If necessity is the mother of invention, British clothing-rationing in the wake of the Blitz may have been the godmother of street style.
From Rationing to Ravishing, a show of garments on now at the Museum of Vancouver through the weekend, has examples of Vancouver-made clothing during that period, while Fashion on the Ration: 1940s Street Style, the exhibition opening at London's Imperial War Museum this week, explicitly looks at the British homefront through the prism of everyday clothing. Displays include underwear made from RAF silk maps, gas-mask handbags and siren suits.
People, "had to get creative in the time of austerity to find innovative ways to work around those government restrictions," curator Laura Clouting says by phone from London. Between the rules on yardage and use of pleats, pockets and other clothing-design details, and the fact that about 15 million Britons were otherwise wearing a uniform of some kind, "people worried about standardized clothing, so not only did they buy things to last and spend effort to make do and mend, they spent a lot of time making it seem interesting."
"The Blackout was such an invasive restriction," she adds, "and clothing steps in as a way that people are able to maintain a little bit of control over their lives to just embellish an outfit with a little bit of handmade jewellery or embroidery [was] a way of … retaining a sense of individuality." Style had to do its part in the war effort (as the vintage propaganda posters and ads in the Fashion on the Ration show), and it was a serious government concern regarding morale, Clouting says, explaining, for instance, why the production of cosmetics continued during the war and, while in shorter supply, they were not rationed. Noted designers were enlisted to make Utility CC41 label clothing collections appealing. "It was a mixture of retailers, magazines and the government all having that same attitude and individuals still wanting to find ways to express themselves through their clothes," she adds.
Retailers like Selfridges department store also pitched in, more opportunistically. "There was a steep rise in traffic collisions and they produced these kinds of buttons, pin-on flowers and handbags which [were] luminous," Clouting adds, "as a way to capitalize on the new sweeping regulation of the Blackout, which affected everybody every single day of the war. That was a fusion of practicality and people wanting to retain a sense of panache."
For England, the war ration also helped bring the original so-called high-street – or factory-produced clothing – and philosophy that had begun in the 1930s to fruition. Beginning with the clothing ration in mid-1941, adults were allotted booklets with 66 coupons each to last 15 months and every item type was assigned a points value depending on quantity of fabric and labour involved in its production (a dress would be 11 coupons, a coat 18). The wealthy barely felt the wardrobe privation, (able and willing to pay the 33 per cent purchase surtax on luxury items, or of 100 per cent on fur) but the middle class, the farm families and the urban poor traded up as the quality of clothing largely improved, Clouting says, and at prices afforded by all.
"The utility scheme actually had such an impact on today it was all about finding efficiencies in mass production but one of the crucial things," Clouting says, "and very different from today was that the quality of the utility clothing was paramount. It …wasn't just flogging out lots of clothing, it had to be available to those with less money but [still] of robust construction and strict specifications on quality of materials to allow people to have a fair chance on clothing that wouldn't disintegrate after a few wears. In a way it was the democratization of clothing."As a result, much of what was produced has lasted, in some cases looking good as new: The Imitation Game costume designer Sammy Sheldon recently told me that at least half the wardrobe of each of the principals consisted of vintage CC41 label clothing sourced from the period.
The less-is-more attitude lingered beyond the official end of clothing rationing in 1949. To accurately reflect that in The Bletchley Circle, a procedural set in 1952 about four women who previously worked at the wartime code-breaking offices, costume designer Anna Robbins created realistic capsule wardrobes for the lead cast: just two suits and five blouses each. In order for her own grandmother to make her wedding dress during the period, Robbins recalls, she had to save up rationing coupons, while a friend of the family crafted hers out of gingham dish cloths. "There's a photo of it and it could have been on a catwalk," she says. "It looked like couture, but this was just everyday women who had to make do and mend."
That image could describe the vintage fabric piecework in the current Maison Margiela couture collection, or the bricolage effect of Prada's quilt-like spring toppers, but with a key difference: rationing spurred the creation of a quirky, individual re-purposing, and, unlike today's "street" style, that couldn't – and still can't – be bought.
From Rationing to Ravishing runs at the Museum of Vancouver through March 8; Fashion on the Ration runs to August 31 at the Imperial War Museum, London.
Nathalie Atkinson