2019 Fashion on the Ration Challenge

PollyWollyDoodle

I have been reading along and dying to join in, but was only able to read/write on the phone until today and it takes too long. I love the comments above about what people 'really' wore. I think Laura you are spot on about the tweed suit; every upper-class/middle-class woman would have had one for the country, although I think you wouldn't wear it in town. Think of our own dear Queen striding through the heather in her younger days, I think her 'casual' outfits are very much what well-off 1940s/1950s women would have worn. Working-class women wouldn't have tweed, but if you could afford it I think you would still have a 'costume' (a two-piece suit) to go out in.



People kept clothes for much longer in the 40s/50s, and a tweed suit would have been relined or remodelled if the fabric was still good enough - there was much more emphasis on the quality of clothes, and it's only much more recently that we have been able to buy clothes so cheaply and change fashion all the time. My mum made many of our clothes, and I learned to make my own clothes in the 1970s because it was cheaper to do so - these days it really isn't, and I'm sure my mum with a large family and a limited budget would probably have been shopping at Primark or similar (although I have no doubt she would also have created outfits from older ones).



The 'Sloane Ranger' was a real thing, I remember working with a young woman who dressed like that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was a complete mystery to me as nobody I knew wore those sort of clothes (or said 'Yar' instead of 'yes' - but she really did!).



I love the Grace Kelly look, and have always aspired to that but unfortunately I am not her shape ...



Laura, I really like the lining/tweed combination, you are very clever as I don't think I would have the courage to try and reline a tailored jacket like that. I certainly wouldn't be replacing internal pockets!

Laura_Elsewhere

PollyWollyDoodle wrote: »

Laura, I really like the lining/tweed combination, you are very clever as I don't think I would have the courage to try and reline a tailored jacket like that. I certainly wouldn't be replacing internal pockets!

I wish I were not doing it!

A couple of days of non-specific lurgy means I have only next week to write a 3-hour Powerpoint, AND re-line the jacket, because I'm nipping to my old place to fill-in for someone off sick, and really want to have the jacket done to show Dad, as I'll stay with them, and he does appreciate a good bit of needlework, bless his tailor-manqu! heart.

I could just have re-done the sleeves, but no, I had to take out all the left front and back lining to cut the pieces, and now it's unwearable ti I complete it and i have no brain yesterday and today, so... argh!

Ah well. A quiet weekend, so plenty of rest this evening and tonight and I can crack on with it tomorrow.

Laura_Elsewhere

PipneyJane wrote: »

That lining should look great inside the jacket. It goes beautifully with the tweed, picking out colours from it. Given the weight and the sheen, I'm thinking silk, but I could be completely wrong. Either way, I can envisage you now, wandering up to a random smoker in the street and asking to borrow a light. The look on his face as your produce a scrap of fabric to burn will be priceless! :rotfl:

I have been wondering silk, too - if it's synthetic then frankly it's the best-spun, best-woven synthetic I've ever worked with. It doesn't fray even the tiniest bit, really well-woven. And very light, too, weighs nothing... in which case I'll have ended up with a silk-lined Harris tweed jacket, blimey!

As for your other comments - absolutely, yes. It's one of the Great Mysteries of Society, to me and my chap, how the British public has erased how bad things were in the post-war years, the late 40s, the 50s and the 60s. It's been seriously re-written in the public mind. Read comments under any old photo on Facebook and everyone seems convinced that all modern buildings were built solely because planners had some psychotic urge to "vandalise" the country... then you look at things like the photos taken by Shelter, the charity still working with homeless people, in the late 60s and early 70s, in the early years of my life and I'm not old yet! And you realise how terrible the housing situation was, and you remember things you heard as a child, and you read journals kept at the time, and you read that two-thirds of British housing stock was damaged by 1945 - TWO-THIRDS - and you realise why post-war development had to happen. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but people were dying in the slums and in the well-built but overcrowded suburbs, and something had to change. When I read those FB comments, I always have to bite my tongue to stop myself demanding of them, "and how many children do you think it's acceptable to hospitalise in order to keep that picturesque row of cottages, with the damp and the infected water and no sewers or drains?" I tend to stay away now from those kinds of sites...

I love the past, but I wouldn't want to live there - maybe in the late 14th to late 15th centuries, but not in the post-war years in Britain. The toughest years of the last few centuries for most people, especially women.

And somehow they got through, and there's a lesson in that for me somewhere!

PipneyJane

Laura_Elsewhere wrote: »

I have been wondering silk, too - if it's synthetic then frankly it's the best-spun, best-woven synthetic I've ever worked with. It doesn't fray even the tiniest bit, really well-woven. And very light, too, weighs nothing... in which case I'll have ended up with a silk-lined Harris tweed jacket, blimey!

It will be beautiful when finished. I hope you feel better soon, so that you can wear it next week to show to your dad.

Laura_Elsewhere wrote: »

As for your other comments - absolutely, yes. It's one of the Great Mysteries of Society, to me and my chap, how the British public has erased how bad things were in the post-war years, the late 40s, the 50s and the 60s. It's been seriously re-written in the public mind. Read comments under any old photo on Facebook and everyone seems convinced that all modern buildings were built solely because planners had some psychotic urge to "vandalise" the country... then you look at things like the photos taken by Shelter, the charity still working with homeless people, in the late 60s and early 70s, in the early years of my life and I'm not old yet! And you realise how terrible the housing situation was, and you remember things you heard as a child, and you read journals kept at the time, and you read that two-thirds of British housing stock was damaged by 1945 - TWO-THIRDS - and you realise why post-war development had to happen. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but people were dying in the slums and in the well-built but overcrowded suburbs, and something had to change. When I read those FB comments, I always have to bite my tongue to stop myself demanding of them, "and how many children do you think it's acceptable to hospitalise in order to keep that picturesque row of cottages, with the damp and the infected water and no sewers or drains?" I tend to stay away now from those kinds of sites...

I love the past, but I wouldn't want to live there - maybe in the late 14th to late 15th centuries, but not in the post-war years in Britain. The toughest years of the last few centuries for most people, especially women.

And somehow they got through, and there's a lesson in that for me somewhere!

I agree with you. While I don’t like the tower blocks (poor design, poor construction), I do completely agree with why they were built. The low-rise properties are much more liveable. Two-thirds of housing bomb was damaged, but that statistic hides the fact that pre-war, probably a third of housing was uninhabitable and/or incredibly over crowded. I wish, now, that I could ask my Nanna what it was like and how her life in Australia contrasted with the life she’d left behind here. She was a teenager when her parents packed up their family and left Britain, sometime before the Great War. (Nanna would be around 130 if she was alive now.)

I could have happily lived through WW2, if I was living where I live now, in a 1930’s semi on the outskirts of London, near a tube line. I’d be up on the common manning a first-aid station, or back on the wards tending the wounded (if they’d have me after 26 years off-duty).

The post-war slum clearances were necessary. It is just a pity that some of the properties were so badly built and/or maintained. That cannot be excused. The ideal was to build “Homes fit for heroes”. I wish they still were.

- Pip

PipneyJane

PollyWollyDoodle wrote: »

I have been reading along and dying to join in, but was only able to read/write on the phone until today and it takes too long. I love the comments above about what people 'really' wore. I think Laura you are spot on about the tweed suit; every upper-class/middle-class woman would have had one for the country, although I think you wouldn't wear it in town. Think of our own dear Queen striding through the heather in her younger days, I think her 'casual' outfits are very much what well-off 1940s/1950s women would have worn. Working-class women wouldn't have tweed, but if you could afford it I think you would still have a 'costume' (a two-piece suit) to go out in.

The Queen is a good example, Polly.

As you mentioned, the quality of the fabric was the important thing - it’d have to stand up to years of wear and poor cleaning. Working class women would have made their own “costume” or remodelled a secondhand one. Even if their mothers weren’t handy, they would have been taught the skills at school (unless they were lucky enough to score a place at a grammar school).

PollyWollyDoodle wrote: »

The 'Sloane Ranger' was a real thing, I remember working with a young woman who dressed like that in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was a complete mystery to me as nobody I knew wore those sort of clothes (or said 'Yar' instead of 'yes' - but she really did!).

I love the Grace Kelly look, and have always aspired to that but unfortunately I am not her shape ...

Ditto. I am cursed with a short waist. It took me years to work out how to dress with it. My work dressing style is entirely modelled on Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson’s character) from the X-Files. Her jackets were always done up to give a longer line, as are mine.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

PipneyJane wrote: »

The Queen is a good example, Polly.

As you mentioned, the quality of the fabric was the important thing - it’d have to stand up to years of wear and poor cleaning. Working class women would have made their own “costume” or remodelled a secondhand one. Even if their mothers weren’t handy, they would have been taught the skills at school (unless they were lucky enough to score a place at a grammar school).



Ditto. I am cursed with a short waist. It took me years to work out how to dress with it. My work dressing style is entirely modelled on Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson’s character) from the X-Files. Her jackets were always done up to give a longer line, as are mine.

- Pip

Don't forget second-hand clothing! The Provincial Lady writes of sorting through her clothes trying to find things to send away to a clothing agency to raise some funds when she has to redeem her great-aunt's ring... there were very exclusive clothes agencies - I remember one in the 1980s still going, nothing at all like anything we think of as a second-hand shop! Very exclusive, very posh, very upmarket...

And then all the layers down from that - within families, between friends, and then wider across communities with jumble sales and suchlike, as well as second-hand clothes shops which were much more like our modern charity shops which are a comparatively recent thing - and again I remember second-hand clothes shops and they really were not exclusive and usually everything smelt a bit peculiar!

And because clothing lasted so well, and fashions changed more slowly, you could have a garment bought and sold a dozen times in twenty years, gradually moving into cheaper and lower homes, and eventually - even before the wartime Make Do & Mend! - the 1919 grand fine-wool fur-collared overcoat became a 1932 low-hip-belted overcoat and a separate fur tippet sold on to buy the velvet for the new flat collar, and eventually by 1937 it was made into two overcoats for little girls...making-over was a long-established skill!

When my aunt died two years ago, just after their cousin, I shall never forget Mum saying wistfully that "nobody now knows that it was Mrs Carter who made our dark green winter coats that we wore to the Festival of Britain - I know it's silly, but..." - and so I shall always remember it was Mrs Carter who made the two little girls, 10 and 7, their smart dark green winter coats which can be seen in the little photograph of them both smiling excitedly in 1951 at the Festival of Britain...

Laura_Elsewhere

PipneyJane wrote: »

Ditto. I am cursed with a short waist. It took me years to work out how to dress with it. My work dressing style is entirely modelled on Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson’s character) from the X-Files. Her jackets were always done up to give a longer line, as are mine.

- Pip

Interesting - I am waistless, almost entirely, but long-torsoed and long-limbed, as well as fat and comparatively small-busted. Imagine Dawn French with Jennifer Saunders' limbs and bust

So a done-up long jacket makes me look very bizarre, as do straight skirts a la Scully iirc! I'm really best off in the shape women wore for centuries - fitted upper garments, defined waist (or entirely fictional, created by the cut of the skirt and bodice!), full lower garments.

PollyWollyDoodle

Oh, I love the story about Mrs Carter and the green coats! In 1951 I bet that was the first new coat they had ever had, no wonder it stuck in their minds.

Laura_Elsewhere

Yes, indeed! I'd never thought of that, but it probably would have been. And that sticks in the memory indeed - being 3.5 yrs younger, I always had my sister's hand-me-downs, and I still remember my beautiful, lovely, wonderful "hollyberry" outfit which was the first clothing I remember that was properly really *mine*... dark green trousers with two narrow red stripes at the ankle, and a red tunic with two narrow green stripes at hem, cuffs and a green belt!

Mrs Carter was a professional sewing woman that my Nana occasionally did cleaning work for, a few times a year, and one year she had got hold of some very good dark green wool cloth and knew that Nana had two little girls, so one day all three of them set off on the bus, and then they each had their little winter coats, buttoning all the way up to the cosy round collar, real textbooks "little girl" coats! And the black and white photo of them smiling at the Festival of Britain is legendary!

I think Mrs Carter used new cloth - I can't imagine one large coat could make two girls' coats, for ages 7 and 10, surely? But so much would have been made over, re-made, altered, cut up... we probably forget that a bit nowadays...

PipneyJane

Laura_Elsewhere wrote: »

Don't forget second-hand clothing! The Provincial Lady writes of sorting through her clothes trying to find things to send away to a clothing agency to raise some funds when she has to redeem her great-aunt's ring... there were very exclusive clothes agencies - I remember one in the 1980s still going, nothing at all like anything we think of as a second-hand shop! Very exclusive, very posh, very upmarket...

Ahh, yes. "Dress Agencies" is what I think the posh shops were called. There was one in Ashtead in Surrey, which I used to drive past when I worked in Epsom 13 years or so ago.

And then all the layers down from that - within families, between friends, and then wider across communities with jumble sales and suchlike, as well as second-hand clothes shops which were much more like our modern charity shops which are a comparatively recent thing - and again I remember second-hand clothes shops and they really were not exclusive and usually everything smelt a bit peculiar!

And because clothing lasted so well, and fashions changed more slowly, you could have a garment bought and sold a dozen times in twenty years, gradually moving into cheaper and lower homes, and eventually - even before the wartime Make Do & Mend! - the 1919 grand fine-wool fur-collared overcoat became a 1932 low-hip-belted overcoat and a separate fur tippet sold on to buy the velvet for the new flat collar, and eventually by 1937 it was made into two overcoats for little girls...making-over was a long-established skill!

When my aunt died two years ago, just after their cousin, I shall never forget Mum saying wistfully that "nobody now knows that it was Mrs Carter who made our dark green winter coats that we wore to the Festival of Britain - I know it's silly, but..." - and so I shall always remember it was Mrs Carter who made the two little girls, 10 and 7, their smart dark green winter coats which can be seen in the little photograph of them both smiling excitedly in 1951 at the Festival of Britain...

Laura, I think the story about Mrs Carter is lovely.

Did anyone watch "Back in Time for Tea" when it was broadcast last February? We recorded it and finally got around to watching the first episode (1919 to 1939) yesterday. Unlike "Back in Time for Dinner" which had a middle-class family, this time around the family is working class and live in Bradford. Housing was definitely better "up north", with the average working class family in Bradford living in a small 2-up, 2-down, and the rents were quoted as being a tenth of the average working-man's wage.

Food, on the other hand, was extortionately expensive and consumed at least 50% of the household budget! (For which they got b**ger all, in my opinion.) Really, the program was all about the food they ate when they could afford it. The family consisted of two older girls, a boy, mum and dad. They were genuinely nice people, with well brought up kids. One of the girls was a bit of a fussy eater but the boy deserves an award for attempting everything without complaint. He visibly gagged on the tripe, but still cleared his plate.

- Pip