THE BLUE SLIDE buckle sings of summer and the patterned frocks of earlier decades. The shift dresses of the mid-1920s had low, false belts but the more defined shapes of the late 1920s and ’30s were frequently belted at the waist in matching fabrics. The blue oval slide was one of three in my grandma’s button box; the others are square and circular. To step into a vintage summer dress today is a colourful exercise in nostalgia, but for women like Annie and Eva, these were everyday wear (and, during wartime, could be cheaper, cotton frocks requiring seven coupons to wool’s eleven).
‘How lovely to get into cotton or silk and fine linen’1 after eight months wearing wool, Naomi Mitchison said of those years. We forget how heavy winter clothing was before the wide introduction of man-made fibres, and how necessary before central heating. The ease of slipping on a light summer dress and the instant creation of a look instantly lifts the spirit. ‘I noticed the semi-transparent beauty of a parasol in the sun,’ Virginia Woolf told her diary in May 1920, ‘how the air has this tenderness now that coloured dresses seem to glow in it.’2
Some floral patterns of the period were created by women who were among the first generation employed in large-scale industrial textile design. Increasing access to art schools and widening opportunities enabled them to gain a foothold in what was still a predominantly male preserve. As in other industries, opportunities were scarce: to become a designer required dedication as well as talent. The Silver Studio, established in London in the 1880s, served many of England’s key textile manufacturers with designs that retailed at fashionable stores such as Selfridges and Liberty. At its peak, the Studio had more than ten designers at any one time; in all, seventeen women were employed. Winifred Mold, its first woman designer, started as a learner in 1912 after taking evening classes at the Paddington Technical Institute for 10s 6d a term. Part-time scholar or no, she felt sufficiently confident about her chosen sphere to define herself as an Art Student on the 1911 census.
Unlike the male designers engaged by the Studio, the women worked from home and communicated with their employer by letter, an entirely manageable practice in the years of three or four posts a day. Working from home gave them a flexibility their male colleagues lacked, and would have suited those with children; married woman numbered among the Silver Studio staff. It also enabled women to carry out other domestic responsibilities: in later years, Winifred Mold was caring for sick parents.
A six-day working week was the norm. A timecard for the designer Madeleine Lawrence, an employee during the 1930s, shows that she earned just under £2 for a forty-eight-hour week, even less than some retail workers. According to a 1931 staff census within the John Lewis Partnership conducted for the Draper’s Record, the majority of its female employees received between £2 2s and £2 11s, and most of these were shop assistants. The role of designer enabled women to exercise creative flair, but brought neither riches nor autonomy. Like many designers in other fields, they worked to a specific brief and had to satisfy commercial trends. Letters between ‘Miss Lawrence’ and Rex Silver, who succeeded his father, the company’s founder, give some insight into how prosaic creative work could be and how hard designers worked for their pay. In 1928 he asked her to
try for me as quickly as you can a few dainty ideas in pencil suitable for Dress Silks in the character of cutting attached. They should be allovers that look equally well any way up and should be daintily drawn in outline and should be composed of quaint little flowers and pods and berries etc all based on nature … Just send me 6 pencil ideas all as different as possible with the above qualities.3
The results Madeleine Lawrence and others like her achieved were far from prosaic. The colours and scents of summer rise from watercolours in the Silver Studio archive: edge-to-edge dahlias, one petal touching the next, delicate pale pink dicentra, bright nasturtiums, irises and primroses; sprigs of daisies; stylised blooms both large and small, and aching blue forget-me-nots. There are beguiling, wistful intimations of spring and summer, and of bee-buzzing heat and sunshine, hedgerows, herbaceous borders and butterfly-flitting gardens. The style emphases of the 1930s were so abundantly floral that not only did dress patterns imitate flowers, gardens could be described in terms of dresses: ‘The flowers in cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from within’,4 Virginia Woolf wrote in The Years.
The introduction of roller-printing allowed many more colours to feature within one design and enabled manufacturers to produce rich, dense palettes as well as delicate shades and to create multiple colourways far more easily than formerly. All-over patterns were favoured because of their versatility: complex repeats were more difficult to match when cutting out and led to wastage. A Mrs McPherson, who produced a small number of designs for the Silver Studio during the 1920s, made effective use of the liking for flowers set against black backgrounds, the black ground making a nod towards modernism and the Moderne look. Painterly designs were all the more vivid when foregrounded in this way.
In an era with a liking for all things jazzy, striped silks, especially those produced by the Macclesfield factories, were also popular. Up to the Second World War, Cryséde silks had a certain cachet. Produced by Alec Walker, who was much influenced by Raoul Dufy, these wood-blocked textiles translated Cornish life and landscape into acclaimed motifs. Patterns like ‘Cornish Farm’, ‘Zennor’ and ‘Lobster Supper’ were among those featured on the dresses and long wispy scarves initially designed by Walker’s wife Kathleen (Kay). Both fabrics and dresses retailed through mail-order and Cryséde’s own shops, the first of which opened in Newlyn in 1921 and by 1938 had reached as far as Harrogate, Manchester, Cheltenham, Birmingham and Edinburgh.
A 1926 London Underground poster lured home-dressmakers to the summer sales with an image of women picking over colourful fabrics. A Selfridges advertisement in the Daily Express gives some idea of the range available: silk crêpe, 3s 11d; all-silk crêpe georgette 5s 11d; all-wool stockinette 7s 11d; crêpe-de-Chine, 8s 11d and 9s 11d. Those visiting Liberty in 1927 could browse its squat fabric books and leaf through samples of Chinese Tyrian silk at 9s 11d or choose linen or cotton for a quarter of the price. Flowers bloomed in Whiteleys’ sample pages, along with jazzily patterned prints, and salmon pink and white ‘crêpe duleen’ suitable for tennis parties and garden fetes.
Pearl buttons were pleasing additions to summer clothes, as were those made of glass or its imitator Lucite which was lighter and did not chip, but allowed the pattern to show through without distracting the eye. Often incised or decoratively shaped (like the glass bow in my grandma’s button box), glacial-looking buttons were a popular choice. The 1930s cruise-liner look called for more definition and a stronger statement: a Pictorial Review pattern circa 1937, priced 1s 6d, shows a white belted dress punctuated by navy blue buttons, with triangular pockets at breasts and hips.
John Lewis gave the names ‘Lyme Regis’, ‘Lynton’ and ‘Ilfracombe’ to some fashionable summer styles. Holiday resorts grew rapidly during the 1930s, with middle-class destinations like Torquay promoting their charms in newspapers and magazines. Blackpool spent £3 million on its parks, promenades and Winter Gardens; in 1937 it was estimated that 15 million Britons took an annual break, roughly one-third of the population. (However, it was not until the following year’s Holidays with Pay Act that the right to a paid holiday was enshrined in law.) Members of the WI might wish to take a double room with Miss Thorogood at Westcliff-on-Sea (bed and breakfast from 22s 6d each person; full board from 35s). For those with smaller funds, day trips were an attractive option. For many years, my grandma’s holidays were day trips.
Whatever their destination, women wanted to show off their summer finery. Promenade photographers were only too willing to oblige them for posterity. Photographs record the polka dots and florals chosen by my grandma and great-aunt. One photograph shows Eva striding forth in co-respondent shoes. Similar white shoes ‘for cruising and holidays’,5 with black, sea-blue or nut-brown trimmings cost the interwar woman 16s 9d.
By the 1950s, a slide buckle might fasten a cummerbund rather than a narrow belt. Patterns were changing too: the post-war years saw bigger, bolder florals and organic-shaped abstract prints. Instead of all-over designs, herbaceous borders circled and rose from the hemlines of fuller skirts. Scenic illustrations and sketchy line drawings were everywhere: pagodas and Eiffel Towers stood statuesque, little French poodles trotted across colourful cottons, reflecting the broadening taste for foreign travel – or the fantasy of it at least. My mum wore a Spanish-themed skirt with bullfighters and flamenco dancers. (The British holiday resort was still going strong, however. A beach scene, complete with sticks of rock, was part of the Festival of Britain.) In the late 1960s, 1930s florals made their comeback in shops like Granny Takes a Trip and Antiquarius on London’s King’s Road. A few years later, it was time for me to rummage for them in provincial jumble sales and on market stalls.
I still have some of those vintage dresses: intense red poppies on silk; sky-blue, white and magenta patterned crêpe, sharp blue cotton stripes. A favourite print set mauve, blue and clover-pink anemones beside bronze-splashed yellow daisies. Frocks like these promise eternal sunshine, although it must have rained sometimes back then.