In their shoes: using fashion objects to explore the duration and complexity of wartime experiences

ABSTRACT

Experiences of conflict rarely adhere to the historical confines of defined dates. Although the Second World War was officially brought to a close on 2 September 1945, the emotional legacy of the conflict lingered. Drawing on objects from the Museum of London, this article investigates how fashion objects can be used to highlight the long-term impacts of conflict. By looking at how people reused, saved, and fetishized wartime objects in peacetime, it shows how emotional reactions of hope, disappointment, and lingering resentment manifested themselves through practices of dressing, as well as demonstrating the uneven impact of conflict across class and gender boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• museum
• Second World War
• austerity
• emotion

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Beatrice Behlen, David Gilbert and the Museum of London for support developing this research and to Lucie Whitmore, Laura Harrison, and the inspirational WTOS team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Conflict lingered and continued to impact people’s lives long after the arrival of peace in Europe on 8 May 1945, challenging the neat periodization often present in history books that divide 1940s Britain into two discrete historical times: war, spanning 1939–1945 and the austerity years of Clement Attlee’s Labour government. See, for example, Ziegler (1995) and Kynaston (2008).

2. Nicholas Saunders theorizes that material culture provides a key to understanding how war impacted upon the city and its people since war is ‘the transformation of matter’ through a process of creation and destruction. Saunders (2004, 5).

3. Experiences of the Blitz clearly fulfil Sara Cobb’s definition of conflict as a situation marked by actions of violence and displacement (Cobb 2013).

4. See Ruth Hoberman’s work on disruptive objects in Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 79. See also William Tullett’s recent work on the agentive properties of objects that shape our sensory experiences of the environments we live in.

5. Running through each of these is an assumption that austerity fashion was a top-down power structure in which the acts of a benevolent, male-dominated government impacted upon British women through rationing and design regulations. Such narratives overlook individual experiences in favour of authoritative public histories.

6. See, for example, Museum of London, 77.122/3.

7. Mass Observation was a social research organization founded in 1937 with the aim of studying the everyday lives of British people. This was achieved by gathering the diary entries of volunteer writers and the findings of a team of social observers.

8. 1943–1944 Making of Civilian Clothing (Restrictions) Order No 1, TNA, BT 64/905.

9. Although street markets in less affluent parts of the city continued to thrive after 1946, by 1947 West End dealers reported that demand for second-hand clothing and `accessories had fallen dramatically as shop stock rose. Mass Observation, Diarist 5250, June 1947.

10. As Bob Collins’s documentary photographs of second-hand clothing markets show, these often offered a plethora of choice in comparison to sparsely stocked stores. Shoes at an East End street market, by Bob Collins, 1948. Museum of London, IN37802.

11. This is reflected in the way that sale prices of pristine garments dating from the Second World War have grown dramatically in recent years, exemplified by the record-breaking £1,700 raised by a ‘typical’ Utility suit sold to a museum through Kerry Taylor Auctions in October 2015, nearly 10 times its estimate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an AHRC CDA in conjunction with the Museum of London [grant number AH/L003430/1].