ‘pin money’.80

JANE’S DAY: WORK, REST AND PLAY The underlying pronatalist rhetoric of women’s work remained: this was a temporary post until a better offer came along, but the choice between paid work and homemaking and motherhood was discursively extended by means of a series of intersections –​temporal, spatial, physical, social

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and emotional –​by which conflicts between the two could be successfully navigated. The New Look was seen as a radical release from and a return to more traditional feminine ideals; the mythology that surrounded these two antithetical impulses was sustained by a shared ideological and material dialogue of feminine agency and irrational desire expressed through a continuum of roles ‘on’ and ‘off’ duty by which modern womanhood might be performed and displayed. Garishly illustrated romantic short stories were the centrepiece of every issue of popular women’s magazines like Woman. Virtually without exception these tales of postwar aspiration narrated the turbulent experiences of young career girls –​journalists, fashion designers, ‘confidential’ secretaries –​who finally achieve success or a career breakthrough only to give it all up for love. Such narratives were reinforced by dualistic images of characters ‘before’, fashionably dressed in businesslike blouses and tailored costumes, and ‘after’, now transformed into a glamorous ‘other’ in swirling pastel coloured ‘sweetheart’ lines or ‘gaily coloured’ romantic frocks. Britain had its own real life version of a fairytale romance with the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth in 1947. The royal princesses had followed contemporary trends and adopted versions of the New Look; Princess Margaret and Princess Alexandra had both placed orders with Dior, to some public criticism by Labour politicians, and Elizabeth, although remaining faithful to Hartnell and Amies, also switched to longer-​length costumes and dresses. Veronica Scott and a Woman’s fashion artist gave readers ‘a closeup of the Royal Wedding clothes’ in 1947: ‘The style has very classic lines; the bodice with its deep sweetheart neckline fits closely and the graceful width of the skirt is achieved by brilliant cut.’81 Designed by Hartnell, the emphasis was on cut rather than yardage to create amplitude, acknowledging the need for continued constraint and the egalitarian sharing of resources. Even the future queen had to fashionably reconcile desire and duty. For her bridal journey, the Princess was to wear a ‘mist blue crepe dress with diagonal fastening topped by a softly tailored coat in velour cloth’ and a ‘little beret hat’ in felt with a grey ostrich plume cockade.82 Good Taste, a magazine aimed at the younger female market, published by Weldon’s (who had pioneered popular women’s weeklies featuring paper patterns in the nineteenth century with the publication of Weldon’s

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Fashion Journal), featured Jane, a well-​dressed girl, following her ‘round the clock’.83 First, arriving at work ‘bright and early’ Jane is ‘pin neat and pretty … in a slickly tailored wool frock’ in a warm shade of rust (Fig. 24); then, stepping out at lunchtime, Jane wears a misty blue, smart ‘nip-​waisted’ coat with ‘a generous swing to the longer skirt’. After work Jane ‘goes out to play in a printed frock gay as her own mood’; softly gathered up over the bust with a series of butterfly bows, a tied waist, and a matching ribbon, the skirt ‘descends with a whirl to the new ballet length’.84 A balance needed to be struck between being charming and feminine; ‘flighty bows’ and frilled blouses, or ‘costume bracelets clunking away at your wrist’ were unsuitable. Of course, it was important to bring a little prettiness about the place, but a successful ‘office personality’ meant that make-​up, hair, clothing, speaking voice, smile were all as valuable to the boss as ‘high-​speed shorthand and infallible filing’. Anne, another example of Good Taste in the workplace, was as ‘practical as a column of figures’ in a crisply pressed, spotless, navy frock from Susan Small, with a plain Peter Pan neckline and ‘a simple, checkered bow-​tie (sic)’. When Anne went out after work she teamed this with a little boater covered in the same material as her tie, matching gloves, and a navy handbag.85 ‘Neat’, ‘classic’, ‘tidy’, ‘crisp’, ‘smooth’ were all adjectives used to describe women’s working attire and make clear the spatial and sartorial boundaries of working femininity. To further emphasise a culture of constant surveillance, illustrations deployed a repertoire of poses of women at work poised expectantly, holding a telephone, notebook, diary, pen, or umbrella, looking up from a desk, seated on a stool or office chair, ankles demurely crossed. In contrast, ‘gay’, ‘bright’ coats and cotton frocks that ‘swirl’, and above all ‘swing’ defined the schematic ‘freedom’ of off-​duty looks. Vogue suggested to its female readers that there was now no longer one style but Freedom in Fashion … Necklines were high, low, round or square. Skirts, ballet to mid-​calf. Sleeves, long or short. Coats huge as a tent or close-​shaped as an hour-​glass. Jackets can be fitted or boxy; basqued or straight. Skirts can be slim as a pole–​or widely pleated.86

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Fig. 24  ‘Jane’s Day’, Good Taste, March 1946, © Time.Inc (UK) Ltd

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The important thing ‘in these days of planning’ was a scheme ‘whereby as many garments as possible play as many parts as possible with absolute perfection and not just as unrehearsed understudies’.87 The war was over but, sustained by an emphasis on individual choice and agency, the classed and gendered politics of rational consumption and inconspicuous good taste continued to exert a powerful ideological force. How long the British people were willing to buy into it was open to question. Demobilisation and the rapid dissemination of Dior’s New Look exposed cleavages between the Labour Party’s desire to democratise high-​minded aesthetic ideals and consumers’ and manufacturers’ own democratic ideals of fashionable modernity. Despite the undoubted success of wartime controls, socialism’s implicit assumptions around ‘good and bad’ taste linked to ‘good and bad’ citizens and consumers obscured the essential impetus of popular style trends as a two-​way generative process. Once general demobilisation was almost complete and the postwar dust had begun to settle, the prolonging of wartime controls and even greater shortages created a frustrating feeling of stasis for the mainstream trade and its consumers symbolic of past sacrifice with little as yet in the way of reward. From the government’s perspective, evidence that consumers appreciated utility’s durability and quality as guaranteed prices confirmed a belief in the political potential of rational consumerism and that the benefits of minimalist design and ‘honest’, high quality materials had acculturated and raised mainstream standards of taste. In the midst of ensuing economic crises, the continuation of wartime controls seemed justified and the mantra of fair shares that had shored up voluntary compliance during the war adapted to the changing aspirations of peacetime austerity and Labour’s mandate for reform. Fashionable desire motivated by moral as much as solely material gratification was something that could be successively both physically rationed and psychologically rationalised for political ends and the collective good. Continued state intervention was a feasible policy choice: a necessary part of a commitment to establish a socialist society rather than return to inter-​war Conservative capitalism, which was held to have been responsible for working-​class poverty and mass unemployment.88

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6 AUSTERITY AND ASPIRATION: A BOY, A GIRL AND A BIKE

‘LET US FACE THE FUTURE’ On the first day of the new Labour parliament, the London Evening Standard pictured a young man in a pale suit representing ‘The People’ striding ahead into a sketchily defined rugged landscape signposted ‘To the Socialist Era’.1 Social geographer David Matless analyses how the rhetoric of planning and social reform redeployed the iconography of surveillance and anticipation that characterised preservationist literature before the war to create a new visually coded moral geography of postwar citizenship. By its very nature, reconstruction was an inherently spatial project: ‘[E]‌nvironmental and social visions were necessarily combined … as part of a cultural movement seeking a design for modern life.’2 The portrayal of the act of looking ahead towards an as-​yet-​undefined point on the horizon  –​what Matless defines as ‘future gazing’ –​allowed a new mapping out of different classed and gendered subjectivities. Outdoor leisure and recreation in particular became synonymous with idealised concepts of postwar democracy expressed in terms of a British countryside seen as the symbol of individual freedom and the affirmation of ‘liberty’ –​a

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common possession that broke through class and social boundaries.3 Matless observes: In the shaping of leisure policy after 1945 we have an ecology of pleasures whereby people and their practices are mapped in a necessary relationship with particular environments, and –​in the case of those not recognisably part of an open-​air culture –​are not to take themselves or their practices into other environments. There they would simply offend others and be incapable of taking meaningful pleasure themselves (by contrast, a rambler could not be an offensive presence in a seaside resort). A principle of meaningful access implied that if one, for example, enjoyed loud music and saucy seaside humour one could not connect spiritually to a hill.4 At first sight, leisure was not a top priority for the incoming Attlee administration in 1945. As Jeffery Hill observes, it featured as little more than a footnote to the visionary policies outlined in Labour’s election manifesto, ‘Let us face the future’.5 Legislatively, leisure took a back seat, but philosophically its reform was at the forefront of Labour’s reconstructive agenda. Concepts of rationalised leisure and fashionable consumerism were married to policy objectives that mapped out socialism’s plans for economic recovery and welfare reform. Labour Research Department memoranda argued that a socialist policy for leisure was essential a ‘decisively important’ part of socialist policy to help the citizens of Britain to live full and varied lives … Socialism is an attitude to life as a whole, not merely that part of it spent in work … the aim of socialists has always been wider than a mere change in the ownership of the means of production.6 In an environment where most had repetitive work and lived in the ‘sordid disorder of ill-​planned’ towns it was unsurprising that they sought the warmth and comfort of cinemas and pubs and escapist entertainment. Rising star and keen hiker Barbara Castle (MP Blackburn) felt that the Party had to show that the task of reconstruction was ‘something bigger than just ending queues and raising pensions and wages’;7

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socialist doctrine was based on ethical principles and to become a socialist entailed a fundamental transformation in an individual’s values. Enhanced morality and the achievement of higher levels of wealth were connected in a dialectical way, ‘the fairer distribution of the “national cake” would encourage workers to increase productivity’.8 The ‘authenticity’ of the British countryside had emerged after its wartime duties as a wide-​ranging discursive fudge into which different versions of a reconstructed British society and its citizens could now be poured. In May 1948, Hugh Dalton, President of the Rambler’s Association, set off on a Saturday morning for a three-​day tramp across the Derbyshire Peaks with his Parliamentary Labour colleagues (Arthur Blenkinsop (Ministry of Pensions), Capt. Julian Snow (Lord of the Treasury), Fred Willey (MP Sunderland), G.R. Chetwynd (MP Stockton-​on-​Tees) and Barbara Castle (MP Blackburn). Arthur Blenkinsop was pictured ‘speeding ahead like a greyhound’ while the diminutive figure of Castle plodded along ‘beneath a great rucksack’.9The prioritising of long-​term gains over instant gratification, the concept of correlatively productive work and rational leisure, and the benefits of fashionable moderation all constituted a heady ideological brew.

VISIONS OF UTOPIA: A BOY, A GIRL, AND A BIKE A study looking at The Enjoyment of Leisure produced by the Policy Committee of the Parliamentary Labour Party10 sought to outline government strategies for improving the health and welfare of the nation. Much emphasis was placed on moving away from a more proscriptive wartime approach to one where work and leisure would operate in tandem: through careful planning, opportunities for improvement would be made accessible through a diverse range of amenities as a necessary incentive to increased industrial output.11 The problem for the Labour Party, however, was in envisioning such amenities without resorting to the vulgar, tacky strategies so successfully employed by the commercial leisure industries. The cover featured a pen and ink illustration of three sharply dressed spivs, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, loitering around a pinball machine. Conflicting

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understandings of the codification of working-​class pleasure according to middle-​class concepts of respectability constituted a perennial dialogue within socialism. The irrational desires of the working classes and their reform was synonymous with the British labour movement’s always tense relationship with the profits of industrial capitalism.12 If driven by a philanthropic impulse to improve the physical and spiritual condition of the workers and urban poor, then regimes of ‘improvement’ suppressed the ritualised amusements that were an essential part of traditional community life and sought to regulate their pleasures through coercion.13 Finding appropriate ways of occupying idle hands expediently incorporated ideas around wellbeing into new constitutional imperatives and socio-​economic policies whose aims were to produce and reproduce a healthy citizenship in the context of bourgeois capitalism and its powerful hegemonic discourses.14 Socialism’s historical response was effectively a two-​pronged ‘substitutionist’ or ‘statist’ approach.15 A substitutionist approach proposed a range of alternative cultural forms that would emerge from within the Labour movement itself; a statist approach looked to the agencies of state and municipal mechanisms to provide leisure and recreation facilities better than those offered by commercial interests. Trade unionist and more radical socialist activists focused on generating an alternative working-​class culture outside of popular commercial interests and capitalist exploitation.16 Idle enjoyment was not explicitly censured; rather the virtues of healthier but equally pleasurable forms of leisure and fashionable consumerism that were morally and economically more rewarding were to be encouraged. The romantic British comedy, A Boy, A Girl, and A Bike17 offers a typically heavy-​handed allegory of such a vision, told through the experiences of the young men and women of the fictional Wakeford Wheelers Cycling Club. The atmosphere of a Britain on the very cusp of a new era while still in the throes of austerity inflects the class and gendered relations played out through the cycling metaphors that constantly and literally drive the propagandist narrative. The film opens as the Wheelers appear on the horizon and make their way at speed down the winding stonewalled moorland road with first the Fells and then the chimneys of Wakeford, a fictional Northern mill town, providing the dramatic

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backdrop. Ostensibly the story of the problems various club members face in establishing a new life after the war, the subtext of the screenplay by left-​leaning writer Ted Willis makes evident how central ideals of productive work and active leisure were to propagandising socialist economic and cultural policy objectives. The focus of the film is the love triangle that develops between working-​ class engaged couple Sam Waters (Patrick Holt) and Susie Bates (Honor Blackman) (Fig. 25), and the wealthy dilettante David Howarth (John McCullum). In the opening sequence, the three meet when David’s old Bentley breaks down –​much to the amusement of the Wakeford Wheelers, whose jolly descent en masse back to town had been rudely interrupted by the car’s honking horn as it pushed through on the narrow moorland road. Susie pauses to wryly suggest that David gets himself a bike; David is immediately attracted and watches admiringly as she pedals off in her pert little shorts and neat club cardigan. The rivalry

Fig. 25  Honor Blackman and Patrick Holt, A Boy A Girl and A Bike (dir. Ralph Smart, 1948) © ITV/​REX Shutterstock

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that builds between Sam and David for Susie’s affections serves as a way of working through wider issues of class identification and social status. In his pursuit of Susie, David’s almost seamless transformation from Bentley driver to club cyclist ratchets up the tension to hammer home class differences. David exudes an easy confidence, and his ability to swiftly assimilate what he sees as the quaint styles and mores of Wakeford life into his suave romantic repertoire undermines the value system on which they are based. Sam and Susie both work at the mill, and their reputations as skilled workers and exemplars of intergenerational advance within the local working community are emphasised throughout the film. Susie is shown at work singlehandedly operating her own very complex loom, while Sam’s supervisory role and status in the industrial hierarchy is made clear as he sorts out a problem with Susie’s machine and wipes his hands on an oily rag rather than soil his crisp foreman’s overalls. Susie’s self assurance and competence present an ambiguous modern feminine identity that mirrors Sam’s characterisation as the quiet but determined skilled engineer and club captain. In contrast, David’s occupation –​if he has one –​is never referenced; he is the son of a rich businessman. His father speaks with a broad northern accent, indicating the industrial source of the family’s wealth, but this only further emphasises David’s lack of any practical skills other than charm. David accidentally knocked Susie off her bike when taking his car into town, and David and Susie head for the cycle repair shop where he looks on with incredulity as the latest new model catches her eye and she knowledgably comments to the shop owner: ‘I like the chain set. I don’t think I’ve seen fluted cranks like that before.’ Later in the film he is shown as unconcerned when unable to even tighten a wheel nut (Sam has to do it for him). David is clearly used to buying his way out of trouble and relying on other people to sort out his problems. A Boy, A  Girl and A  Bike attempted to portray Labour’s aim to create a new technocracy figuratively. The restrained dignity of highly skilled manual workers and the expertise of professional managers and technicians were seen as vital to Britain’s postwar production drive. Martin Francis argues: The monumental task of economic and social reconstruction post-​ 1945 stipulated quiet efficiency rather than anti-​social aggression of

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showiness … The rebuilding of Britain required a disciplined and purposeful workforce … Those who failed to appreciate the serious task at hand –​the feckless, the work shy, the plutocratic ‘parasite’, the black marketeer and the ‘good time girl’ received short shrift.18 A new figure emerged after the war, that of the ‘technocrat’ whose occupational status encompassed managers, skilled engineers and technicians, planners, architects and draftsmen, economists and scientists –​‘doers’ rather than ‘thinkers’.19 Since the late nineteenth century participation in outdoor ‘rational’ leisure activities such as walking and cycling had offered an arena of pan-​class status recognition and display. The link between physical and social ‘mobility’ was endlessly adaptive to commercial exploitation and changing economic and social conditions.20 Young men and women on the latest bikes, singly, in couples, and in groups, cycling for sport, or as part of a club, offered a formulaic visual and textual repertoire of aspiration that took on a new fashionable and socio-​economic valence in the late 1940s.

THE TECHNOCRATS J. B. Priestley, writing in 1941 in a Picture Post special issue on reconstruction, argued that ‘the policy-​makers, the planners, the intelligentsia, the readers of Penguin Specials, everyone with an emotional stake in the condition of the people’ would hold the key to the building of a New Britain.21 Priestley railed:‘They do not manufacture fifteen-​inch guns or Spitfires down at the old family place in Devon. It is industrial England that is fighting this war ….’ The old world of deference and an aristocratic ‘Old England’ portrayed in films was gone; it was a war of machines and of the men who make and drive those machines.22 Writer and influential social commentator George Orwell similarly believed that a ‘new indeterminate class of skilled workers’ would be the ‘directing brains’ of a new England … technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, ‘the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-​concrete age’.23 After the war, a technical middle class grew ‘very fast indeed, much faster than the also expanding “old” professional middle-​class of doctors, lawyers, or indeed administrative civil servants’.24 A  Fabian pamphlet

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examining the nature of class in postwar British society concluded that many workers in the light industries were: … less truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer … To that civilisation belong the people who are most at home in and most definitiely of (original italics) the modern world, the technicians and the higher paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.25 Sociologist Mike Savage suggests that the figure of the technocrat offered a distinctly modern, alternative middle-​class identity that legitimised the need for new markers of social status, but without recourse either to more worrying contemporary manifestations of working-​class incursion or to kowtowing to the forelock pulling that characterised old beliefs in the superior standing of the British aristocracy. Based on a detailed analysis of Mass Observation directives addressing issues of class identification, Savage argues: ‘Rather than early forbears of affluence and the rise of welfare marking the end of class identities, we can see their reworking around different motifs and values.’26 The ambiguity of the technocrat offered an expedient compromise. For the traditional middle class, it allowed a new sense of democratic values and a new sense of themselves as active postwar citizens; for the aspirant skilled working and lower-​middle classes, it provided a way of challenging and negotiating pre-​war social structures and the assumptions of class and gender that underpinned them. Skilled technicians and engineers and a relatively well-​ educated expanding clerical class were groups well placed to profit from the job opportunities that war and the reconstruction both brought in its wake.27 Talking about returning to start work after being demobbed, Len Perry recalled: I can’t think of a better time. Everything was so new … the whole future was going to be new and better and we were going to be part of that. There was that feeling on the ground. Being in the lift trade you were part of the reconstruction. And the atmosphere on the

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building site was tremendous. They were earning money and they were going to do things you know. And again it was discipline and the whole of the building labour were ex-​servicemen. They’d fought a war and you’d meet guys that were spitfire pilots or something like this taking measurements or working in the drawing office … and prisoners of war … these were the men that built this new thing.28 Major reforms in health, social security, education and employment that were the hallmarks of Labour’s Welfare State were aimed at the poorest in society, but their effects were experienced most tangibly by that proportion of the working population that was relatively affluent, if not necessarily prosperous. Popular women’s weeklies in the late 1940s almost without fail included a feature on potential careers, opportunities for training or retraining as teachers, nursery workers, nurses, secretaries, clerical workers or hairdressers, as well as factory and agricultural workers, and shop assistants. Historically excluded from studies of social mobility, and until the 1980s classified as to social status only in relation to either their spouse or father, the importance of women workers as a generative force in modern social formations and the aspirational modelling of modern family life has been overlooked. Viewing part-​time work in clerical or traditional ‘feminine’ jobs outside of the professional or challenging solely in exploitative or oppressive terms tends to further isolate and inflect women’s own understandings and experiences of patterns of employment and consumption as secondary to ‘real’ jobs. The resurrection of London’s clerical and administrative sector after the war reshaped London and its economy; there was also a corresponding gender shift, with women providing an increased share in the workforce.29 The growth of government bureaucracy and the Welfare State required hundreds of white-​collar workers to administer and operate new National Insurance contributions, a massive programme of reconstruction and the rebuilding of a modern education system and health service. There was a shortage of teachers, Good Taste told its readers, and there were wonderful opportunities for the girl who had always wanted to become a teacher, but who had been unable to afford the training. ‘Now training is paid for with an allowance of £2 per week.’30 The War Office ran special correspondence courses for men and women in army and ATS as preparation for becoming teachers after the

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war.31 The 1944 Butler Education Act was a landmark in educational reform and one of the pillars of postwar democratic change, but its impact on adult education and the opportunities it provided for both retraining and employment is often overlooked. The provision and expansion of vocational and recreational activities for adult workers and for young adults entering the workforce was a crucial part of the act’s reformist agenda.Various classes were specially arranged for civil servants and other clerical workers in such workplaces as the LCC and the Post Office, and technical qualifications offered to employees in many large engineering firms. The LCC organised a whole range of courses, from music appreciation to shorthand, from ‘Light woodwork (women)’ to contemporary literature, and were set out in handbooks such as Floodlight or Education for Living, a Civil Service guide to classes that proclaimed: Further Education is concerned not only with the education of the classroom or the correspondence course … but with education in the sense of putting people in the way of making their own entertainment and bringing out their latent abilities for the better use of life outside of working hours.32 As a full-​time career, adult education was still seen as in the early stages of development; the greater part of the work was covered by part-​time employment, but this meant it was ideally suited to women who could teach a range of business-​based and vocational courses and leisure-​based activities such as dressmaking, cookery, and ‘Keep Fit’. The work was well paid and could be fitted in around domestic commitments. The cotton industry in which Sam and Susie both worked was of particular importance to the Attlee government and its efforts to revive cotton as a key export industry. Before the war there had been a general decline in Britain’s place in the world market for cotton and spinning and the workforce contracted considerably, and by 1945 a further 150,000 workers had been lost. A substantial recruitment drive was mounted, with posters showing a ration book suspended from a mill by a fibre of cotton with the strapline ‘BRITAIN’S BREAD HANGS BY LANCASHIRE’S THREAD’.33 In June 1947 the Central Office for Information (COI), which had superseded the wartime MOI, launched a two-​pronged campaign ‘Women for Industry’, to win over new recruits and encourage

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higher productivity from the existing workforce.34 A ‘combined morale’ strategy was agreed for a series of press advertisements featuring ‘a woman in the mills’ that emphasised the prestige of the job and its role as a vital part of the nation’s economy –​‘one yard of wool cloth exported to dollar markets would bring back 14lbs of beef in return’ –​ and pointing out that well paid young school leavers could learn a trade always in demand and earn higher wages.35 The propagandist depiction of Susie Bates in A Boy A Girl And A Bike was part of a wider glamorisation of millworkers. Young mill girls were likened to film stars in promotional advertisements endorsed by famous northern celebrities like Wilfred Pickles and Ernest Briggs (a popular racing motorcyclist): Renee Bamford, a 21-​year-​old weaver, averaged a weekly output of 1,000 yards of poplin and was described as a ‘star in her own right’. A fictional character called Sally Wright became the focus of the second phase of COI propaganda in 1949, aimed at young married women with children wanting part-​time work. Sally, described as ‘pleasant and attractive’, was married to an engineer, had two school-​age children, a sister overseas and a mother-​in-​law who was a former millworker. Invested with such qualities, the COI felt Sally could speak intelligently about the demand for productivity at home to serve the export drive while identifying with the needs of fellow women workers through personal experience.36

FASHIONING THE FUTURE Britain in the immediate aftermath of World War II was ideologically ambivalent, torn between ‘plain thinking and high living.37 Consensus politics was ever a case of pull and push. Socialist values that owed much to a masculine culture of craft pride underpinned the rhetoric of fashioning new kinds of citizens and consumers.38The interchange between productive work and leisure embodied the aspirations of a new class of skilled, ‘active’ twenty-​somethings central to Labour’s vision of new kind of classless technocracy. Throughout the war, popular participation in outdoor leisure activities had in no way disappeared; quite the opposite. Some Youth Hostel Association (YHA) hostels in coastal or other strategic areas were closed but membership actually saw a gradual and quite substantial growth.

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After the ‘cult’ of rambling and hiking in the late 1930s, YHA membership stood at an all time low of 50,000. By 1943 this had climbed to 100,000, increasing to 150,000 at the end of the war and reaching 230,000 by 1948.39 Weekend camps and youth hostelling weekends enjoyed a renaissance, encouraged by the extremely hot summers of 1946 and 1947, and became a permanent fixture in the calendar of clubs like that of the Regent Street Polytechnic Rambling Club; members who had to work on Saturdays formed their own ‘Pirate’ club, organising Sunday walks in the countryside around London and charabanc trips taking them further afield.40 The postwar Croydon YHA saw its numbers increase, and by 1948 there was a full social calendar of rambles, camping trips, lantern slides, quiz nights, beetle drives and musical evenings. Even the coldest winter on record did not deter some of the club’s stalwarts from a ramble. A group set out from Addington (South Croydon) at about 10.30 in the morning in about 18 inches of snow: Snow in quantity is apt to produce an exhilarating effect on even the normally sedate –​and this ramble was no exception! We lunched in a cafe at Biggin Hill while blobs of melting snow dripped from our rucksacks, and outside men were shovelling [sic] solid frozen blocks from the main Westerham Road.41 Young consumers like these had spent their early adult life in uniform and were anxious to make up for lost time; any opportunities for leisure were seized upon. Recently demobbed, Len Perry pictured on a day out cycling with friends in Kent (leaning forward in the centre between two girls) (Fig. 26) recalls: It was a wonderful time to be around after the War … There were all sorts of things going on. You’ve got to remember it was sort of five years’ of nothing. And then everything started happening. It was a wonderful time to be alive. The British countryside and its recreational enjoyment assumed a huge salience in the postwar popular cultural imagination. ‘Leisure’ became an emotive catch-​all phrase of postwar ambition incorporated into numerous advertisements for everything from recruitment

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Fig. 26  A bike ride to Westerham c. 1947, image courtesy of Len Perry

posters to Ascot water heaters to underpants. Those promoting the return of Dunlop tyres to the civilian marketplace reiterated Len’s and his companions’ day out in the countryside: a young couple pause beside their bicycles to consult their map in the shadow of an ancient long barn, another perch on a village bench, their tandem parked up beside them; young cyclists visiting Canterbury Cathedral are compared to Chaucer’s fourteenth-​century pilgrims.42 The freedom of walking and cycling in the open air could be exploited –​politically and commercially –​as a series of affordable pleasures through which to target a young adult market hungry for new opportunities for leisure and consumption that the Attleean government’s policy objectives sought to tap into.

A TIME OF NOT STANDING STILL This will not be a year of standing still. We shall either push our way upwards on to firmer ground, or slither downwards into deep dark marshes.43

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Austerity Britain is seen as a time of grey drab disillusion. However, as Sissons points out, austerity as a term is highly ambivalent and often means different things to different people.44 For all the talk of it as a description of a period of grey and miserable deprivation, he argues, it was also an exciting time, with a strong flavour of its own: It is difficult to recall a time when so much idealism was in the air … when TV was only a metropolitan toy, ball-​point pens a source of wonder, and long-​playing records, a translatlantic rumour … The great social experiment that was being conducted gave rise to a sense of crusading idealism ….45 Labour’s vision of modernity in 1945 was highly self-​conscious, contrasting postwar restraint with pre-​ war industrial strife and social inequality, ‘that peculiar amalgam known as Labour socialism which coalesced during the 1890’s’.46 At the heart of Attleean policy objectives was an anti-​doctrinaire stance that was seen as characterising a ‘beer, bread and cheese’ brand of British socialism with its roots in the radical non-​conformism of the nineteenth century and a political heritage stretching back to the Peasants’ Revolt. The ‘most compelling and difficult question’ facing Labour in 1945 was ‘how to make socialists?’47 The ideals of Victorian muscular Christianity synthesised in the discourse of a nineteenth-​century Rational Recreation Movement were reimagined in World War II and reformulated in the language of postwar reformed capitalism; but reconciling means and ends presented conflicting demands. It was believed a new kind of voluntarism was needed to shape new kinds of postwar consumers and voters according to egalitarian definitions of peacetime wants and needs. A typology of appropriate affluence sought to style postwar socialist society in a way that did not rubber-​stamp a return to a pre-​war conformist value system. Fashion was important in emphasising an opening up of a continuum of consumer choice and new opportunities for fashionable agency that bypassed rather than confronted prior structures of class difference but also validated the idea that radical reform and change was in motion. The film A Boy, A  Girl and A  Bike sought to map out the moral boundaries of postwar citizenship in a popular cultural form and, throughout, fashion and dress is a powerful allegorical

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impulse. For most of the film Sam wears the latest style of short zipped blouson with elasticated waist and cuffs and innovative diagonally zipped pocket, short, crisp tailored shorts and an American-​style knitted leisure shirt. This look contrasts with both dull, dependable Club Secretary Steve, never out of heavy serge shorts and a rather too small boxy blazer (a style popular in the early 1930s), and the flashy upper-​ class David in natty dog-​tooth check sports jacket and flannels –​whose self-​conscious study of the sartorial mores of Wakeford society acts as an important narrative foil. When David meets up with Susie at the dance hall he is still dressed in the clothes he has worn all day. Susie reprimands him for such informality and accuses him of not bothering to dress up because it was ‘beneath him’. David’s unintentional and clearly unfamiliar fashion faux pas is aligned with the differently motivated but equally indifferent attitude exhibited by the gang of local spivs who barge into the dance hall with marcel waved hair and showy, pin-​striped suits with huge-​collared open-​necked shirts. The cinematic point of view immediately cuts back to club headquarters in the little local café to make clear differences between under-​dressed David and over-​dressed spivs and the clean-​cut fashionable man’s man Sam, in open necked twill shirt and quiet sports jacket working away ‘after hours’ sorting out cycling club finances with poor old Steve. In an effort to win over Susie David swiftly assimilates the carefully coded conventions of the Wakeford social hierarchy: he rides out with her on an old upright bicycle borrowed from his family’s gardener, his flannels tucked into his socks. Wobbling beside Susie, who is bent down low over the drop handlebars of her up-​to-​the minute BSA bicycle, David is knocked back as Susie expresses her embarrassment at being seen with him and his old boneshaker –​she has a ‘reputation to consider’. Susie, like her fiancée Sam, articulates a quietly independent fashionable identity. Susie is neither overtly sexualised, like the Lolita-​like Ada Foster (Diana Dors), nor desexualised, like young war widow Nan Ritchie (Megs Jenkins), perpetually in an apron, who is content to make the tea and peel potatoes while others have a good time. At the dance hall she appears cool and elegant, dressed up in a crisp pale cotton frock with pearls and matching earrings. With her hair swept up into a French knot she offers a reassuringly natural but modern desirability in contrast

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to the more threatening, glamorous blonde Ada who swishes down the stairs of the palais in a strapless black evening dress and leads the spivs by the nose. The antithetical fashioning of Wakeford society is central to the film’s propagandist message. David, stung into action by Susie’s jibes, acquires a new up-​to-​the-​minute bike and cycles up the drive of his family’s ivy-​clad country house turned out in full cycling kit of tailored shorts and cotton drill hiking shirt with patch pockets, short socks and ­cycling shoes. As his family pulls up alongside in their Rolls-Royce they look askance and his sister asks: ‘What on earth have you got on?’ David replies: ‘Just off for a spin, cheerio.’ Shocked, his mother exclaims: ‘In front of everyone?’, and his sister retorts” ‘In those clothes?’ In the final scene David’s commitment to both cycling and Susie are revealed as merely passing fads that he was unable to sustain in the face of his snobbish mother’s obvious disapproval and his own superficial nature. David believed he could merely dress the part, but he couldn’t live it, nor live up to its hard-​working democratic foundations. Sam and Susie are, of course, eventually, reunited. Susie merely took a detour on her path to ‘true’ happiness with go-​ahead engineer Sam, whose natural talents have not been marred, like David’s, by over-​indulgence and privilege.

AFFLUENT AUSTERITY This must have been the outfit which inspired the down-​pointing of suits. For surely Mr Wilson himself must be terribly hard up for coupons, or he would not have worn this suit of 1934 style when he opened Alexandre’s new factory last week. We hope he’ll spend some of his coupons on a new suit cut in the 1948 fashion.48 In June 1948 Picture Post reprised its earlier cover story promoting the comradeship of the road on the brink of war in 1939. The attractive young female cyclist in shorts and crisp shirt is reformulated to appeal to contemporary aspirations, pictured with her young family on ‘A nice days’ outing’.49 Cycling and cycling clubs, the Post reported, were booming and were particularly popular with young men and women in their ‘teens and 20s; the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), and the National

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Cyclists Union (NCU) both had membership exceeding 50,000, and the NCU had shown a 30 per cent increase in the previous year. Off for a day out, young singletons, an ex-​champion racer with her husband and baby, and the cover story family all met at Wandsworth Common, where it was ‘a quick look at the map’ and off on a 60-​mile spin, easy ‘if you follow behind … as one of a happy crowd’ (Fig. 27). As in 1939 emphasis was on cycling as an activity of choice not necessity, distinguished by a unique spirit of camaraderie; if somebody

Fig. 27  ‘A nice day’s outing’, Picture Post, 19 June 1948, photo by Haywood Magee/​Getty Images®

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has a puncture everyone stops to help ‘It’s one for all and all for one –​ even the slowest’. The article concluded: Next time you hear disembodied voices floating away to silence behind the garden hedge, or find yourself surrounded by bare legs and tight shorts at a traffic halt, reflect that … [one] would have to look hard for a cheaper, pleasanter, healthier way of spending week-​ ends. Cantankerous country-​dwellers, and impatient motorists, may curse the cycle. Millions have reason to bless it.50 Supported by left-​leaning publications like Picture Post and British neo-​ realist cinema, rationality and self-​control were collective and individual qualities that continued to be prioritised by the Labour Party as key factors in social and economic reconstruction.51 However, like many people’s wardrobes in 1948, the justification of controls as a response to the war effort and its immediate effects was wearing a little thin. On the eve of Bonfire Night 1948 Harold Wilson, a year on from his appointment as President of the Board of Trade, consigned hundreds of regulations covering 60 types of commodity necessitating 200,000 permits of one kind of another to the flames of recovery.52 Wilson was well aware of the power of publicity and the announcement was timed to coincide with the traditional 5 November celebrations to appease a society increasingly hostile to continued state checks on consumption. However, despite Wilson’s theatrical gestural bonfire, controls remained an essential element in Labour Party policy objectives of planned economic management. Rather than a huge conflagration, Wilson merely reduced to ashes thousands of individual licences largely relating to the manufacture and distribution of vacuum flasks. Wilson, seen by many within the party as ‘too clever by half’, was careful to present himself as an economic specialist whose skills, honed in wartime, were particularly suited to the challenges of rationalisation. Ever the canny career politician, in response to criticism from the left he continued to advocate ‘basic’ controls, but nullified Conservative claims of communist leanings by arguing for these as the foundation of a new partnership between government and industry.53 In mid-​1948 the end of the Utility Scheme was still seen as ‘out of the question’ by Harold Wilson.54 There was some considerable

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‘downpointing’ of men’s suits, jackets and trousers, and women’s overcoats and lined suits, to appease growing public discontent and the increasing frustration of the trade. Utility, it was argued, would continue its role in levelling up quality in design and manufacture and levelling down access to well made fashionable clothing. The wartime scheme was also seen to have added value aesthetically and commercially to one of Britain’s key export trades seen as vital to Labour’s plans for economic recovery. Wilson argued that quite stringent cloth controls would remain in place until Britain’s balance of payments was healthier: Utility production was one of our great national assets and something on these lines should continue as a permanent feature of the industrial scene … The time for bad jokes about utility is long past. Our people have to come to associate it with good quality, fair prices, and a high standard of design and craftsmanship.55 The mainstream clothing trade was more circumspect. The government’s ideological investment in the couture skills of designers like Norman Hartnell and Peter Russell at the vanguard of British design were, rightly, understood as a cultural product vital to Britain’s export trade during and after the war. This had given utility an important fashionable cachet that undoubtedly aided the scheme’s promotion to an initially overwhelmingly reluctant, even hostile, public. The mass trade acknowledged that the scheme had done an excellent job in the war, and even in retrospect it was difficult to suggest improvements in relation to productivity: it had ensured provision of durable, well made clothing to all the population and enabled the release of more resources for the war effort; in standardising minimum qualities of cloth and levels of shrinkage, the CC41 mark had eliminated the poorest fustians and cheap shirtings and sheetings; long runs had simplified production and allowed borrowing between home and export output to keep prices and inflation low.56 However, the Board of Trade’s decision to retain the more proscriptive elements of utility production after the war was now cumbersome and hampering the apparatus of private enterprise and industry that had effectively made the scheme workable in the first place.57 Military production and civilian clothing needs had been well served by huge innovations in textile technology and manufacturing processes

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in the 1920s and 1930s. The development of cotton rayon transformed mainstream access to style diversity and fashion trends. Mass production methods and mass consumerism implied standardisation of choice and uniformity of design but, Janice Winship argues, in Britain between the wars this went hand in hand with mobility. Working in shops, factories and offices, the bodies of young working girls, ‘lipsticked, silk-​ stockinged’, were the site of social and industrial transformation.58 The south of England, where new industries sprung up along arterial routes out of London, experienced a period of prosperity in the 1930s; a low cost of living, increased wages and low taxes gave them greater purchasing power.59 Producers, vendors and consumers of radios, artificial dresses, cheap cosmetics, cigarettes, sweets, permanent waves, popular films, music and magazines and the new anonymous spaces of the chain store fulfilled the desires of new workers and consumers through a particular inflection of disciplinary regimes at work and at leisure rewarded through the aesthetic pleasure of consumption.60 Relative to income a significant proportion of wages and salaries could be spent on new clothes, gramophone records, bicycles, motor cycles and on leisure activities such as the dance hall and the cinema and on days out and holidays. Young men with money to spare favoured trousers with 24 inch bottoms and an inch turn up, ‘bags’ and double breasted jackets, and a ‘slick and fresh’ look that set them apart from their fathers. Montague Burton had rapidly expanded in the 1930s and was very popular with younger men, giving them a distinctive ‘City’ cut that in the trade came to be referred to as the ‘smart’ or ‘Burton’ cut: a suit with fairly broad shoulders and well-​defined waist and hips.61 Alongside this there were parallel developments in the design and production of high performance fabrics for sports and leisure. Yorkshire cotton manufacturer Thomas Haythornthwaite, for example, developed Grenfell cloth, an almost flawless, closely woven twill made of poly yarns of Egyptian cotton. Extremely light and wind and weatherproof even in high altitudes, Grenfell cloth became extremely popular when it was used for a new kind of climbing suit designed by Eric Taylor, with a detachable hood, a zipped jacket, and elasticated cuff sleeves.62 Parsons and Rose argue that the relatively high cost of these garments put them out of the reach of most consumers. However, faced with high production costs and increased competition from cheaper alternatives

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manufacturers like Bukta (H. R. Buck) progressively brought prices down and swiftly incorporated high-​end technical innovations into jackets and other equipment aimed at the popular outdoor and general leisure market. As with cotton rayon production, with the outbreak of war in 1939 production and further technical innovation were redirected to the war effort. Haythornthwaites manufactured five million yards of Grenfell cloth for all three services in the first 18 months of the war. The demands of military production only further advanced and promoted the wearable, washable, waterproof and breathable qualities of a functional but highly fashionable pre-​war leisure wardrobe ideally suited to the desires of a succeeding generation of young postwar consumers. Zipped jackets in Grenfell cloth were now advertised as suitable for ‘Alps or Links’ and illustrated with a picture of a traditional lone mountaineer juxtaposed with a young couple enjoying a round of golf. Set against the wider cultural climate of postwar aspiration, the idea of ‘climbing’ took on additional symbolic power. The horizons of ordinary working people had been altered in many different ways: the prospect of full employment and the economic and social advantages this brought were being realised in new forms of leisure and consumerism. The world had become a smaller place, brought about by the extended geographical horizons of wartime service overseas for hundreds of thousands of men and their families. The Croydon Club magazine Viewpoint contains numerous reports of trips abroad, for example a skiing holiday in Norway, as well as visits from hostellers from other parts of Europe. One of the members wrote of his excitement at the prospect of new opportunities for travel and leisure: ‘I had last seen the Hook of Holland in August 1945, from the deck of an Army leave-​boat, now here were Peggy and I, in August 1948, waiting to disembark for a cycle tour of Holland.’63 Harry Hopkins’ social history of the era of the New Look defines it as a time in which the development of social change ‘accelerated so greatly as to produce differences of kind rather than mere degree’.64 Innovations in science and technology were seen to have shaped a new kind of grassroots democracy personified in the figure of ‘the technocrat’. For Hopkins, these ‘new experts … the builders of the new world’ rendered the old class divisions irrelevant. Single-​minded, rational and motivated by the public good, these men’s skills and knowledge drove

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reforms in education, the workplace, leisure provision and participation, and in outdated systems of status.65 Men in ‘grey pullovers and grey raincoats’ whose fathers were likely to have been manual workers now filled first class train carriages en route to cities like Birmingham and Newcastle, ‘shamelessly talking in highly miscellaneous accents their unintelligible shop … They were as different from the old “professional man” as a Glasgow Scot from a Home Counties Englishman’.66 Reconstruction was a high visibility political project articulated in the language of ‘the people’ –​men and women united in a shared purpose –​realised in a timeless consensual understanding of British society as a benign meritocracy. But for all the hyperbole, fashioning a classless society was not quite as easy as the widespread currency of these paternalistic characterisations of radical social change might suggest. The Labour Party attempted to recast a nineteenth-​century reformist agenda in contemporary terms: individual strategies of improvement were the synthesis of Labour’s commitment to create a new form of democratic capitalism. If the war itself was now rarely explicitly represented in popular cultural or political propaganda, then it continued to serve as the backdrop against which progress was measured by different social groups with different and differently fulfilled expectations of what peace would bring. Producers and consumers were constructing new kinds of affluent bodies on their own terms through fabrics and styles connoting a modern understanding of work and leisure, and of duty and desire that allowed a constant symbolic and material slippage between the two. Ambiguity was exploited and embodied in multivalent forms of work and leisure clothing for a generation of men and women in their early 20s anxious to ‘get on’. Neither disenfranchised from postwar society nor resistant to socialist or bourgeois idealism, mainstream fashionable desire could be channelled into the middle ground between ‘spivvery’ and sober utilitarianism that high street fashion and style trends largely occupied. Socialism’s implicit assumptions around ‘good and bad’ taste linked to ‘good and bad’ citizen consumers, and the undoubted success of wartime controls, obscured the essential impetus of popular style trends as a two-​way generative process. Rarely if ever acknowledged as a fashion forward social grouping or initiators of style trends, many upper-​working-​and lower-​middle-​class young men and women capitalised on gains made before and after World War II in raised standards

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of living, better and more secure paid work and holidays that allowed participation in a range of recreational activities and, of course, access to affordable fashionable clothing and style trends. The classed and gendered politics of rational consumption and conspicuous constraint continued to exert a powerful and popular ideological force, but the democratisation of high-​minded aesthetic ideals often clashed with consumers’ and manufacturers’ own ideals of democratic fashionable modernity.

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CONCLUSION The Autonomy of Austerity: Postwar Affluence by Design

TODAY WE ARE ALL MIXED UP Today we are all mixed up: the poor, the well-​to-​do, the vulgar, the refined, are everywhere.1 Spanning a period of some ten years, this book has sought to show how concepts of fashionable, ‘healthy’ citizenship operated as a pivotal ideological vehicle by which ‘austerity’ might be dressed politically and fashionably. Wartime and postwar austerity by political, fashionable and consumer design was an important facet of socialist strategies for postwar economic management and wider reform. Alongside a raft of measures to improve the nation’s health and educational and welfare provision a new vocabulary of cultural regeneration had emerged articulated in a range of idealised postwar ‘types’. The Britain Can Make It exhibition discussed in Chapter  4 exemplified the impulse to make clear the relationship between modern citizenship and consumerism ‘by design’ as the foundation of democratic capitalism. A series of modern rooms were furnished with fabrics and furniture supposedly appropriate to the aspirations of various classes of consumer. For more than a year the Council of Industrial Design (COID) had considered the needs

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of the hypothetical occupants of for example, ‘a working-​class Utility bedroom’, or ‘[a]‌bedroom with man’s dressing room and bathroom in a large house’.2 Nearly a quarter of the catalogue was given over to schematically illustrated descriptions of these rooms, and their imaginary residents: go-​ahead active 20-​somethings, earnest bespectacled boffins, busy young artisanal or professional family men and new housewives and mothers; older working-​class men in shirtsleeves and women in hats and aprons, professional men and their elegant career spouses, ‘a Barrister at Law who collects books, and his wife, a former actress who gives musical parties’ who ‘enjoyed a vast minimalist living room in a large town house’.3 In a Fabian Society discussion pamphlet published in 1947, H. D. ‘Billy’ Hughes, (Parliamentary Private Secretary to Ellen Wilkinson, Secretary of State for Education) attempted to define what was now meant by ‘class’. Hughes suggested that systems of identification linked to occupation and income could no longer be relied upon: The landowner or capitalist with a large unearned income, educated at Eton and New College, causes little difficulty, neither does the ex-​ elementary school labourer with his £4 weekly pay packet. But the intervening groups are not so straightforward. The manager of a factory who left school at 14 and worked his way up from the bench, with a reasonable salary, ample savings invested in stocks and shares, and a broad Lancashire accent, begins to cause confusion. The bookie or black marketer with a Rolls-Royce car and a large bank balance is still more of a problem. Ernest Bevin, Gracie Fields, Bruce Woodcock and many other well-​known figures, do not fit easily into any preconceived pattern.4 The problems of recognition, Hughes believed, were further complicated by the ‘chain store democracy’ brought about by the efforts of Messrs Marks & Spencer Ltd’s and Montague Burton before the war, and which rationing intensified; this had made it far more difficult for the ‘casual observer’ to detect the social status of the occupants of a ‘bus or the passers-​by in the street’.5 Ferdinand Zweig’s influential survey found that many working people who in the past would have described themselves as ‘poor’ no longer did so; some ‘even claimed

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not to belong to any class at all’ and others said in effect that ‘they were working class at work but middle class at home’.6 Poorer families did not necessarily identify themselves as working class, and in Gallup polls conducted in 1948 and 1949 over half of those sampled saw themselves as middle class.7 At the same time a post-​1945 phenomenon was identified whereby some young people ‘of high family income and prolonged education’ described themselves as working class.8 The pre-​war idea that systems of status were based on the happenstance of birth was seen as anachronistic and out of touch with the democratic values of the ‘new Britain’. However, this frequently went hand in hand with the idea that the traditional social groupings were not just under threat but also in danger of becoming extinct. Sociologists Roy Lewis and Angus Maude conducted a survey in 1949 to review the state of the middle classes after the war, using five income brackets to categorise the population. However, their system of classification to assess class differences was in effect as reliant on the linguistic tropes of using a lavatory or a toilet, a napkin or a serviette as on income.9 Richard Hoggart, in his notable reflection on the changing structure and culture of the British working class, argues that ‘affluence’ had made it more difficult to criticise capitalism, but material progress had brought with it new kinds of cultural exploitation. A shared but distinctive urban culture of ‘the people’ involving speech, family life, streets, clubs and pubs, was being eroded and replaced by a new, heavily Americanised and homogenised mass culture.10 Hoggart situated the dislocation of working-​class communities and the destruction of their traditional culture in terms of ‘hedonistic-​group-​individualism’, ‘modernist knick-​knacks’ and a rootless tackiness.11 Comparable studies of postwar mobility carried out in North America were highly influential on British sociological thought. Eli Chinoy’s pioneering work on the abstract idea of the ‘American Dream’ attempted to measure the concrete reality of the ideology of success experienced within the postwar automotive industry by investigating the lives and attitudes of its well-​paid workers.12 Chinoy’s findings argued that workers adapted the reality of monotonous and routine factory life to traditional middle-​and lower middle-​class ideals of opportunity and improvement in a new way. Well-​paid workers

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were not without ambition, but such ambition was expressed in a new vocabulary of success that included the search for security, the pursuit of small goals in the informal hierarchy of the factory floor, and the constant accumulation of personal possessions. These all became equated with advancement, Chinoy observed: In their efforts to reconcile their own ambitions and achievements with the tradition of opportunity, workers have also transformed what was once a symbol of economic success into a significant form of personal progress in itself. Advancement has come to mean the progressive accumulation of things as well as the increasing capacity to consume … If one manages to buy a new car, if each year sees a major addition to the household –​a washing machine, a refrigerator, a new living-​room suite, now probably a television set –​then one is also ­getting ahead.13 The period between the end of the war and the 1950s was a time of transformation. Middle-​class values and the old markers of status differentiation were seen as being eroded by greater opportunities for white-​collar and non-​manual employment. At the same time, traditional working-​class life and the old industrial value system on which it was based was seen as having been replaced by middle-​class aspirations and new forms of consumerism. Pervasive arguments about the disruption of old systems of class identification generated a new paradigm of classification in Britain. The focus of sociological enquiry, once limited to the working class and the poor, was more explicitly directed to probe diverse criteria of identification from newspaper readership, to carpets and carpeting, and attitudes to everything from sex before marriage to voting behaviour. Social groupings, it was argued, might be more accurately understood not just in terms of occupation and income but market situation, culture, lifestyle and consumption.14 The rhetoric of consensus politics was a powerful conduit for postwar egalitarianism but it masked widespread underlying cultural anxieties about status. In practice, reductive generalisations about the complexities of social relations and inequality made clear the prejudicial assumptions that lay behind much social and economic

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commentary and the classed identities of its authors.15 Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and George Lavers’ influential survey of English Life and Leisure is illustrative here.16 Data was gathered in the late 1940s from 220 adult men and women (200 aged over 20, and 20 people under the age of 20) whose characteristics were detailed in case histories briefly summarised in the opening section.17 The aim ‘in an age labelled [sic] austere’ was to offer an objective assessment of everyday leisure habits –​interpreted very broadly to include the cinema, the stage, broadcasting, dancing, reading habits and adult education –​and to provide useful statistics on, for example, the prevalence of smoking, drinking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity. Descriptions of respondents inflected with a highly moralistic tone reveal an obvious gender and class bias. Middle-​class women are frequently referred to as ‘gentle’ in manner and appearance, and even a married woman is described as ‘sexually innocent of course’ (my emphasis); lower-​middle-​class women assume airs above their station, for example a wealthy self-​made businesswoman and her husband are labelled as failed social climbers out of their depth in terms of taste and education; the working-​classes of both sexes are pronounced as ‘inevitably grubby’, and almost all are defined as sexually promiscuous, and addicted to smoking, drinking and gambling. Miss E is an exception and steps out ‘as clean and smart as any debutante in Mayfair (and a good deal fresher and more natural’ –​a miracle considering she lives in an overcrowded house with no sanitation in a ‘rough’ area where ‘[i]‌ncest is not uncommon, rape not rare, and fornication is as usual as a square meal (often more usual)’.18 Immorality and fecklessness are throughout implicitly assessed on the basis of participants’ physical appearance and choice of clothing –​seen as a result not of poverty but of individual character traits. Mrs W, pronounced ‘enormously fat, to an extent that defies description … goes about with her clothes unfastened, bare feet thrust into muddy carpet slippers, long black hair uncombed, dirty hands and dirty face’.19 She lives with two men with whom she has had various children and is pregnant again. The surveyors find it astonishing that ‘either of the men –​both decent working-​class types –​ could copulate with such a monstrous creature’.20 The fragrant Miss E, in contrast, despite hardship ‘is keeping herself nice’ for her fiancée in the

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Navy, and trying to improve herself with the aid of a pamphlet on beauty hints from a woman’s magazine and a 5s. 0d. book on etiquette’.21 Mrs G, ­married to a soldier and living in a wooden hut with no running water, also keeps herself and her children ‘spick and span’ but because she is unattractive physically ‘there can be no question of her sexual virtue’ –​although this didn’t seem to have held Mrs W back.22 The survey noted with undisguised disdain the large numbers of coach trips leaving High Wycombe all year round for coastal resorts in summer, and theatres and pantomimes in spring and winter. In a period of just eight weeks 100 coaches left for London to see ‘skating varieties’ (hugely popular in the 1940s), 32 set off for the heavyweight world boxing championship, and one company bought 2,000 tickets for the Bertram Mills Circus.23 Films were variously categorised as ‘reasonable entertainment’, or ‘harmless but inane’ or (and by far the worst example according to Rowntree and Laver) ‘glorifying False Values’. Only 12 per cent of the films seen were assessed under this last heading but its pernicious effects could be traced in almost all the other films, especially those made in Hollywood. The authors concluded: … the constant repetition of scenes of rather vulgar and ostentatious luxury, and the constant suggestion that ‘having a good time’ can only mean dining and drinking champagne in expensive restaurants, dancing in night-​clubs, being waited on by several servants, and living in rooms of absurdly large dimensions, must have a deleterious effect upon a nation that has, above all, to realise that its future lies in plain living, hard work and in unsophisticated pleasures.24 James Obelkevich’s study of postwar consumption patterns in Britain argues that ‘[c]‌omplaints about consumerism –​like those about “luxury” in earlier centuries –​seem to be based not on evidence but on snobbery –​the fear that someone, somewhere, is buying things which the speaker disapproves of and thinks they shouldn’t have’.25 There was a real initiative in the postwar period to address social inequality, but the institutional imagery of class seemed remarkably unchanged.26 The Labour Party’s struggles with imagining as much as delivering a new kind of democracy reflected the wider competing

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discourses of a largely traditional postwar Britain, itself struggling to come to terms with a new modern world and a different form of modernity. The rhetoric of restraint yoked Labour’s vision of modernity to a wider sense of national purpose, but this became progressively more difficult as the democracy of postwar affluence became a much more powerful cultural reference point.27 The constant configuration of appropriate and inappropriate postwar ‘types’ exposed long-​standing middle-​class anxieties around the corrupting influence of ‘Americanisation’ and its effect on the masses. New opportunities for consumerism and the ideals of affluence rooted in self-​indulgence rather than self-​discipline conflicted with a socialist vision of rational restraint and reform.28 This was a model of physical improvement that had always also provided a formula for aspiration and affluence for the very consumers and citizens the Labour government believed were so in need of direction and training. As historian Peter Hennessy observes: ‘Never has a government inherited a more disciplined nation than did the incoming Labour ministers in 1945, nor, almost certainly, a more united one.’29 Technicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, hairdressers, beauticians, and factory and office workers were historically groups at the forefront of an engagement with modern innovations in and expanding opportunities for producing and enjoying new forms of consumerism. Socialist ideals of rationalisation as the foundation of ‘reformed capitalism’ were hampered by concepts of ‘fitness’ that abstracted objects from their mass manufacture and intended use. Government controls were demonstrably out of touch with popular trends and strategies of sartorial resistance they had paradoxically both motivated and facilitated and sought to curb.

‘THE RUSTLE OF SWING’ New strategies of popular appeal had evolved in response to the social transformations that it was believed had taken place, particularly in advertising. Class was no longer simply an economic indicator but a complex cultural variable involving ‘lifestyles’, complicated by ‘special-​interest-​groups’ defined by age and social status.30 Hollywood hair styles, cosmetics, jewellery, lavish home furnishings

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and a wardrobe of fashionable clothes and accessories for every social occasion and temporal or spatial location played a particularly significant role in the construction of British femininity in the late 1940s and 1950s.31 Film theorist Jackie Stacey’s research reveals how British ‘lack’ was contrasted with American ‘plenty’. Viewer’s desires were realised in a fantasy world of luxury played out on screen through an abundance of signifiers that linked particular stars with consumer products and their availability. Stacey’s interviews evidenced how much cultural knowledge was invested in the act of spectatorship, and the significance of fashion and body adornment to the processes of subjective and social identification that motivated particular readings of films. Drawing on Ien Ang’s study of the gendered pleasures of consumption,32 Stacey emphasises the importance of understanding the female audience as one actively and selectively positioned to negotiate gaps and contradictions between different texts and take pleasure in their recognition. A continual playing off of fictional fantasy and realism was a crucial antagonism within the mechanisms of feminine looking.33 A cocktail of consumer knowledge and class conflict haunts Caroline Steedman’s account of her mother’s desire for the idealised products of postwar consumer culture in which so much of her own sense of selfhood was invested.34 Most accounts of working-​class life, Steedman argues, are written from male perspectives that celebrate the traditions of communal living as consolation for the cruel material privations of poverty. Her mother’s longing subverts such accounts, ‘born into the “old working class” … she wanted: a New Look skirt, a timbered country cottage, to marry a prince’.35 Longing shaped not only Steedman’s childhood but also her understanding of alternative mechanisms of class identity; her mother wanted glamour and what she didn’t have, but these were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her.36 Steedman challenges Richard Hoggart’s classic recollection of a 1920s working-​class childhood as exemplifying the well trodden narrative path of a scholarship boy whose escape ignores the material stepping stones by which women might negotiate their own pulling away from their origins: ‘clothes, shoes, make-​up … the cut and fall of a skirt and good leather shoes can take you across the river to the other side …’.37

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What Steedman learnt from her mother through magazines, films, personal anecdotes and, coming from a Lancashire mill town, a detailed knowledge of fabrics with names like barathea, worsted, gabardine, twill, jersey and lawn, was that the world of privilege might be appropriated. Pat Kirkham’s analysis of the classed and gendered ambiguities expressed in the costumes and characters of the film Dance Hall38 argues: Too many middle-​class liberal historians and film-​makers tend to over-​simplify the lifestyles of the working class, irrespective of historical and cultural specificities. Design historians fall into similar traps, assuming all too often when looking at, say, department store catalogues or advertisements for clothes that only the cheapest would be bought by the working-​class and only the more expensive by the middle-​class.39 While in many ways reinforcing the old narrative trajectory of escape through conformity –​work and a brief period of excitement then marriage and the safety of domesticity –​the film Dance Hall reinforces the idea of fashion and leisure as a potentially threatening space of if not subversion, then negotiation. The narrative is superficially structured around the familiar motif of four competing femininities: Georgie (Petula Clark), Mary (Jane Hylton), Eve (Natasha Parry), and Carole (Diana Dors) –​all carefully costumed in differentiated recognisable styles. Georgie is the idealised ‘girl next door’, bogged down by her respectable parents’ expectations of who she is. She rejects the dreary new dance dress they have scrimped and saved for in favour of a luxurious frothy ‘dream dress’ supplied by the dance hall impresario ‘for one night only’. Mary is the virtuous best friend in neat tailored skirts and knitted short sleeve jumpers promoted as the ideal look for aspiring office workers. For the all-​important dance competition, Mary opts for a ‘pretty’ organza party frock with self-​coloured belt and a gathered off-​the-​shoulder neckline that reveals nothing more than a single string of pearls and she continues to wear her wristwatch. In contrast, Eve and Carol serve as fashionable book ends to this continuum of postwar mainstream desire: both offer a more dangerous yet at the same time alluring sexuality.

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Eve is characterised and costumed as more mature than all the other girls. For dancing, Eve wears ‘grown-​up’ dresses, representative of a higher priced, mid-​range look popularised by brands like Gor-​ray, Dorville and Matita and aimed at a young married rather than younger single set: fashionably full-​skirted in the latest plaid designs with side-​ button details and three-​quarter sleeves with turned back white cuffs. However, a more earthy sexuality beneath this rather starchy exterior is implied as the camera lingers over Eve’s black seamed stockings and high heels. Kirkham notes that later, now married to the hard-​working but dull Phil (Donald Houston), Eve appears in the slim-​line skirt and matching knit sweater she wore for her wedding; for her, the film suggests, ‘the fun times are over’.40 Eve is tempted by the more exciting sexualised figure of the tall, dark American, Alec (Bonar Colleano), whose dark Latin looks are accentuated by a pale-​coloured, double-​breasted suit that makes him stand out from the crowd. Like Georgie however, Eve’s one-​nighter must be put behind her as she settles down to a boring but reliably secure future with Phil. Carole, portrayed as the youngest and most naive of the girls offers the most ambiguously coded feminine identity: sexy but already coolly self-​assured in the power of her physical attraction over men and an awareness of its potential consequences. Played by the beautiful young Diana Dors  –​heavily promoted as a glamorous British starlet to rival anything that Hollywood had to offer –​the figure of Carole disrupts any easy equation being made between Americanisation and promiscuity. Seen in profile, Dors’ breasts are emphasised by sharp-​pointed foundation garments underneath a clinging sweater, a casual V-​necked jersey top, or a fashionably ingénue off-​the-​shoulder gypsy blouse. Never shown wearing a dress  –​even her dance frock is a boldly patterned cotton skirt with peplum detail worn with a lace blouse  –​the ambiguity of a constrained sexualised top and a free-​stepping bottom half with swinging long skirts, identified by Kirkham as utility (emphasised by high-​heeled white ankle-​strap shoes) offers a mix of American high school, exotic sensuality, and working-​class British nous –​a look that Dors performed to perfection in numerous films in the 1950s. Carole in fact settles for Mike (James Carney), a tall, swarthy, good-​looking young man with dark curly hair, who says little but offers a mix of sexual magnetism and working-​class solidity to rival her own.

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Kirkham situates the palais as a place where fantasy and reality merge in the performance of classed and gendered identities. However, the implied polarities of safe and dangerous feminine sexuality embodied in fashionable choice are disrupted by the constant movement of the four young women, their dresses, and their conflicting desires as they swirl and dance and give themselves up to the ‘swing’. Dance Hall reflected and offered a range of subjective positions fashioned as much by consumer agency as by legislative or ideological coercion. Contemporary Pathé News footage reinforces the idea of the dance hall as an important arena of status recognition but a liminal space that allowed the constant playing off of mainstream identities. Young women show off new looks and new lines: polo neck sweaters and sleeveless blouses with dirndl skirts, leather moccasins, hair tied up in pony tails; long slim-​line belted dresses with high heels; black lacy cocktail dresses or jaunty shirt-​waisters with a sailor collar. Young men equally embrace the performative opportunities of the dancehall. Some are still in uniform but most display the eclecticism of their sisters: blazers, flannels and an old school tie; ‘American style’ suits with their hair oiled in large quiffs; lightweight golf jackets and even a sheepskin ‘flying jacket’ with cotton Chinos; lounge suits with small collar shirts and shoestring ties. Stereotypes of classed ‘types’ only operate by being instantly recognisable and the frequency and longevity of such descriptors indicate the consistency of their conceptual currency. However, the idea that some social groupings, particularly the aspirational working and lower-​ middle classes, might not equally have a sophisticated understanding of their symbolic potential is not just intellectually inconsistent but contradicted by the evidence. Angela Partington’s exploration of the New Look demonstrates how the relationship between clothes and class can operate as part of synthetic system of constant change and negotiation by which the working classes ‘might articulate their own specific tastes and preferences by using the cultural codes of the mass market’.41 In contrast to the rather hidebound aesthetic prejudice that inflected the institutions of British culture and couture, the exigencies of demobilisation and the rapid dissemination of the New Look spectacularly demonstrated the facility for mainstream customers to adapt and appropriate a range of influences, including state controls, to their own designs.

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Highly politicised concepts of democratic ‘restraint’ attempted to reconcile productivity with an anti-​fashion perspective that even in wartime, when justification of pragmatism seemed unnecessary, was mystified by an aura of exclusive aestheticism.42 In response, almost from their inception, the proscriptive powers of Austerity Regulations dictating the stylistic limitations of utility designs were corrupted. Loopholes that peppered ambiguously worded and hugely complicated Clothing Orders were immediately exploited by manufacturers, who sought to meet the tastes of mainstream consumers tending towards more ornamentation and ‘frippery’ than the principles of British minimalism advocated by the design establishment and the Board of Trade. Popular magazines, which since the turn of the century had provided a major source of fashionable inspiration for an expanding mass market, continued to offer patterns whose purpose in the war was as much one of providing consumers with ideas for constant decorative ornamentation –​collars, cuffs, belts, boleros, applique motifs, etc. –​as for functional necessity. Woman, for example, suggested a ‘debonair touch’ could be given to ‘plain’ utility styles with homemade tassels, and frills and net added to yoke edges and bodices would enhance a ‘feminine look’.43 Certainly, from a design and fashion historical perspective the impact of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designer’s (IncSoc) involvement in utility at an ideological level was significant, but the influence of their designs and style templates on mainstream utility production and of their minimalist aesthetic on mainstream tastes were quite limited. Helen Reynolds argues that the austere simplicity encouraged by the couturier scheme was only really embraced by firms such as Berketex and Jaeger at the higher end of the ready-​to-​wear market.44 IncSoc’s priorities were, arguably, always the promotion of British couture and the elevation of London’s position in the global fashion market after the war; the patriotic mission of raising levels of taste amongst the proletariat was a useful propagandist by-​product for individual designers and for socialist idealism. Much of utility’s perceived success as an educative mission in good taste was founded on the misguided premise that the respectable lower-​ middle and upper-​working classes were unaware of how to make the best of meagre resources, or of how to practice thrift in private in order to present a fashionable, neat appearance in public. In the war, many of

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the ‘lady’ volunteers on local committees and panels sponsored by the Board of Trade and other government ministries who were organising cookery and sewing classes enjoyed the novelty of having to ‘make do for oneself’. Many of those they were preaching to, however, continued to sew and knit as they had always done by dreary necessity or as a pleasurable hobby –​but many enjoyed government-​sponsored weekly classes and demonstrations more as social events than as opportunities for ‘training’. As previous chapters have sought to evidence, dressing appropriately for war and postwar austerity was circulated in terms of skills and knowledge that the majority of British manufacturers and consumers were not only well versed in but were also at the forefront of pioneering. Continued clothing controls remained a vital political tool: inequality and class differences could be transformed through the postwar educative mission of good taste. Valued for its capacity to act as a form of visual shorthand for various models of social stratification, the exercise of fashionable agency whatever the demands of austerity validated the idea that radical reform and change was in motion. The Utility Scheme was promoted as a means of expanding consumer choice for good quality and affordable fashionable styles that bypassed rather than confronted prior structures of status recognition and class difference. The pledge of ‘never again’ was inseparable from the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’, but the educative mission of clothing controls and the rational reform of popular leisure were inflected with an implicit snobbery and an overbearing sense of middle-​class ‘do-​gooding’. The socialist rhetoric of fashionable austerity was inseparable from a top-​ to-​bottom understanding of style diffusion that showed little deviation from a pre-​war value system of status and status recognition that Labour Party policy objectives around consumerism sought to overturn, but in many ways reinforced. In the design –​and fashion –​historical imagination the ‘heroic’ qualities of controls and consumer compliance at a time of national crisis tend to obscure that at the heart of the postwar Utility Scheme was political dogma entrenched in the ideals of rational consumerism that failed to keep pace with the shifting expectations and desires of the electorate as producers and consumers.45 Christopher Sladen’s assessment of the relative successes and failures of the Utility Clothing Scheme concludes that the project should not be

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seen as a failed attempt by the government and the design establishment in Britain to foist aesthetic good taste and rational ideals on a reluctant public; it is more helpful to see utility fashion as one strand within a pattern of longer-​term social change. Utility, rationing, uniforms and austerity can ‘all be viewed as allies in a continuing campaign’ to wrest fashionable agency from the grip of the privileged.46 In the late 1940s the mainstream garment industry urged Harold Wilson and the Board of Trade to dismantle the scheme, arguing that the public was unable or unwilling to buy the greater proportion of utility garments that the industry could produce; consumers would get better value and more variety in all types of outerwear and underwear if these restrictive schedules were abolished. Disgruntled by what it believed was years of high-​ handed treatment from the Board of Trade and Wilson’s particularly belligerent attitude, the trade wanted the government to reconsider the appropriate form the scheme should take in response to ‘present, and so far as they are foreseeable, future conditions’.47 As the scheme related to cotton, for example, a complicated jumble of compromise decisions had been ‘piled one on top of the other, often under pressure of war-​time circumstances’.48 Utility cloth could only be made commercially into specified clothing types deemed most suitable by the government. This ‘brilliant legal edifice’ deterred trade either home or export ‘running away with production’ and fuelling inflation. For ‘the creations of fashion’ the postwar concept of standardisation was meaningless and the global textiles industry was continuing to expand ‘with almost frightening rapidity’, leaving British manufacturers and designers vulnerable.49 Wilson remained unmoved. In early 1949, suits and coats were made coupon free and utility prices were also cut by one shilling in the pound to lower the cost of living.50 The continued inclusion of clothing controls, Wilson argued, was vital to Labour’s reconstructive agenda and Britain’s recovery: the Utility Scheme was ‘not perfect’ but it was the government’s view that it should remain as a permanent feature of the economy.51 British couture remained equally committed to the minimalist aesthetic that was utility’s supposed idealised template with a compromised version of the New Look that did little to dispel what for some was seen as London’s reputation for safety and for collections aimed at an ageing or particular kind of ‘nice’ upper-​class clientele. The prestige of London

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couturiers was boosted by the patronage of the royal family, which attracted a good deal of positive publicity. However, this rather narrow focus cramped their vision and reinforced a reliance on a repertoire of understated, ‘well-​bred’ occasion-​specific clothes out of touch with a rising generation of consumers less concerned with class and protocol, who wanted more transient, younger, sexier fashions that could be bought off the peg.52 By 1950 some in the popular press were unimpressed by these rather catholic designs. Edna McKenna, writing in the Daily Graphic, dubbed the IncSoc group the ‘Timorous Ten’ and assessed their contribution to fashion change in the latest collections as ‘[v]‌ery wearable, yes. But where are all those new ideas?’53

AUSTERITY AND AFTER In January 1949 Harold Wilson lifted restrictions on woollen goods, and six weeks’ later announced the end of the whole clothing rationing scheme. Never afraid to court publicity, Wilson followed up his statement to the House of Commons with a melodramatic flourish as he and wife Mary were pictured symbolically tearing up their coupon books.54 A further ‘bonfire’ was delivered in March 1949 to clear a way through what Wilson described as a ‘jungle of controls’. Speaking in the House of Commons in September, during the devaluation debate, Wilson argued that controls were to remain ‘a permanent instrument’ of national policy’ but it was important to get rid of those that were a ‘hang over from the wartime administration’ that were limiting competition and thus retarding commercial enterprise.55 At the Labour Party conference soon afterwards there were misgivings that the bonfire could become a ‘funeral pyre of social justice’; Barbara Castle, who had worked at the Board of Trade with Wilson, warned of an ‘epidemic of decontrol’ and claimed that policy was being led by economic advisers not socialists.56 Rationing, utility and austerity measures together allowed an unprecedented level of statutory control over industrial production and civilian consumption and the ability to constantly balance out shifting military and economic demands with those of the home and export trades. Utility specifications must be distinguished from austerity regulations.57 The elision of the distinctive material and political ends and

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means of utility specifications and Austerity Restrictions obscures the power of their differential prescriptive roles to control industrial production and ‘educate’ consumer desire as a conduit for socialist plans for fashioning a ‘new Jerusalem’. The Labour Party remained committed to long-​term policy objectives to rationalise modern consumerism as the foundation of new systems of economic management. In contrast, Dior’s New Look was representative of a relentless, uncontrollable fashionable desire for high-​end glamour. Between the two lies the modern fashion system itself and a symbolic exchange of goods and desires that all kinds of consumers in Britain, including the working classes, could enjoy in new ways. Innovations in manufacturing processes and synthetic dye and fabric technologies pioneered by firms like Marks & Spencer and Montague Burton generated fashionable styles and affordable style trends on a mass scale that as much as state controls embodied wider structures of social and political change. The production of utility clothing contributed to the greater part of Marks & Spencer’s turnover, which virtually doubled in the period between 1945 and 1948, showing, Rachel Worth argues, how the store benefited from and capitalised on the democratisation of fashion that the war had brought about.58 This study offers a different perspective. The Utility Scheme exploited innovations in manufacturing, synthetic dye and fabric technologies that were the foundation of democratic fashionable styles and affordable style trends pioneered by firms like Marks & Spencer before, during and after the war. Susannah Handley’s research into the history and development of synthetic fibres and textiles in the twentieth century argues that it was ultimately fibres like nylon, polyester and acrylic ‘that delivered high fashion to the high street’.59 Chain stores purchased couture gowns and reproduced them by the thousand, particularly through the use of new branded fibres that enjoyed a huge retail success in the 1950s. Synthetic fibres were (and still are) predominantly produced by blending mixes of artificial and natural fibres such as wool and worsted, thus providing an economic means of meeting increasing consumer demand and overcoming shortages of raw materials.60 Scientific sounding names such as Terylene, a British polyester, British Celanese’s Tricel (especially adapted for heat-​set permanent pleating), and nylon, Dacron, and Orlon (Du Pont products) implied a uniqueness that

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enhanced their marketing as revolutionary modern fabrics suited to the lives and aspirations of busy modern consumers.61 By 1950 a huge variety of nylon in different textures and thicknesses was incorporated into Marks & Spencer blouses and lingerie and offered a depth and range of vibrant, colourful colourfast clothing that celebrated a move away from the greyness of war and austerity: lingerie in flame, blue, pink and aqua; green, lilac, gold, and champagne pyjamas; cyclamen, violet, turquoise nightdresses; spring hats in ‘fiesta, pink romance, banana and Windsor blue’.62 Colour was an extremely significant feature of nylon’s and other synthetic fibres’ appeal. The absorbent potential of synthetics’ interaction with chemical dyes allowed an explosion of colours and tones that lent a sense of adventure and experimentation to clothes to reinforce the idea of new, younger approaches to fashion and of contemporary change and progress.63 ‘Nylon’ was a word that the menswear trade in Britain noted was slipping ‘like a thief in the night’ into the general vocabulary of style trends.64 It was ‘indissolubly linked with the demands of [our] sisters and wives for sheerer and sheerer stockings’ but in its true guise was ‘a Protean material which is capable of being used for almost any clothing purpose’. While still at an experimental stage, developments in America suggested colourful and uncrushable nylon shirts were on their way.65 Synthetic fabrics were seen as ‘miracle materials’ that transformed not just mainstream wardrobes but mainstream lives with crease resistant, permanent pleated, light, wash and war qualities symbolic of a new, and exciting postwar future that was the central trope of the New York World’s Fair and the Festival of Britain in 1951.66 ‘Marspun’, an easycare spun rayon fabric (produced by Combined Egyptian Mills), exclusive to Marks & Spencer, for example, was developed into a vast range of dresses which took their inspiration from Dior’s New Look, about 3,000 different styles by 1955 based on some 340 Paris designs and 2,000 colour combinations. Chapter by chapter, this book has charted how during and after the war economic shortages and political philosophy impelled statutory intervention in the production and consumption of fashionable clothing. Neil Rollings has persuasively argued that the maintenance of wartime controls on workforce, raw materials and consumption were always seen as having a permanent role to play in bringing about Labour’s plans

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for nationalisation, as a means of maintaining full employment, and in reducing longstanding class and income differentials.67 A  spectacular culture of fashionable conspicuous constraint emerged in the war that it was believed cut across the boundaries of traditional systems of classed and gendered status recognition. Idealised concepts of a wartime consensus on the need for individual constraint and some form of institutional control offered an expedient marriage of desire and its willing deferral. The political negotiation of consumer wants and needs philosophically arbitrated socialism’s historically fraught relationship with popular consumerism and commercial leisure, and between the electorate’s expectations of future affluence and growing disillusion with unceasing austerity. Clothing controls always served a higher purpose than their actual utilitarian mission to produce cheap clothes on a mass scale with the minimum use of labour and materials. The use of state controls was integrated into a historical dialectic of socio-​economic rationality: production and profits could be maximised by addressing the interests of consumers at work and at leisure. The critical impetus has not been to work through the legislative mechanics of wartime and postwar clothing controls nor their effects on the trade in terms of yardage and quotas or on style trends, but to situate the complex interactions between the state, the clothing industry, and consumers as a structuring device through which to problematise the political dimensions of dressing for austerity. In February 1949, the Labour Party was caricatured attempting to entice voters with a ‘Coupon Free Socialist Suit’ and a matching ‘Coupon Free Socialist Costume’ on display beneath a carefully set trap, a garden sieve propped up by a stick with the words ‘Another Five Years of Them’ written across it. Clement Attlee is shown promoting the goods while Herbert Morrison lurks in the background waiting to pull the string.68 On the anniversary of Wilson’s earlier bonfire, a cartoon by ‘Strube’ (Sidney Strube, recently replaced as political cartoonist for the right wing Daily Express) appeared in the trade journal Men’s Wear titled ‘The irresistible £10 suit’ (Fig. 28).69 The scene is an official function. A butler announces the entry of ‘The Right Hon. Aneurin Bevan MP’ (a flashy dresser well known for his love of Savile Row suits) in close tailored, clearly bespoke suit with a double-​ breasted jacket whose lapels and buttons are picked out in a contrasting

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Fig. 28  Cartoon by ‘Strube’, ‘The irresistible £10 suit’, especially drawn for Men’s Wear, 5 November 1949, image courtesy of the Emap Archive at the London College of Fashion Archive, University of the Arts London

striped fabric, a wing collared shirt and bow tie. A group of bespectacled socialist mandarins and Clement Attlee, gathered for pre-​dinner drinks (pointedly beer rather than wine) and all dressed in various plain lounge suits, look on in amazement; ‘Is he moving to the right?’, they ask, while poor old Attlee in a tweed suit claps his hand to his head and exclaims ‘Nye!’ with an air of resignation bordering on desperation.

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Labour’s responses to postwar austerity have been judged as inevitable and well intentioned, or avoidable and misguided; the result, it is argued, was the institution of a programme of social reform ideologically ‘more pragmatic than doctrinaire’.70 Class-​based structures of economic interest and privilege were left largely intact and the spirit of wartime radicalism was assimilated into a reconstructive agenda in a way that inhibited change.71 However, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the politics of constraint in 1945 cut across class and party boundaries, and how much patriotic stoicism and restraint were embedded in concepts of a national identity within the wider contemporary popular and popular cultural imagination. In Britain between the wars, much of the left’s political energy had wrestled with debates over the use of economic controls on investment and prices and how to harness these to socialist aims for reform and plans for nationalisation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that arguments about the continuation of wartime controls over the workforce, raw materials and consumption continued to play a major role in Labour policy. Engineering unions called on Whitehall to prioritise production of capital goods needed for national reconstruction and prevent firms seeking quick profits from ‘frivolous’ consumer goods. One communist organiser listed electric irons alongside ‘fancy broaches’ as examples of the kind of ‘profitable knick-​knacks which unpatriotic employers were squandering the nation’s resources’.72 Economic shortages and the demands of the war effort impelled radical statutory intervention in the production, supply and consumption of essential consumer goods supported by almost universal voluntary compliance and expressed in a spectacular culture of fashionable patriotism that it was believed cut across previous boundaries of classed and gendered systems of status recognition. Attleean concepts of a new kind of consensus consumption attempted an expedient marriage of desire and its non-​coercive control to arbitrate socialism’s historically fraught relationship with popular consumerism, and the electorate’s expectations of future affluence amidst the slough of continued austerity. Efforts to educate consumers were made visible through polarities of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, often in paired images of objects or popular cultural representations of the numerous ‘types’ that dominated British media representation, particularly British cinema in the 1940s. But despite such

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efforts, the ‘universality’ of timeless aesthetic purity was challenged by the sense of individual consumer agency such spectacles ambiguously disciplined and empowered. Neither state intervention, innovations in mass manufacture, or almost universal compliance with controls magically democratised mainstream fashion. The ideals of wartime rationing and the Utility Scheme embodied support for ‘fair shares’ while the mantra of ‘never again’ galvanised popular support for a radical socialist agenda of welfare, social and educational reform when peace came. At the interface of the body politic and the body fashionable, austerity as an abstract concept and as a material expression of a nation and its people at a time of crisis was never a single set of ideas that could be interpreted and embodied ‘by design’. A missionary zeal imparted reformist properties onto a narrowly defined agenda of rationality paradoxically inseparable from a less well defined but nevertheless powerful consumerist vision of improvement laid out as a series of fashionable choices.

Fig. 29  Group of young cyclists in various wool ensembles, © Woolmark Archive (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd) and the London College of Fashion

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Affluence in postwar Britain was not just a matter of money:‘Indirectly it changed society, giving new meanings to the basic categories of class, age and gender.’73 What this book has sought to explore is the extent to which the ideology of austerity and its challenges endowed such an exchange with a radical dynamism. Postwar austerity was equally not just a matter of denial and lack, it equally invested consumerism with new understandings of social agency that both conformed to and challenged normative values. The British public was subjected to a relentless diet of propaganda around the virtues of restraint, but fitness for purpose was always premised as a springboard to something better. During and after the war, dressing for austerity articulated a complex range of strategies by which the social aspirations of the elected and the electorate for future affluence might be designed. The mantra of fair shares was realised in demands for full employment, better pay and conditions, a universal system of health and social welfare provision that effectively shaped new kinds of consumers hungry for change, and equipped them to fashion their own understandings of what ‘good taste’ and ‘something better’ looked like (Fig. 29).

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NOTES Introduction:  Austerity, Aspiration and Affluence 1 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 2 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 318. 3 Steven Fielding, ‘To make men and women better than they are: Labour and the building of socialism’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–​51 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), pp. 16–​27, pp. 20, 21. 4 Patrick J. Maguire, ‘Utility and the politics of consumption’, in Judy Attfield (ed.), Utility Reassessed:The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 220–​32, p. 223. 5 Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 4. 6 Rex Pope, ‘British demobilization after the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 30/​1 (1995), pp. 65–​81, p. 66. 7 William Lemkin, ‘How Britain provided a complete outfit for her demobilised servicemen’, The Outfitter Export (July 1947), pp. 45–​7, p. 45. 8 Tony Williams, Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–​1955 (Albany NY, State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 213. 9 Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 29. 10 I Know Where I’m Going, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1944. 11 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 83. 12 Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War, p. 71. 13 Pam Cook, I Know Where I’m Going (London: BFI, 2002), p. 28. 14 Nella Last, ‘Tuesday 1 April 1947’, in Nella Last’s Peace:The Post-​War Diaries of Housewife, 49, ed. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson (London: Profile Books, 2008), pp. 150–​1. 15 Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–​51, p. 19.

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1  Austerity by Design: Fashioning a New Jerusalem 1 Picture Post, ‘A day awheel’, 10 June 1939, 19–​22. 2 Ibid. p., 22. 3 Picture Post, ‘Fashion round up’, 25 January 1940, 27. 4 Ibid. 5 Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–​ 1945 (London and New York: Berg, 2012), p. 35. 6 Christopher Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion: Utility Cloth, Clothing and Footwear 1941–​ 1952 (Oxford: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 71. 7 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–​1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). 8 Eric L. Hargreaves and Margaret M. Gowing, Civil Industry and Trade (London: HMSO, 1951), p. 437. 9 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 43. 10 Picture Post, Anne Seymour, ‘A coupon summer’, 5 July 1941, pp. 26–​7. 11 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 97. 12 Helen Reynolds, ‘The utility garment: Its design and effect on the mass market 1942–​45’, in Judy Attfield (ed.), Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 125–​43, p. 129. 13 Monica Felton, Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain (British Achievements of the War Years), Historical Pamphlet Series No. 5 (London: Imperial War Museum, 1945; repr. London: Ministry of Information, 2007), pp. 32–​3. 14 Henry E. Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, pp. 83–​5. 15 Reynolds, ‘The utility garment’, p. 135. 16 Gavin Waddell, ‘The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers: Its impact on post-​war British fashion’, Costume 35 (2001), pp. 92–​115, p. 92. 17 [British] Vogue, ‘Fashionable intelligence: The London couture creates utility clothes for the Board of Trade’, October 1942, pp. 25–​31. 18 Waddell, ‘The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers’, p. 95. 19 Draper’s Record, editorial, 22 August 1949, p. 9. 20 [British] Vogue, editorial, October 1942, p. 27. 21 Pat Kirkham, ‘Beauty and duty: Keeping up the (home) front’, in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), pp. 13–​28. 22 Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor, Through the Looking Glass: A History of Dress from 1860 to the Present Day (London: BBC Books, 1989), pp. 109–​10. 23 Draper’s Record, editorial, 21 October 1939. 24 London Evening News, editorial, 3 September 1940. 25 Howell, Wartime Fashion, pp. 59–​60. 26 [British] Vogue, ‘Groom to guardsman standard’, August 1942, p. 57. 27 Pathé News, ‘Day to day frock issue: Shoulder arms’, 1943. Available at http://​ www.britishpathe.com/​v ideo/​d ay-​t o-​d ay-​f rock-​i ssue-​t itle-​s houlder-​a rms (accessed 4 April 2015)

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28 Pat Kirkham, ‘Fashion, femininity and “frivolous” consumption in World War Two Britain’, in Attfield, Utility Reassessed, pp. 143–​57. 29 Ibid., p. 150. 30 Ibid. 31 Interview, Phyl Gray, 15 June 2008. 32 Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1930–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 26–​7. 33 Peter McNeil, ‘ “Put your best face forward”: The impact of the Second World War on British dress’, Journal of Design History 6/​4 (1993), pp. 283–​99, p. 293. 34 [British] Vogue, ‘The look alive look’, August 1942, p. 27. 35 Ibid., ‘Clothes that cover the country’, October 1942, p. 59. 36 Ibid., ‘The apotheosis of the bicycle’, April 1944, pp. 26–​7. 37 Lisa Tickner, ‘Women and trousers: Unisex clothing and sex role changes in the twentieth century’, in Leisure in the Twentieth Century (London: Design Council Publications, 1977), pp. 56–​67. 38 [British] Vogue, ‘Limbering up for the Big Push’, photographs by Lee Miller, August 1942, pp. 28–​9. 39 John B. Priestley, British Women Go to War (London: Collins, 1944), p. 7. 40 Ibid., p. 13. 41 Ibid., p. 7. 42 Ibid., p. 25. 43 Ibid. 44 Millions Like Us, dir. Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder, 1943. 45 Dorothea Collett Wadge (ed.), Women in Uniform (London: Sir Isaac Pitman, 1943), p. 113. 46 Priestley, British Women Go to War, 26, 47 Ibid., p. 43. 48 Tawny Pipit, dir. Bernard Miles, 1944. 49 Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 60. 50 Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, ‘Material politics: An introduction’, in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1–​32, p. 32. 51 Matthew Hilton, Consumers and the State since the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 68–​9. 52 Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America 1870–​1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 53 Lant, Blackout, p. 31. 54 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 59. 55 McNeil, ‘ “Put your best face forward” ’, p. 292. 56 [British] Vogue, editorial, July 1941, p. 18. 57 Picture Post, ‘Old clothes make news’, 26 July 1941, pp. 26–​7. 58 Good Taste, ‘Christmas party: what about clothes?’, December 1942, p. 44. 59 Housewife, Alice Hooper Beck, ‘It’s not the fashion now’, June 1942, pp. 61, 63. 60 [British] Vogue, editorial, April 1942, p. 25. 61 McNeil, ‘ “Put your best face forward” ’, p. 263.

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62 Ibid., p. 267. 63 Matthew Sweet, West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels (London: Faber, 2012), pp. 50–​3. 64 [British] Vogue, ‘Fashionable intelligence’, p. 25. 65 Ibid., p. 26. 66 Ibid., p. 31. 67 Howell, Wartime Fashion, pp. 184–​5. 68 [British] Vogue, editorial, July 1941, p. 18. 69 Edwina Ehrman, ‘Broken traditions’, in Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman and Caroline Evans (eds), The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 97–​117, p. 109. 70 Waddell, ‘The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers’, p.96 71 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 151. 72 Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, p. 95. 73 Judy Attfield, ‘Introduction’, in Attfield, Utility Reassessed, pp. 1–​10, p. 4. 74 Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–​1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 81–​2. 75 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 151. 76 Ibid., pp. 141–​2. 77 Ibid., p. 170. 78 Ehrman, ‘Broken traditions’, p. 109. 79 McNeil, ‘ “Put your best face forward” ’, p. 293. 80 The Times, editorial, March 1942, p. 3. 81 Zweiniger-​Bargieolowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 85. 82 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 92. 83 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 86. 84 Reynolds, ‘The utility garment’, p. 237. 85 Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–​ 1979 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), p. 34. 86 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 37. 87 Mass Observation, ‘Beveridge Indirects’, December 1942. 88 Kevin Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940–​ 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 95. 89 Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Pimlico Press, 1994), p. 272. 90 Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, England Arise:The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 21.

2  Austerity in Transition: Demobilisation/​Remobilisation 1 I Know Where I’m Going, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945, A Production of The Archers. 2 Rex Pope, ‘British demobilization after the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 30/​1 (1995), pp. 65–​81.

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3 Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A  History of the Leeds Clothing Industry 1850–​1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 91. 4 I am indebted to Dr Robin Woolven for directing my attention to this fascinating record of the daily life of a male consumer for whom fashion and grooming were very important. 5 Anthony Heap, diaries, transcribed Dr Robin Woolven, 5 March 1942, London Metropolitan Archives, LMCA (ACC/​2243). 6 Ibid, pp. 95, 96. 7 Helen Reynolds, ‘The utility garment: Its design and effect on the mass market 1942–​1945’, in Judy Attfield (ed), Utility Reassessed:The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 125–​43, p. 134. 8 House of Commons Debates, ‘Austerity suits’, 6 April 1944, Vol. 397, cc. 2210–​49. 9 House of Commons Debates, ‘Men’s clothing [restrictions]’, 2 November 1943, Vol. 393, c. 532. 10 Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–​ 1945 (London and New York: Berg, 2012), p. 105. 11 Heap, diaries, 21 December 1942. 12 Ibid., 19 June 1943. 13 Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and composure: Creating narratives’, Cultural and Social History 1/​1 (2004), pp. 65–​94, p. 87. 14 House of Commons Debates, ‘Discharged army personnel (clothing allowance)’, 9 December 1942, Vol. 385, cc. 1664–​72. 15 Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 16 Heap, diaries, 21 February 1943. 17 Ibid. A soubriquet attached to affordable, made to measure suits pioneered by the ‘Fifty Shilling Tailors’ founded in Leeds in 1905 by Henry Price. 18 Ibid. 19 William Lemkin, ‘How Britain provided a complete outfit for her demobilised servicemen’, The Outfitter Export (July 1947), pp. 45–​7, p. 45. 20 Ibid. 21 House of Commons Debates, ‘Army clothing factory Pimlico’, November 1919, Vol. 121, cc. 935. 22 Allport, Demobbed, p. 119. 23 Heap, diary, 25 January 1944. 24 House of Commons Debates, ‘Demobilised soldiers (civilian clothing)’, 18 January 1944, Vol. 396, cc. 56–​7. 25 House of Commons Debates, ‘Demobilised soldiers (civilian clothing)’, 25 January 1944, Vol. 396, cc. 523–​4. 26 Lemkin, ‘How Britain provided a complete outfit’, p. 45. 27 Imperial War Museum, ‘Notes to Catalogue No. UNI 2965/​6; UNI 11023’. Available at http://​www.iwm.org.uk (accessed???). 28 The Times, ‘Soldier to civilian’, 15 March 1944, p. 2. 29 House of Commons Debates, ‘Discharged service personnel [civilian clothing]’, 19 October 1944, Vol. 403, cc. 2670–​8.

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30 Ibid. 31 [British] Vogue, ‘Beauty and the younger generation’, August 1944, p. 21. 32 Pope, ‘British demobilization after the Second World War’, p. 66. 33 House of Commons Debates, ‘Discharged service personnel [civilian clothing]’. 34 John B. Priestley, British Women Go To War (London: Collins, 1944), p. 30. 35 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 72. 36 The Times, editorial, 24 April 1945, p. 33. 37 Picture Post, ‘Emphasis on women’, March 1944, pp. 50–​1. 38 Ibid. 39 [British] Vogue, ‘Beauty follows fashion’, February 1944, p. 15. 40 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 53. 41 The Times, ‘Paris fashions –​exaggeration the keynote’, 30 August 1944, p. 7. 42 Ibid., ‘Paris fashions are quick off the mark’, 6 October 1944, p. 19. 43 Picture Post,‘The sinister element in dress designing’,readers’letters,4 November 1944, p. 3. 44 Ibid., Alison Settle, ‘What a Vogue photographer sees in Paris’, 25 November 1944, pp. 12–​3. 45 Ibid. 46 Picture Post, editorial, 25 November 1944, p. 13.. 47 Mass Observation, The Journey Home (London: John Murray, 1944), p. 7. 48 Pam Cook, I Know Where I’m Going (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 26, 28. 49 Ibid, pp. 25, 26. 50 Picture Post, Alison Settle, ‘London: Can it become a world fashion centre?’, 6 January 1945, pp. 19–​20. 51 [British] Vogue, ‘The wind is changing’, March 1945, p. 29. 52 House of Commons Debates, ‘Demobilised women (clothing grants)’, 21 March 1944, Vol. 398, c. 651. 53 Good Taste, ‘Cash and coupons for the war bride trousseau’, Special Brides Issue, April 1946, p. 27. 54 Board of   Trade, Confidential Report, ‘Austerity regulations’, 4 May 1945, BT 64/​956. 55 Picture Post, editorial, 6 January, 1945, p. 12. 56 [British] Vogue, Lesley Blanch, ‘I’d like to see…’, January 1944, p. 78. 57 Frank V. Cantwell, ‘The meaning of the British election’, Political Quarterly 9/​2 (1945), 150–​75, p. 154. 58 Ibid., p. 157. 59 Board of  Trade, Correspondence JAS: Board of Trade, 5 June 1945, BT 64/​956. 60 Ibid., Correspondence, JAS: Board of Trade, 28 June 1945, BT 64/​956. 61 Ibid., Memo, ‘Better utility prices’, CAB 124/​423, 28 June 1945, BT 64/​956. 62 Ibid., Note, Nowell: Board of Trade, 30 June 1945, BT 64/​956. 63 Ibid., Memorandum, ‘Better utility prices’. 64 House of Commons Debates, ‘Discharged service personnel [civilian clothing]’. 65 Allport, Demobbed, p. 73.

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66 Labour Party, ‘Let us face the future’, 1945 election manifesto. Available at http://​www.politicsresources.net/​area/​uk/​man/​lab45.htm (accessed 4 September 2016). 67 David Morgan and Mary Evans, The Battle for Britain: Citizenship and Ideology in the Second World War (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135–​6. 68 Conservative Party, ‘Mr Churchill’s declaration of policy to the electors’, 1945. Available at http://​ w ww.politicsresources.net/​ a rea/​ u k/​ m an/​ c on45.htm (accessed 4 September2016). 69 Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), p. 5. 70 Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-​Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 144. 71 Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments 1945–​1951 (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 53 72 Ibid.

3  Austerity by Consensus: Democratising Desire 1 John B. Priestley, Three Men in New Suits (London: Allison & Busby Ltd, 1945), pp. 16–​7. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 8. 4 Ibid., p. 41 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 60. 7 Ibid., pp. 28–​9. 8 The Times, ‘Release from services: Speed at Navy Centre …’, 19 June 1945, p. 2. 9 Ibid., ‘Human element in army scheme’, 19 June 1945, p. 2. 10 Ibid. 11 George in Civvy Street, dir. Marcel Varnel, 1946, Columbia Pictures. 12 William Lemkin, ‘How Britain provided a complete outfit for her demobilised servicemen’, The Outfitter Export (July 1947), pp. 45–​7. 13 Ibid, p. 47. 14 Arthur Barker, Nobby and Pincher in Civvy Street, 1950, cited in Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 119. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid, pp. 7–​8. 17 Ibid., p. 25. 18 Lemkin, ‘How Britain provided a complete outfit’, p. 47. 19 Henry E. Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, p. 95. 20 Ibid., p. 32. 21 Anthony Heap, diaries, transcribed Dr Robin Woolven, 11 June 1945, London Metropolitan Archives, LMCA (ACC/​2243). 22 Ibid., p. 95.

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23 Interview with Len Perry, 28 October 2007. 24 Mass Observation, The Journey Home (London: John Murray, 1944), p. 3. 25 Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–​1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 256. 26 Ibid., p. 116. 27 Ibid., p. 119. 28 Ibid., p. 120. 29 Mass Observation, The Journey Home, p. 35. 30 Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 120. 31 Board of Trade, report, ‘Austerity’, 9 August 1945, BT 64/​956. 32 Ibid., report, ‘Responses to “Austerity” ’, 11 September 1945, BT64/​956. 33 Ibid., correspondence, Donald Barber to Sir Stafford Cripps, 4 September 1945, BT 64/​956. 34 Ibid. 35 Board of Trade, Correspondence, Sir Stafford Cripps to Donald Barber, 27 September 1945, BT 4/​956. 36 Monica Felton, Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain (London: HMSO, 1946), pp. 32, 39. 37 Elizabeth Wilson and Lou Taylor, Through the Looking Glass: A History of Dress from 1860 to the Present Day (London: BBC Books, 1989), p. 128. 38 [British] Vogue, editorial, May 1945, p. 29. 39 Picture Post, editorial, 20 October 1945, p. 17. 40 Picture Post,‘What! Bustles? Surely we can’t be going back to that!’,15 September 1945, pp. 22–​3. 41 Pathé News, ‘Service into Civvies’, 1945. Available at http://​www.britishpathe. com/​video/​service-​into-​civvies/​query/​service+to+civvies (accessed 3 August 2015) 42 Ibid. 43 Draper’s Record, editorial, 7 July 1945, p. 13. 44 Ibid., advertisement for Wilkinson and Warburton Ltd, Leeds, ‘We take off our ATS’, 1 September 1945, p. 33. 45 [British] Vogue, ‘Base your demobilisation wardrobe on clothes like these’, May 1945, pp. 62–​3. 46 Ibid. 47 Good Taste, ‘Operation trousseau’, February 1946, pp. 24–​7. 48 Ibid., p. 42. 49 Ibid., p. 45. 50 Good Taste, Eve Cavendish, ‘New for you’, January 1946, pp. 26–​9. 51 Ibid., 28. 52 Ibid. 53 Good Taste, Eve Cavendish, ‘A way with clothes’, February 1946, p. 20. 54 Ibid., ‘Film flashes: Brief Encounter. A film you really should see’, February 1946, p. 33. 55 Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 98, 102–​3.

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56 Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 193. 57 Ibid., p. 188. 58 Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–​ 1945 (London and New York: Berg, 2012), p. 181. 59 Lou Taylor, ‘Paris couture, 1940–​1944’, in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London: Pandora, 1992), pp. 127–​45, pp. 135, 136. 60 [British] Vogue, ‘Pointers from the Paris Collection’, May 1945, p. 29. 61 Wilson and Taylor, Through the Looking Glass, p. 122. 62 Taylor, ‘Paris couture, 1940–​1944’, p. 136. 63 Wilson and Taylor, Through the Looking Glass, p. 145. 64 Felton, Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain, pp. 32, 39. 65 Jane Ashelford, ‘ “Utility” fashion’, in Utility Furniture and Fashion 1941–​1951, catalogue, Geffryre Museum (London: ILEA, 1974). 66 Christopher Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion: Utility Cloth, Clothing and Footwear 1941–​ 1952 (Oxford: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 43. 67 [British] Vogue, editorial, February/​March 1946. 68 Howell, Wartime Fashion, p. 168. 69 Ibid. 70 Picture Post, Alison Settle, ‘London: Can it become a world fashion centre?’, 6 January 1945, pp. 19–​20. 71 Alison Settle, English Fashion (London: Collins, 1948), p. 48.

4  Lessons in Austerity: Styling Postwar Citizenship 1 Picture Post, ‘Cripps preaches on the right use of victory’, 12 May 1945, pp. 22–​3. 2 They Came to a City, dir. Basil Dearden, 1944, Ealing Studios. 3 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2001), pp. 12, 13, 14. 4 Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan, The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 68, 69. 5 Eve Cavendish, ‘New for you’, January 1946, pp. 26–​9, pp. 27, 89. 6 [British] Vogue, editorial, November 1945, p. 7. 7 Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–​ 1945 (London and New York: Berg, 2012), p. 181. 8 [British] Vogue, editorial, September 1946, p. 29. 9 Robert Murphy, British Cinema and the Second World War (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 124. 10 The Wicked Lady, dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945, Gainsborough Pictures. 11 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: BFI, 1994), p. 130. 12 Picture Post, ‘Britain’s best clothes are for export’, 21 January 1945, p. 166. 13 [British] Vogue, ‘Peace but not plenty’, October 1945, p. 35. 14 Ibid., editorial, November 1945, p. 7.

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15 Cavendish, ‘New for you’, p. 28. 16 Picture Post, ‘The prime minister talks to Picture Post’, 27 July 1946, p. 10. 17 Council of Industrial Design (COID), ‘Notes for guidance for selection committees’, Summer (1), DIA Yearbook and Membership List (1946). 18 Christopher Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion: Utility Cloth, Clothing and Footwear 1941–​ 1952 (Oxford: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 73. 19 Veronica Scott, ‘Here they are at last…’, 25 May 1946, p. 7. 20 Fabian Society, Fabian Quiz (London: Fabian Society, 1946). 21 Henry E. Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, p. 100. 22 Woman, ‘Do visit this exhibition’, 23 March 1945, p. 5. 23 Harry Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), p. 51. 24 Outfitter Export, editorial, special edition, March 1946, p. 12. 25 Council of Industrial Design (COID), Britain Can Make It Exhibition Guide (London: HMSO, 1946). 26 Audrey Withers, ‘Fashion design: Britain can make it’, Design 46 (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 47. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid, p. 48. 29 Ashley Havinden, ‘Men’s wear’, Design 46 (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 74. 30 Robin Darwin, ‘Designers in the making’, Design 46 (London: HMSO, 1946), pp. 139–​40. 31 Picture Post, ‘Britain can make it’, 19 October 1946, p. 21. 32 Penny Sparke, Did Britain Make It? British Design in Context, 1946–​1986 (London: Design Council, 1986), p. 149. 33 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 109. 34 Ibid. 35 Woman, Veronica Scott, ‘How do you like your fashions –​with a British or French accent?’, 10 October 1946, p. 7. 36 Woman, ‘Oh, its my dress!’, 19 October 1946, p. 12. 37 Ibid., editorial, 30 November 1946, p. 8. 38 [British] Vogue, ‘Paris bones to shape’, July 1946, p. 66. 39 Ibid., editorial, September 1946, p. 52. 40 Ibid., editorial, October 1946, p. 39. 41 Mass Observation FR 2473, ‘Juvenile delinquency’, April 1947, p. 41. 42 Mark Roodhouse, ‘In Racket Town: Gangster chic in Austerity Britain, 1939–​ 1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31/​4 (2011), pp. 523–​41, p. 533. 43 Ibid., pp. 534–​5. 44 Ibid., p. 533. 45 Ibid., p. 532. 46 Daily Express, editorial, 24 June 1947. 47 Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (London: John Murray, 2003), p. 137. 48 Ibid., p. 157. 49 Ibid., p. 362.

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50 Tailor and Cutter & Women’s Wear, ‘Style highlights’, 5 September 1947, p. 608. 51 Ibid., ‘Colour is demobilised!’, 4 July 1947, p. 371. 52 Marion Hume, ‘Tailoring’, in Amy de la Haye (ed.), The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion 1947–​1997 (London: V&A Publishing, 1997), pp. 36–​62, p. 41. 53 Tailor and Cutter & Women’s Wear, ‘Meet the spiv’, 15 August 1947, p. 561. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Anthony Heap, diaries, 12 October 1947, transcribed Dr Robin Woolven, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA (ACC/​2243). 57 The Times, ‘Man and his dress’, 8 October 1947, p. 5. 58 Ibid., ‘Pardonable plumage’, 5 February 1948, p. 5. 59 Ibid. 60 Edwina Ehrman, ‘Broken traditions: 1930–​1955’, in Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman and Caroline Evans (eds), The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 131. 61 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–​51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 62 The Times, editorial, 23 January 1948, p. 5. 63 Andrew Clay, ‘Men, women and money: Masculinity in crisis in the British professional crime film 1946–​1965’, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 51–​ 66, p. 52. 64 Dancing with Crime, dir. John Paddy Carstairs, 1947, Southall Studios. 65 The Times, ‘New films in London –​fact and fiction’, 11 August 1947, p. 6. 66 Mass Observation, M34, File Report 3057, November 1948. 67 Outfitter Export, editorial, February 1946, p. 42. 68 Ibid., editorial, August 1946, p. 37. 69 Ibid., editorial, September 1946, p. 22. 70 Ibid., ‘Operation outlook –​ex-​service designers’ plan’, July 1947, pp. 41–​4, p. 42 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 44. 73 Ibid. 74 Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, p. 100. 75 Mike Parsons and Mary B. Rose, Invisible on Everest: Innovation and the Gear Makers (Philadelphia, PA: Northern Libraries Press, 2003), pp. 164, 165–​74. 76 Ibid., p. 47 77 Outfitter Export, advertisement for Windac jackets, December 1947, p. 27. 78 Ibid., ‘War or peace –​rain isn’t rationed’, advertisement for Cravenette raincoats, Bradley Dyers’ Association, October 1946, p. 35. 79 Interview with Len P, 18 September 2007. 80 Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place 1910–​1975 (London: Persephone Books, 1975), p. 137. 81 Ibid. 82 Pathé News, ‘Factory fashions’, 1946. Available at http://​www.britishpathe. com/​video/​factory-​fashions/​query/​Mills (accessed 6 September 2015).

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5  Austerity and Affluence:  Another Look at the New Look 1 Leonora Curry, ‘Report from Paris’, Drapers Record, 10 October 1947, p. 23. 2 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985), p. 102. 3 Marjorie Beckett, ‘Paris forgets this is 1947’, Picture Post, 27 September 1947, p. 26. 4 Ibid., p. 27. 5 Ibid., p. 28. 6 See Taylor, Lou, ‘Paris couture, 1940–​1944’, in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London: Pandora, 1992), pp. 127–​45. 7 Ibid., pp. 27, 31. 8 Valerie D. Mendes, Four Hundred Years of Fashion (London: V&A, 1984), pp. 90–​1. 9 Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), p. 84. 10 Christopher Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion: Utility Cloth, Clothing and Footwear 1941–​ 1952 (Oxford: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 76. 11 Angela Partington, ‘Popular fashion and working-​ class’, in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London: Pandora, 1992), pp. 145–​61, p. 151. 12 Ibid., p. 150. 13 Herbert and Nancie Matthews, Assignment to Austerity:An American Family in Britain (New York: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1950), p. 246. 14 Ibid. 15 Marr, A History of Modern Britain, p. 84. 16 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, pp. 225–​6. 17 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 77. 18 Mass Observation, ‘The New Look: Current fashions in clothes’, File Report 3095, March 1949. 19 [British] Vogue, ‘The new silhouette is skin deep’, October 1947, p. 39. 20 Picture Post, letters page, 4 October 1947, p. 31. 21 Ibid. 22 Pathé News, ‘Harold Wilson at home, 1947’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​harold-​wilson (accessed 16 September 2015). 23 Angela Partington, ‘The days of the New Look: Consumer culture and working class’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–​51 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), pp. 247–​63, p. 253. 24 Partington, ‘Popular fashion and working-​class’, pp. 146, 147, 153. 25 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 79. 26 Ibid., 108. 27 Judy Attfield, ‘Introduction’, in Judy Attfield (ed.), Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 1–​12, p. 2. 28 Ibid. 29 Henry E. Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, p. 82.

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30 Rebecca Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), p. 77. 31 Ibid., p. 41. 32 Goronwy Rees, St Michael: A  History of Marks & Spencer (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), pp. 61–​5. 33 Ibid., p. 44. 34 Love Story, dir. Leslie Arliss, 1944, Gainsborough Studios. 35 Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 74. 36 Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–​ 1945 (London and New York: Berg, 2012), pp. 146–​7. 37 Helen Reynolds, ‘The utility garment: Its design and effect on the mass market 1942–19​45’, in Judy Attfield (ed.), Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 125–​43, p. 135. 38 Ibid., pp. 133–​4. 39 Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, pp. 83, 94. 40 Draper’s Record, ‘Real picture frocks –​new fashion?’, 11 August 1945, p. 14. 41 Picture Post, Kathleen Butler, ‘Cotton steals the show’, 31 May 1947, p. 21. 42 Valerie D. Mendes, ‘Women’s dress since 1900’, in Mendes, Four Hundred Years of Fashion, pp.77–​121, p. 92. 43 Pathé News, ‘Utility Fashion Show 1948’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe. com/​video/​utility-​fashion-​show/​query (accessed 16 September 2015). 44 [British] Vogue, Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Way of life: What is it, why is it, and what does it mean to us?’, December 1947, p. 44. 45 Draper’s Record, Leonora Curry, ‘Just a line or two’, 17 October 1947, pp. 738–​99. 46 Woman, Veronica Scott, ‘How long is your skirt going?’, 25 October 1947, p. 7. 47 Alison Settle, English Fashion (London: Collins, 1948), p. 48. 48 Woman, July 1947, p. 93. 49 Ibid. 50 Tailor and Cutter & Women’s Wear, Leonora Curry, ‘A few lines … about new lines’, 1 August 1947, p. 528. 51 Ibid., p. 529. 52 Zillah Halls, ‘Mrs Exeter –​the rise and fall of the older woman’, Costume 34/​1 (January 2001), pp. 105–​11. 53 Partington, ‘Popular fashion and working-​class’, p. 151. 54 Amy de la Haye, ‘Introduction’, in Amy de la Haye (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fifty Years of British Fashion 1947–​1977 (London: V&A, 1997), pp 8–​36, p. 17. 55 Pathé News, ‘Window fashion parade 1948’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe. com/​video/​window-​fashion-​parade (accessed 16 September 2015). 56 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 79. 57 Marion Hume, ‘Tailoring’, in Amy de la Haye (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Fifty Years of British Fashion 1947–​1997 (London: V&A Publishing, 1997), pp. 36–​62, p. 40. 58 Woman, ‘Woman Simplicity patterns give you the New Line’, 24 January 1948, p. 8. 59 Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion, p. 109. 60 Pathé News, ‘Utility fashion show 1948’. 61 [British] Vogue, ‘Smart fashions for limited incomes’, January 1949: 76–​7.

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62 Ibid. 63 Mass Observation, ‘Utility report’, 1948 64 Rachel Worth, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 46. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 49. 67 Ibid., pp. 104–​5. 68 Ibid., p. 51. 69 Good Taste, Velia Ercole, ‘Appointment with love’, February 1946, p. 76. 70 Woman, editorial, 19 October 1946, p. 4. 71 Picture Post, ‘A girl finds a job to suit her’, 26 October 1946. 72 Ibid. 73 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987), pp. 196–​204. 74 Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford, Berg, 2004), p. 157. 75 Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain, 1945–​ 1968 (London: Tavistock, 1980), pp. 40, 45. 76 Ibid., pp. 42–​4. 77 Penny Summerfield, ‘ “The girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring…”: discourses of women and work in the Second World War’, in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds), Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester and New  York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 35–​53, p. 50. 78 Picture Post, Sydney Jacobson, ‘Will the women go back’, 19 July 1947, pp. 7–​8. 79 Summerfield, ‘ “The girl that makes the thing …’, p. 50. 80 Dolly Smith Wilson, ‘A New look at the affluent worker: the good working mother in post-​war Britain’, Twentieth Century British History 17/​2 (2005), pp. 206–​29. 81 Woman, Veronica Scott, ‘The wedding dress’, 22 November 1947, p. 7. 82 Ibid. 83 Good Taste, ‘Jane’s day: Round the clock with a well-​dressed girl’, March 1948, p. 34. 84 Ibid., pp. 34–​6 85 Good Taste, ‘Going about your business’, April 1948, pp. 36–​7. 86 [British] Vogue, ‘Freedom in fashion’, January 1948, pp. 27–​48. 87 Ibid., ‘Have a scheme’, January 1948, pp. 69–​71. 88 Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, ‘Consensus and consumption: rationing, austerity and controls after the war’, in Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–​1964 (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), pp. 79–​96, p. 82.

6  Austerity and Aspiration:  A Boy, A Girl and A Bike 1 David Low, ‘Make way’, cartoon, Evening Standard, 27 July 1945. 2 David Matless, ‘Visual culture and geographical citizenship: England in the 1940s’, Journal of Historical Geography 22/​4 (1996), pp. 424–​39, p. 436.

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3 Ibid., Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 202. 4 Ibid., ‘Moral geographies of English landscape’, Landscape Research 22/​2 (1997), pp. 141–​55, p. 153. 5 Jeff Hill, ‘ “When work is over”: Labour, leisure and culture in wartime Britain’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds), ‘Millions Like Us’? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 236–​60, pp. 258–​9. 6 Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, England Arise:The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 137. 7 Steven Fielding, ‘To make men and women better than they are: Labour and the building of socialism’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–​51 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), pp. 16–​27, p. 21. 8 Ibid., p. 22. 9 Daily Herald, Tom Stephenson, ‘MPs led way in Pennine hustle’, 24 May 1948. 10 Labour Party, The Enjoyment of Leisure, 24 March 1947, MSS 292.812.21. 11 Ibid. 12 Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture in Britain 1884–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 13 Robert Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1973);Edward PalmerThompson,‘Time,work-​discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–​97. 14 John Clarke and Chas Critcher, The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (London: Macmillan, 1985). 15 Hill, ‘ “When work is over” ’, p. 240. 16 Ibid., pp. 258–​9. 17 A Boy, A Girl, and A Bike, dir. Ralph Smart, 1948, Gainsborough Pictures. 18 Martin Francis, ‘The Labour Party: Modernisation and the politics of restraint’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–​1964 (Chicago, IL: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 152–​ 70, p. 156. 19 Mike Savage, ‘Affluence and social change in the making of technocratic middle-​ class identities: Britain, 1939–19​55’, Contemporary British History 22/​4 (December 2008), pp. 457–​76, p. 473). 20 Geraldine Biddle-​Perry, ‘The rise of “The world’s largest sport and athletic outfitter”: A study of Gamage’s of Holborn, 1878–​1913’, Journal of Sport in History 34/​2 (2014), pp. 295–​317. 21 Picture Post, J. B. Priestley, ‘When work is over’, 4 January 1941. 22 Ibid. 23 George Orwell, The Lion and the The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941), p. 98. 24 David Edgerton, Warfare State Britain 1920–​1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 172. 25 Herbert Delauney Hughes, ‘Towards a Classless Society’: A Discussion Pamphlet (London: Fabian Publications Ltd, 1947), p. 3. 26 Savage, ‘Affluence and social change’, p. 473. 27 Ibid.

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28 Interview with Len Perry, 18 September 2007. 29 Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 201. 30 Good Taste, ‘So you’re being demobbed’, February 1946, p. 34. 31 Picture Post, 9 October 1946, p. 14. 32 Civil Service Council for Further Education, Handbook for the Session 1947–​1948: Education for Living (London: Fosh & Cross, 1947), p. 35. 33 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 100. 34 William Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 35 Ibid., p. 159. 36 Ibid., p. 163. 37 Harry Hopkins, The New Look. A Social History of the Forties and Fifties in Britain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), p. 97. 38 Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-​Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 90. 39 Oliver Coburn, The Youth Hostel Story:The First Twenty Years in England and Wales (London: National Council of Social Service, 1950), p. 85. 40 Bernard Chapman, Polytechnic Rambling Club, c. 1947/​48. 41 ‘Antartic ramblings’, Viewpoint: The Magazine of the Croydon Group YHA, March 1948, p. 1. 42 Advertisements, Dunlop tyres, Camping and Outdoor Life, June/​ July 1946; November/​December 1946. 43 Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘The challenge of 1948’, in The Times, editorial, 3 January 1948, p. 3. 44 Michael Sissons’Introduction’, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds), The Age of Austerity 1945–​1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp.?–​???, p. xvii. 45 Ibid., p. xvii. 46 Fielding, Thompson and Tiaratsoo, England Arise, p. 85. 47 Ibid., p. 89. 48 Men’s Wear, editorial, 31 July 1948, p. 7. 49 Picture Post, ‘A nice day’s outing’, 19 June 1948, pp. 8–​11. 50 Ibid., p. 11. 51 Francis, ‘The Labour Party’, p. 161. 52 Henry Irving, ‘The birth of a politician: Harold Wilson and the bonfires of controls, 1948–194​9’, Twentieth Century British History 25/​1 (2014), pp. 87–​107. 53 Ibid., pp. 92, 99–​100. 54 The Times, ‘Coupons and customers’, 1 May 1948, p. 5. 55 Ibid., ‘Cloth shortages to continue –​more for export’, 21 October 1948, p. 2. 56 Henry E. Wadsworth., ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, pp. 82, 95. 57 Ibid., p. 85. 58 Janice Winship, ‘New disciplines for women and the rise of the chain store in the 1930s’, in Margaret Andrews and Mary M. Talbot (eds), All the World and Her

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Husband:Women in Twentieth-​Century Consumer Culture (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), pp. 23–​45, p. 35. 59 David Fowler, The First Teenagers:The Lifestyles of Y  oung Wage-​Earners in Interwar Britain (London: The Woburn Press, 1995), p. 182. 60 Winship, ‘New disciplines for women’, pp. 29–​30, 37. 61 Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–​1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 183. 62 Mike Parsons and Mary B. Rose, Invisible on Everest: Innovation and the Gear Makers (Philadelphia, PA: Northern Libraries Press, 2003), p. 212. Ibid., p. 22. 63 Dennis Evans, ‘Ten days below sea level’, Viewpoint: The Magazine of the Croydon Group YHA, October 1948, p. 3. 64 Hopkins, The New Look, p. 159. 65 Ibid. 66 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 159.

Conclusion :   The Autonomy of Austerity: Postwar Affluence by Design 1 Mass Observation, ‘The class riddle’, 1948, p. 9. 2 Patrick Maguire and Jonathan Woodham (eds), Design and Cultural Politics in Post-​war Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), pp. 80–​1. 3 Ibid. 4 Herbert Delauney Hughes, ‘Towards a Classless Society’: A Discussion Pamphlet (London: Fabian Publications Ltd, 1947), p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 14. 6 Ferdynand Zweig, The Worker in an Affluent Society: Family Life and Industry (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 136. 7 George H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls Great Britain 1937–​ 1975, vol. 1 (New York: Gallup, 1976), p. 172 8 Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London: The Cresset Press, 1955), p. 37. 9 Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, The English Middle Classes (London: Phoenix House, 1949), p. 25. 10 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 169. 11 Ibid., p. 173. 12 Eli Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1955). 13 Ibid., p. 126. 14 Mike Savage, ‘Changing social class identities in post-​war Britain: Perspectives from Mass Observation’, Sociological Research Online 12/​3 (2007). Available at http://www. socresonline.org.uk/​12/​3/​6.html (accessed 15 December 2009). 15 Arthur Marwick, Class: Image and Reality in Britain, France and the USA since 1930 (London: Fontana Collins, 1980), pp. 157–​62. 16 Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and George R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951). 17 Ibid.

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18 Ibid., p. 26. 19 Ibid., p. 5. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid., p. 32. 23 Ibid., p. 403. 24 Ibid., p. 239. 25 James Obelkevich, ‘Consumption’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (eds), Understanding Post-​war British Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141–​54, p. 153. 26 Marwick, Class, p. 12. 27 Martin Francis, ‘The Labour Party: Modernisation and the politics of restraint’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–​1964 (Chicago, IL: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 152–​70, pp. 168–​9. 28 Ibid. 29 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 89. 30 Frank C. Mort, ‘Paths to mass consumption: Britain and the USA since 1945’, in Mica Nava, Andrew Blake, Iain MacRury and Barry Richards (eds), Buy this Book. Studies in Advertising and Consumption (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), pp. 15–​33, p. 28. 31 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 111–​2. 32 Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985). 33 Stacey, Star Gazing, pp. 57, 45. 34 Caroline Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago Press, 1986). 35 Ibid., p. 9. 36 Ibid., p. 6. 37 Ibid., pp. 15–​16. 38 Dance Hall, dir. Charles Crichton, 1950, Ealing Studios. 39 Pat Kirkham, ‘Dress, dance, dreams and desire: Fashion and fantasy in Dance Hall’, Journal of Design History 8/​3 (1995), pp. 195–​214, p. 202. 40 Ibid., p. 200. 41 Angela Partington, ‘Popular fashion and working-​ class’, in Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London: Pandora, 1992), pp. 145–​61 and ‘The days of the New Look: Consumer culture and working class’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–​51 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), pp. 247–​63. 42 Judy Attfield, ‘Introduction’, in Judy Attfield (ed.), Utility Reassessed:The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 1–​10, p. 4. 43 Woman, ‘A debonair touch…’, 12 January 1946, p. 11. 44 Helen Reynolds, ‘The utility garment: Its design and effect on the mass market 1942–​1945’, in Attfield, Utility Reassessed, pp. 125–​43, p. 140. 45 Attfield, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 46 Christopher Sladen, The Conscription of Fashion: Utility Cloth, Clothing and Footwear 1941–​ 1952 (Oxford: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 98.

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47 The Times, ‘Goods policy –​schemes to be orchestrated’, 1 May 1950, p. 6. 48  Ibid. 49 Henry E. Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, The Review of Economic Studies 16/​40 (1948), pp. 82–​101, p. 100. 50 The Times, editorial, 23 March 1949, p. 4. 51 Ibid., ‘Utility Scheme and after –​minister supports quality mark’, 24 February 1949, p. 3. 52 Edwina Ehrman, ‘Broken traditions: 1930–​55’, in Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman and Caroline Evans (eds), The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 97–​117, p. 112. 53 Ibid. 54 Paul Addison, Now the War is Over: A Social History of Britain 1945–​1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 56. 55 Hennessy, Never Again, p. 382. 56 Henry Irving, ‘The birth of a politician: Harold Wilson and the bonfires of controls, 1948–194​9’, Twentieth Century British History 25/​1 (2014), pp. 87–​107, p. 98. 57 Wadsworth, ‘The Utility Cloth and Clothing Scheme’, p. 85. 58 Rachel Worth, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 46. 59 Susannah Handley, Nylon, The Manmade Fashion Revolution: A Celebration of Design from Art Silk to Nylon and Thinking Fibres (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 68. 60 Ibid., p. 68. 61 Ibid., pp. 69–​71. 62 Worth, Fashion for the People, p. 77. 63 Jane Schneider, ‘Out of polyester: Desire, disdain and global fibre competitions’, Anthropology Today 10/​4 (1994), pp. 2–​10, p. 4. 64 Men’s Wear, ‘Nylon’, 6 November 1948. 65 Ibid. 66 Handley, Nylon, p. 63 67 Neil Rollings, ‘ “The Reichstag method of governing”?: The Attlee governments and permanent economic controls’, in Helen Mercer, Neil Rollings, and Jim Tomlinson (eds), Labour Governments and Private Industry: The Experience of 1945–​1951 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 15–​36, pp. 17, 21. 68 Cartoon by Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, ‘Another Five Years of Them’, 2 February 1949, National Library of Wales, Cartoon Collection, 9940149802419. Available at, http://​delwedd.llgc.org.uk/​delweddau/​ilw/​ilw01561.gif (accessed 16 November 2015). 69 Men’s Wear, cartoon by ‘Strube’, ‘The irresistible £10 suit’, 5 November 1949. 70 David Morgan and Mary Evans, The Battle for Britain: Citizenship and Ideology in the Second World War (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 139. 71 Ibid., p. 139. 72 James Hinton, ‘ “The tale of Sammy Spree”: Gender and the secret dynamics of 1940s British corporatism’, History Workshop Journal 58/​ 1 (2004), pp. 86–​109, p. 90 73 Obelkevich, ‘Consumption’, p. 149.

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Board of Trade papers Confidential Report, ‘Austerity regulations’, 4 May 1945, BT 64/​956. Correspondence JAS: Board of Trade, 5 June 1945, BT 64/​956. Correspondence, JAS: Board of Trade, 28 June 1945, BT 64/​956. Correspondence, Sir Stafford Cripps to Donald Barber, 27 September 1945, BT 64/​ 956. Memo, ‘Better utility prices’, CAB 124/​423, 28 June 1945, BT 64/​956. Note, Nowell: Board of Trade, 30 June 1945, BT 64/​956. Report, ‘Austerity’, 9 August 1945, BT 64/​956. Correspondence, Donald Barber to Sir Stafford Cripps, 4 September 1945, BT 64/​ 956. Report, ‘Responses to “Austerity” ’, 11 September 1945, BT64/​956.

Camping and Outdoor Life Advertisements, Dunlop tyres, June/​July 1946; November/​December 1946.

Council of Industrial Design (COID) ‘Notes for guidance for selection committees’, Summer (1), DIAYearbook and Membership List (1946).

Daily Express Editorial, 24 June 1947.

Daily Herald Stephenson, Tom, ‘MPs led way in Pennine hustle’, 24 May 1948.

Draper’s Record Advertisement for Wilkinson and Warburton Ltd, Leeds, ‘We take off our ATS’ ‘Real picture frocks –​new fashion?’ Curry, Leonora, ‘Report from Paris’, Drapers Record, 10 October 1947. —​—​— ‘Just a line or two’, 17 October 1947. Editorial, 21 October 1939. Editorial, 7 July 1945. Editorial, 22 August 1949.

Good Taste ‘Cash and coupons for the war bride trousseau’, Special Brides Issue, April 1946. Cavendish, Eve, ‘A way with clothes’, February 1946. Ibid., ‘New for you’, January 1946. ‘Christmas party: What about clothes?’, December 1942. Ercole, Velia, ‘Appointment with love’, February 1946. ‘Film flashes: Brief Encounter. A film you really should see’, February 1946. ‘Going about your business’, April 1948.‘Operation trousseau’, February 1946. ‘Jane’s day: round the clock with a well-​dressed girl’, March 1948. ‘So you’re being demobbed’, February 1946.

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Housewife Hooper Beck, Alice, ‘It’s not the fashion now’, June 1942.

London Evening News Editorial, 3 September 1940.

The Papers of Mass Observation, University of Sussex ‘Beveridge Indirects’, December 1942. ‘Utility report’, 1948. M34, File Report 3057, November 1948. ‘The Class Riddle’, Unpublished Directive, January 1949. ‘The New Look; Current fashions in clothes’, File Report 3095, March 1949.

Men’s Wear Editorial, 31 July 1948. ‘Nylon’, 6 November 1948. Cartoon by ‘Strube’, ‘The irresistible £10 suit’, 5 November 1949.

Outfitter Export Editorial, February 1946. Editorial, special edition, March 1946. Editorial, August 1946. Editorial, September 1946. ‘War or peace –​rain isn’t rationed’, advertisement for Cravenette, Bradley Dyers’ Association, October 1946. ‘Operation outlook –​ex-​service designers’ plan’, July 1947. Advertisement for Windac’ jackets, December 1947.

Pathé News ‘Day to day frock issue: shoulder arms’, 1943. Available at http://​www.britishpathe. com/​video/​day-​to-​day-​frock-​issue-​title-​shoulder-​arms (accessed 4 April 2015) ‘Service into civvies’, 1945. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​ service-​into-​civvies/​query/​service+to+civvies (accessed 3 August 2015)

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‘Factory fashions’, 1946. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​ factory-​fashions/​query/​Mills (6 September 2015). ‘Harold Wilson at home, 1947’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​ harold-​wilson (accessed 16 September 2015). ‘Utility Fashion Show 1948’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​ utility-​fashion-​show/​query (accessed 16 September 2015) ‘Window fashion parade 1948’. Available at http://​www.britishpathe.com/​video/​ window-​fashion-​parade (accessed 16 September 2015)

Picture Post ‘A day awheel’, 10 June 1939. ‘Fashion round up’, 25 January 1940. Priestley, J. B., ‘When work is over’, 4 January 1941. Seymour, Anne, ‘A coupon summer’, 5 July 1941. ‘Old clothes make news’, 26 July 1941. ‘Emphasis on women’, March 1944. ‘The sinister element in dress designing’, readers’ letters, 4 November 1944. Settle, Alison., ‘What a Vogue photographer sees in Paris’, 25 November 1944. Editorial, 25 November 1944. Editorial, 6 January, 1945. Settle, Alison, ‘London: can it become a world fashion centre?’, 6 January 1945. ‘Britain’s best clothes are for export’, 21 January 1945. ‘Cripps preaches on the right use of victory’, 12 May 1945. ‘What! Bustles? Surely we can’t be going back to that!’, 15 September 1945. Editorial, 20 October 1945. ‘The prime minister talks to Picture Post’, 27 July 1946. Editorial, 9 October 1946. ‘Britain can make it’, 19 October 1946. ‘A girl finds a job to suit her’, 26 October 1946. Butler, Kathleen, ‘Cotton steals the show’, 31 May 1947. Jacobson, Sydney, ‘Will the women go back?’, 19 July 1947. Beckett, Marjorie, ‘Paris forgets this is 1947’, Picture Post, 27 September 1947. Scott, Veronica, ‘The wedding dress’, 22 November 1947. ‘A nice day’s outing’, 19 June 1948.

Tailor and Cutter & Women’s Wear ‘Colour is demobilised!’, 4 July 1947. Curry, Leonora, ‘A few lines … about new lines’, 1 August 1947. ‘Meet the spiv’, 15 August 1947. ‘Style highlights’, 5 September 1947.

The Times Editorial, March 1942. ‘Soldier to civilian’, 15 March 1944. ‘Paris fashions –​exaggeration the keynote’, 30 August 1944. ‘Paris fashions are quick off the mark’, 6 October 1944. Editorial, 24 April 1945.

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‘Human element in army scheme’, 19 June 1945. ‘Release from services: Speed at Navy Centre …’, 19 June 1945. ‘Man and his dress’, 8 October 1947. ‘Pardonable plumage’, 5 February 1948. ‘New films in London –​fact and fiction’, 11 August 1947. ‘Cloth shortages to continue –​more for export’, 21 October 1948. Editorial, 23 March 1949. Editorial, 3 January 1948. Editorial, 23 January 1948. ‘Coupons and customers’, 1 May 1948. ‘Utility Scheme and after –​minister supports quality mark’, 24 February 1949. ‘Goods policy –​schemes to be orchestrated’, 1 May 1950.

[British] Vogue Editorial, July 1941. Editorial, April 1942. ‘The look alive look’, August 1942. Editorial, October 1942. ‘Limbering up for the Big Push’, photographs by Lee Miller, August 1942. ‘Clothes that cover the country’, October 1942.. ‘Fashionable intelligence: The London couture creates utility clothes for the Board of Trade’, October 1942. ‘Groom to guardsman standard’, August 1942. Blanch, Leslie, ‘I’d like to see…’, January 1944. ‘Beauty follows fashion’, February 1944. ‘The apotheosis of the bicycle’, April 1944. ‘Beauty and the younger generation’, August 1944. ‘The wind is changing’, March 1945. Editorial, May 1945. ‘Pointers from the Paris Collection’, May 1945. ‘Base your demobilisation wardrobe on clothes like these’, May 1945. ‘Peace but not plenty’, October 1945. Editorial, November 1945. Editorial, February/​March 1946. ‘Paris bones to shape’, July 1946. Editorial, September 1946. Editorial, September 1946. Editorial, October 1946. ‘The new silhouette is skin deep’, October 1947. Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Way of life: What is it, why is it, and what does it mean to us?’ December 1947. ‘Freedom in fashion’, January 1948. ‘Smart fashions for limited incomes’, January 1949. ‘Have a scheme’, January 1948.

Woman ‘Do visit this exhibition’, 23 March 1945. ‘A debonair touch…’, 12 January 1946.

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Scott, Veronica, ‘Here they are at last…’, 25 May 1946. —​—​—​‘How do you like your fashions –​with a British or French accent?’, 10 October 1946. ‘Oh, its my dress!’, 19 October 1946. Editorial, 19 October 1946. Ibid., 30 November 1946. Scott, Veronica, ‘How long is your skirt going?’, 25 October 1947. ‘Woman Simplicity patterns give you the New Line’, 24 January 1948.

Viewpoint: The Magazine of the Croydon Group YHA ‘Antarctic ramblings’, March 1948. Evans, Dennis, ‘Ten days below sea level’, October 1948.

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS (WITH AUTHOR) Perry, Len, 18 September 2007. —​—​—​ 28 October 2007. Gray, Phyl, 15 June 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY Boy, A Girl and a Bike, A, dir. Ralph Smart, 1948, Gainsborough Pictures. Brief Encounter, dir. David Lean, 1945, Cineguild. Dance Hall, dir. Charles Crichton, 1950, Ealing Studios. Dancing with Crime, dir. John Paddy Carstairs, 1947, Southall Studios. George in Civvy Street, dir. Marcel Varnel, 1946, Columbia Pictures. I Know Where I’m Going, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945, A Production of The Archers. Love Story, dir. Leslie Arliss, 1944, Gainsborough Pictures. Millions Like Us, dir. Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, 1943, Gainsborough Pictures. They Came to a City, dir. Basil Dearden, 1944, Ealing Studios. Wicked Lady,The, dir. Leslie Arliss, 1945, Gainsborough Pictures.

212

INDEX

American Look, the 97, 100, 106–​07, 111, 118, 122, 123, 128 Amies, Hardy 18, 33, ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) 26, 51 Attlee, Clement 35, 59, 60, 89, 177, 178 austerity restrictions 17, 33, 43–​4 lifting of (menswear) 47–​8, 49 lifting of (womenswear) 56–​7, 89–​90 austerity suit, the 43 Austin Reed 104, 106 Barlow, Sir Thomas 19, 33 Beaton, Cecil 22, 23, Berketex, 23, 125, 171 Bevan, Aneurin 177 Beveridge Report 34–​5 Bevin, Ernest 67 black market 82, 98, 102 Blackman, Honor 141 Boy, A Girl and A Bike, A 140–​2 Brief Encounter 80–​1, Britain Can Make It 90, 160–​1 British Colour Council 22, 23 British Cotton Industry Research Association (Shirley Institute) 106 Burgess, Anthony 5

Castle, Barbara 138, 139, 174 Cecil Gee (brand) 97 see also Gee, Cecil Central Office of Information 132, 146–​7 Chamberlain, Neville 15 Champcommunal, Elspeth 18 Churchill, Sir Winston 16, 34, 60, 61 Civilian Clothing Directorate 17 class and social status 161–​3, 179 fashion and, 30, 31, 35, 83, 112, 115, 116, 124–​5, 129, 136, 157, 166–​7, 170 see also consumerism; fashion, democratisation of clothing controls, wartime 2, 18, 24, 31, 33, 41, 42, 171, 172 bonfire of 154 postwar 74, 89, 174 see also rationing; Utility Clothing Scheme clothing trade 6, 31, 32, 41, 43, 46, 49, 59, 74–​5, 82, 97, 99, 101, 104–​05, 113, 119, 120, 122–​4, 136, 171, 173 consensus politics 11, 27, 163–​4 Conservative Party 61, 136 consumerism, new attitudes to 27, 28, 31, 34, 71, 94, 106, 108, 109, 111, 120, 163, 167, 181

213

Index fair shares 27–​8, 33, 34, 35, 71–​2, 147 cotton, frocks 76, 115, 119–​21, 125, 128, 134, 151, 173 Cotton Board 121–​2 Council of Industrial Design (COID) 90–​1 Crawford, Anne, 26 Creed, Charles, 18 Cripps, Sir Stafford 61, 104, 113 cycling 152, 153–​4 fashion 13–​14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 30, 141, 142, 148–​9, 151–​2, 156–​7 Dalton, Hugh 18, 34, 43, 44, 48, 59, 139 Dance Hall, 168–​70 Dancing with Crime 103 Delanghe, Angela, 95 demob suit, 6, 45–​6, 49, 50, 60, 62, 68–​9, 72, 74 demobilisation, men 5–​6, 40–​1, 46–​7, 67 clothing provision and grants, 46–​8, 49, 50, 56, 65–​7, 70, 73 expectations 62–​5, 73 experiences 67–​9 demobilisation, women 51, 54 clothing provision and grants 51, 56, 76–​9, 136 Dereta 23, 125, 126 Dior, Christian 95, 124 see also New Look Director General of Civilian Clothing 33 Dors, Diana 151, 168, 169 Dorville 23, 125, 126, 127, 169 Elizabeth, HRH Princess 26, 133 Exeter, Mrs (fictional character) 123

213

see also consumerism, fair shares; Labour Party, fashion/​ consumerism fashion, menswear postwar trends, 92–​4, 97, 99, 101–​02, 104, 106–​07, 156–​7 in wartime, 41–​5, 74 see also demob suit; spivs fashion, womenswear postwar trends, 82, 83, 87, 88–​9, 91, 92, 95, 96, 110, 121–​2, 125, 126, 134, 136 return of Paris 53–​4, 75–​6, 81–​2, 96, 111, 122 wartime trends, 21–​5, 55 see also cycling, fashion Fath, Jaques 95 femininity, postwar ideals, 35, 57, 75, 76, 79–​80, 82, 83, 108, 109, 111, 129–​30, 133 wartime ideals 23, 24–​6, 52–​3, 54 Formby, George 65 Gainsborough Studios 87 Gee, Cecil 97 (retailer) Hartnell, Norman 18, 83, 122, 133 Hiller, Wendy 37, 51 Holt, Patrick 141 I Know Where I’m Going 37–​40,  54, 84 Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (INCSOC) 18–​20, 31, 83, 119, 171 and export drive, 31, 32, 33, 81, 82, 86–​7, 96, 121, 123, 146–​7, 155 Jay, Douglas 61 Jenkins, Megs 26 Keynsian economics 61

fashion, democratisation of 29, 30–​1, 36, 40, 75, 99–​100, 108, 112, 115–​16, 120, 129, 136, 175–​6, 180

Labour Party fashion/​consumerism, 136, 158–​9, 165, 173–​7, 179

214

214

Index

leisure reform, 35, 138–​40, 142, 145, 147–​9, 156, 159, 164–​6, 180 reconstruction, 35, 58, 60, 137–​8, 145, 158; see also consensus politics; consumerism, fair shares Lelong 95, 110 Lemkin, Sir William 46, 47, Livesey, Roger 37 Lockwood, Margaret 87, 118 London Model House Group 125 Lyttleton, Sir Oliver 34

Rational Recreation Movement 150 rationing 16, 17, 56, 115 Retail Distributors Association 75 Roc, Patricia 25 Russell, Peter 18, 83

Marks & Spencer 117–​18, 120, 126–​8, 129, 161, 175–​6 Mason, James 88 Mass Observation 34, 94, 103, 126 Matita 125, 169 McCullum, John 141 militarism, fashionable 20–​1, 25, 26 Millions Like Us 25, 130, Ministry of Information 7, 42, 75, 82, 108 Ministry of Supply 48, 49, 50, 68 Molyneux, Edward 18, 29, 30, 33, Montague Burton (brand) 43, 175 Morrison, Herbert 34, 35, 177 Morton, Digby 83, 96, 123 Mosca, Bianca 18

technocrat, the 10, 142, 143–​5, 156–​7 textile production 18, 120–​1, 126, 127, 146–​7, 156–​7, 175–​6 see also Utility Clothing Scheme, specifications They Came to a City 84–​6

New Look, the 9, 110, 111, 113–​14, 119–​20, 125 and utility 126, 134, 173 nylon 106, 128–​9, 175–​6 see also Marks & Spencer Outfit Depot Olympia 49, 40 palais de dance 103, 170 Parkinson, Norman 23 Priestley, J. B. 24, 25, 51, 62, 85, 143 Queen Elizabeth 28 rambling 139 Randall, Terry 26

Savile Row 100 Settle, Alison 55, 83, 123 spivs 45, 97–​9, 100, 101, 102–​03; see also black market Steibel, Victor 18, 95, Susan Small (brand) 23, 134

Utility Clothing Scheme 17, 18, 31–​3, 73, 171–​3 designs and collections 18–​19, 20, 23, 24, 31, 33, 155 postwar retention 59, 82, 89, 90–​1, 116–​17, 122, 136, 154–​5, 171–​3 specifications 18, 42–​3, 74–​5 WAAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) 26, 51 wedding, royal 133, Weir, Sir Cecil 18 Wicked Lady,The 87–​8 Wilson, Harold 115, 154–​5, 173, 174 Withers, Googie 86 women and war work 23–​4, 25 and postwar work 131–​2, 134, 145–​6 see also femininity Women’s Land Army 25, 26, 51 wool 21, 23, 40, 43, 83, 92, 109, 123, 126, 147 and Utility Scheme 18, 116, 126 Youth Hostelling Association 148, 157