Rebellion: a Bit of Skirt
It took a long time for British clothes to brighten up. Well into the sixties, children were still wearing the baggy grey shorts and unravelling home-made jumpers of the forties, men were still dressing in heavily built grey suits for social occasions, wearing macs and hats on their days out, and women were in housecoats and hairnets. But the forties did see one celebrated revolution, which showed just how frustrated women had become at the dowdy, dreary life they had suffered. It began in Paris, with the arrival of a new fashion house, created by a young designer who was in love with the belle époque France of his childhood, the pre-First World War country of swirling skirts, elegance and luxury. His name was Christian Dior and his revolution was christened the New Look. One of the British women who attended the unveiling in 1947 said she heard for the first time in her life ‘the sound of a petticoat’ and realized that at long last the war was really over.
Dior’s revolution was a return to billowing, deliberately unpractical skirts and dresses, what the magazine Harper’s Bazaar described as ‘a slight, slender bodice narrowing into a tiny wasp waist, below which the skirt bursts into fullness like a flower. Every line is rounded…’ The long skirts and padded bosoms, the pleats and extravagance, burst like a firework display over a British womanhood described later as in a ‘grey state…weary, dispirited, cramped and cross’. It was a direct challenge to the austerity culture of the government and quickly caused a genuine political battle. The British Guild of Creative Designers complained that they did not have the materials and could not give way to French irresponsibility. Labour MPs busily threw themselves into the fight against frippery. The beefy and redoubtable Mrs Bessie Braddock denounced the New Look as the ‘ridiculous whim of idle people’. Mabel Ridealgh MP said it was being foisted on women and promised that housewives would not buy it. All this padding and artificiality was bad because it made for ‘over-sexiness’, she added; the New Look was turning women into caged birds and removing their new freedom.
Yet from the young princesses of the Royal Family downwards, women were ignoring the political orders and doing everything they could to alter, buy or borrow for the Dior look. Ruth Adam, who worked in the Ministry of Information during the war and later became a novelist, argued that a generation of girls who had been ordered to work in factories, on pain of prison if they refused, did not see it as a liberation:
To them, Labour MPs who lectured them about wearing ‘sensible’ clothing, suitable for productive work, were the same breed as the women officers who had routed them out of doorways where they were having a goodnight kiss, and sent them back to camp; and as the forewoman who had shouted at them for spending too long in the Ladies while Russia was waiting for aeroplane-parts. Now they did not have to listen to lectures about hard work and freedom any more, but could think about being feminine and glamorous.
There was a pent-up yearning for the better, more colourful life that middle-class people, at least, could remember from before the war – everyone from their twenties onwards would have had a reasonably vivid recollection of mid-thirties consumerism. In a world in which men and women were still wearing roughly fitted and standardized demob suits, handed out with hats, ties and shoes as you left the forces, clothing was a powerful symbol of prosperity postponed.