Fashion on the Ration by Julie Summers

Author:Julie Summers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile

6

Supporting Britain’s Women

The appearance of a frock or suit is often spoilt by an ill-fitting corset. Great care should be taken to keep these trim and well repaired.

The Board of Trade, 1944

Never has the British government taken such an interest in its citizens’ knickers. Bras, pants, corsets, suspenders, long-johns and children’s undies were all specified and regulated under the utility scheme and the austerity regulations. People would try as hard as they could to keep their pre-war undergarments in good repair so that they did not have to buy new ones, thus saving precious coupons. However, it was not always possible: ‘I’m alright for outward clothes but my undies won’t hang together much longer,’ Flo Hyatt lamented. Underwear was a constant topic for discussion at home, in women’s magazines, as well as at the Board of Trade. At three coupons each, vests, corsets and knickers were an extravagance that few felt happy to splash out on, though in the pre-war years they would have bought them regularly.

The history of underwear is fascinating and deserves more space than I am able to give it here. If you were a woman in the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century you would not have worn knickers, and bras were not to be invented for another century. As social historian Rosemary Hawthorne has written ‘before 1800 […] the only women indelicate enough to wear drawers – a masculine garment – were said to be lewd, loose-moralled creatures of ill repute’.1 In the nineteenth century, women began to wear split drawers or knickers with separate legs but no gusset. These tended to reach mid-calf and were fastened with a large linen button on the back. Poorer women, who could not afford to have drawers made up, would often use cotton sacks that were used by grocers to store flour, rice or sugar. These were boiled white and made up into underclothes. Men had long worn pantaloons under their trousers or breeches, so that changes in what they wore were less dramatic.

During the First World War, underwear design, along with general clothing and fashion, underwent an enormous change. The late Victorian and Edwardian era had been characterised by long elegant lines, tall, stiff collars for men and broad hats for women. Many working women had been in service and wore housemaids’ uniforms. By 1914, clothes became simplified and easier to wear, so as to be practical for a new era that found women moving between the social classes for the first time. Many took jobs that were hitherto the province of men. They worked in ammunition factories; they were employed as nurses in Britain and abroad; and they took the place of men as bus conductors, lorry drivers and engineers. Some became chimney sweeps or worked on the land in the newly formed Women’s Land Army. The clothing they had worn before the war was no longer practical. By 1915 the hemline for skirts had risen to mid-calf. In 1918 there was even an attempt

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