Clothing coupons which looked such an imposing array when issued melted to nothing before the onslaught of a coat and skirt, or a winter overcoat. A new kind of gold-digging was evolved by women of all ages, who took up the attitude that their husbands, sons, brothers and men friends would never need any new clothes and so might as well let them have their coupons.

This passage was written by Angela Thirkell in her novel Marling Hall set in the countryside of England which came out 1942 in the midst of World War II. In order to prevent the price of goods from skyrocketing, the British instituted a rationing system whereby people got an assortment of coupons that would allow them to legally buy clothing. Thirkell saw the humor in the scramble to keep well-dressed and within the law. Gold-digger is an insult usually directed at younger women who cultivate older men with money in order to share some of their gold via marriage or other means. Here, Thirkell made every woman into a gold-digger, or at least a coupon- digger.

Clothing for public wearing was more formal, more detailed, and as a result more expensive than what we wear now, so the value of coupons to women was far more than it would be today. True, men's fashions evolved very slowly, but the fabric wore out just the same.

You can find Thirkell's novels at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

Writing fashion in fiction is important in my Crime of Fashion Mysteries, because the clothing, the styles, and the attitudes provide clues to the methods and manners of crimes. Today in my Fashion Bites video, I discuss writing descriptions of clothing, and a bit about "voice." Can clothing be considered voice? Check it out at #writing #fashioninfiction #VeiledRevenge #voiceinfiction

Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, though they looked incredibly plain and depraved in oyster satin blouses, tight-seated bell-bottomed trousers, red nails on dirty hands, greasy curls hanging on their shoulders, a cigarette forever glued to their lips, were really very nice, kind girls.

This description of a pair of women train porters assigned to a town stop in England during World War II comes from the mind of the stationmaster Mr. Beedle. He, like many older people in the novels of Angela Thirkell, is upset by changes brought by the war: here, the disappearance of the squad of male porters he had commanded before the war broke out. Even though trousers make perfect sense for the physical job of hefting and toting bags and trunks, and pushing carts piled up with boxes and bags, they are part of the reason that the young women seem depraved to Beedle. And one would hardly expect their hands or hair to stay clean in the midst of all this dust and dirt.

Of course, women had been doing dirty work for time out of mind, think farm women and scrub women, and doing some of it in trousers, but that did not shake belief in the rule that women should not be wearing pants in public places. It was not until the 1960s, and only after a drawn-out public debate, that pants on women in the North Atlantic world were seen as anything but sloppy or overly sporty. So it was a big shift when by the late 1960s, women were wearing all kinds of pants whether or not they were embarked on a dirty job at a train station.

This fashion in fiction is from Growing Up published in 1943. You can find reprints of Thikell's works at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

...Lucy, in a very old shapeless coat and skirt, a shabby felt hat, dirty string gloves, dragging a large bag of some evil-smelling stuff, was not an object of aesthetic pleasure. Then Mlle Duchaux's hard eye observed her well-groomed hair and well-cut, well-cleaned shoes and her well-fitting stockings and recognised her at once for what she was.

The hard eye belongs to a French woman, a retired governess, who had trained many an upper-class English family’s children, and it fell upon Lucy, the daughter of a well-off family in the English countryside during World War II. Lucy was dragging around a bag of fertilizer as she was a hearty, determined young woman who was keen on doing her bit for the war effort whether that involved looking after a garden or working at a hospital. This is from the book Marling Hall by Angela Thirkell which was published in 1942.

Lucy’s clothing was a mess precisely because she was working hard at something, and because of her general indifference to clothing, yet notice that she still wore a skirt and not pants. Only actively partaking in the dirtiest of farmwork would have made pants appropriate at this point in time. The retired governess recognized the shabby clothing was not on account of Lucy’s inability to afford anything better; Lucy’s shoes and her stockings and her hair indicated that she could afford what she wanted. And the retired governess, who had served the upper-classes, knew exactly the subtleties of dress which set off the well-off from the rest of society.

Angela Thirkell began writing novels set in the English countryside in the 1930s and she was still writing in the 1950s. Virago has republished her books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

A confused aroma of cheap clothing greeted him. Except for a small oasis behind a grubby counter, practically all the available space was occupied by suits. Stiff suits, looking like the body when discovered by the police, hung from hooks. Limp suits, with the appearance of having swooned from exhaustion, lay about on chairs and boxes. The place was a cloth morgue, a Sargasso Sea of serge.

More than once P.G. Wodehouse has one of his heroes runs for cover into a used clothing store, or a general used goods store, only to have him pounced on by the salesmen who load him up with things he doesn't in the last want or need, but is unable to resist.

Used clothing stores used to exist to help out those with a small budget who needed the formal clothing that all adult men wore in public spaces at one time or another. Such shops also existed because clothing was more expensive then it is now. Then was 1921 and the book was The Indiscretions of Archie, a good-natured but silly young man who foreshadows the character Bertie Wooster.

I so like the idea of a Sargasso Sea of serge in which poor Archie finds himself adrift because of yet another silly adventure gone wrong.

When you went to a wedding, a hat was a 'must.' But even then Mrs. Oliver kept two. One... was of feathers. It fitted closely to the head and stood up very well to squalls of rain if they should overtake one unexpectedly.... The other, and more elaborate hat, was definitely for attending a wedding held on a Saturday afternoon in summer. It had flowers and chiffon and a covering of yellow net attached with mimosa.

This is from Agatha Christie novel Elephants Can Remember from 1972. In England, hats often are still a must for wedding. In the US, they are only an option, and not one often taken.

If you do wear hat to a formal social event, everyone will come up to you and talk about it, thus revealing how many women long for the chance to wear hats, but haven't the courage in face of the general abandonment of hats in the 1960s.

It was big hair and lots of hairspray which first undermined hats in the late 1950s. Then, they became seen as old-fashioned, and the generation wearing them died out, thus we lost one of our more amusing fashion options. Sigh.

"It's bad enough Mrs Dean having to eat one of Mrs Phipps unspeakable suppers, without being asked not to dress. Anyway, my dinner-jacket suit is about the only decent one I have. My blue suit is too shabby for words, and my brown one's as bad, and I can't dine in flannels, and I won't see my way to getting any new clothes just now."

So laments a young man who is studying law but does not have a job in Angela Thirkell’s August Rising from 1936. Notice that being asked to dress for dinner, which one would think of as a burden of formality, would be preferable to the young man. Why? Because of his 4 suits, his most formal one, his dinner-jacket or tuxedo, is in the best shape. This was the era when men mostly wore suits for public wear unless their work demanded something tougher to withstand hard wear. And here even a young man of professional parents who was not yet earning a living would own a set of suits, one only for evening wear.

While we tend to think of clothing as something only women had to think about, men had to think about it too. And men’s suits were almost never made at home because tailoring, which involved creating a stiffer inner structure, took different skills and materials than dressmaking. One reason why men bought their clothing as ready to wear or had them custom made more often than women did.

Angela Thirkell set her stories in the countryside of England and wrote interconnecting novels where characters and events appear in more than one. Her novels date from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although fashion is not central to her stories, I find her passing comments revealing of how people thought about clothing. You can find her books at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

She raised her long amber necklace with one hand and let if fall heavily on her coral necklace, her silver chain, and her coloured wooden beads, with a gesture of final doom.

This strange conglomeration of jewelry is won by Mrs. Grant, an annoying woman, dubbed “the Englishwoman Abroad” by novelist Angela Thirkell in The Brandons from 1939. Thirkell dresses this character in a hodge podge of garments and fabrics as well as accessories to indicate her lack of sense shows up both in all she does which is mostly annoy people. Someone who doesn’t have the sense to know she is always annoying and inconveniencing people hasn’t the sense to recognize the lack of harmony in her clothing and ornaments. Her material foolishness reflects her general foolishness.

Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside from the 1930s through 1950s, and several characters, including the annoying Mrs. Grant show up in more than one of them. You can find them as reprints from Virago Press: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

...a torrent of complaint burst from the company, each member of which had a personal grudge against the whole coupon system. Mrs. Marling's Burberry, wearing out from sheer spite, had run into fourteen coupons. Miss Harvey had been forced to give two coupons for a piece of blue ring velvet to make a turban....

These fictional characters, surely based on real people, were complaining about the coupon system used to ration clothing and fabric in Britain during World War II. I liked the scene for two reasons. First, a coat wearing out from spite is a funny idea. Second, this scene is a reality check on the nostalgic vision of the past when everyone supposedly supported all elements of the war effort. I recently had my students read an article on the era which stressed how government and magazines told women that not only must they help with war work, but they must see beauty as duty and look good for the men and for general morale. Although the illegal market in rationed goods was noted, there was little emphasis on how annoying such a rationing system could become.

Of course, the idea behind rationing was two fold: to limit consumption so that most goods went towards the war effort, and to prevent the wealthiest people from buying whatever they wanted and driving up prices. In addition, the British government introduced the Utility Scheme which limited prices and demanded a level of quality; again, this was an attempt to keep everyone able to buy something.

The scene above appeared in Angela Thirkell’s novel from Marling Hall from 1942. Ring velvet comes from the term wedding-ring velvet, or chiffon velvet, the idea being it was so fine that you could pull it through a wedding ring. Women turned to cloth turbans during the war, since fur felt and wool felt was hard to get, and they wanted some kind of hat which they saw as necessary to former public wear.

You can find Thirkell’s novels which run through the 1930s onward at Virago Books: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

'I say, when you come to us, you couldn't possibly wear that ripping white trailing dress, could you?' 'The Callot or the Schiaparelli?' asked Mrs. Dean interested.

Oh, to be able to ask which haute couture gown. As this indicates, Mrs. Dean, a character in the novel August Folly by Angela Thirkell, is a wealthy woman. She refuses to wear said gown to dinner away from her home because it is a tea-gown and too informal. As she explains to the young man who brought it up, “I must dress up a little more when I am having my first dinner with your parents.” A good reminder that not everything haute couture was the most formal of evening gowns, and some were for lounging around your own house.

This novel was written in 1930 which indicates that grown women were still wearing tea gowns which had first surfaced in the late 19th century as loosely fitting dresses worn without corsets and thus worn for less formal occasions in one’s own home. Of course, the 1920s was supposed to be a period when the corset was discarded but many women had to wear corsets still in order to create from their curved bodies the test-tube silhouette which became the fashion.

You can find Thirkell’s books in reprints from Virago Books here:  https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

The last time he had seen Mrs. Oliver, her hair style had been plain and severe. It now displayed a richness of coils and twists arranged in intricate patterns all over her head. Its prolific luxury was, he suspected, largely artificial. He debated in his mind how many switches of hair might unexpectedly fall off if Mrs. Oliver were to get suddenly excited, as was her wont.

This passage from Third Girl published in 1966 makes clear that although the older generation, including the likes of Mrs. Oliver and Hercule Poirot, was taken aback by the new fashions of the young, at least Mrs. Oliver partook in some of the new fashions in hair styles.

Whenever you see what Agatha Christie calls here “a richness of coils and twists” in a fashion shoot from the mid-1960s or a movie or television series, you can be pretty sure they are artificial. While we tend to think of the 1960s as a time when simplicity rules, there were complex elements of design showing up too. And hair switches and wigs showed up even in the average woman’s wardrobe at times.

And in fact, Mrs. Oliver does get excited, gets an idea, grabs her head to think, and before you know it, one of the coils of hair hits the floor.

She wore what was presumably the chosen clothes of her generation--black high leather boots, while open-work woolen stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pullover of heavy wool. ... There were hundred of girls looking exactly the same.

This is the mind of Hercule Poirot on the younger generation in 1965 as depicted in Agatha Christie’s mystery novel Third Girl. Poirot was an especially dapper little man with perfectly curled mustaches, a former Belgian police detective turned private investigator whom Christie featured in many novels. She explained that that Poirot felt as most of his generation did: an urge to drop this young woman in a bathtub. You can’t help feeling Christie was sharing her own disdain for mini-skirts and the other fashion accessories and styles, such as long, loose hair, that went along with it.

The young women felt they were rebelling by opting out of the up-do’s that had signaled adulthood for more than a hundred years, and by opting for shorter skirts. But the Baby Boomers ended up looking very much alike, and there were so many of them. Like many young people they were keen on not looking all that different from the crowd.

Christie may need no introduction, but she was an English mystery writer born in 1890 who was a success by 1920 and continued writing for decades. Many of her works were made into plays or movies.

'Do you remember the blue dress you were wearing on the Norwegian cruise?' Mrs. Tebben did remember Winifred Ross's blue dress. It was the blue muslin with white sports, five years old, on its last legs, altered, washed out, but good enough for picnics on the fiords. Miss Ross did not think that Mr Tebben, that nice young Civil Servant had noticed it.

Ah, the power of a dress. The opening question is put by Mr. Tebben to Mrs. Tebben who have been married long enough to have grown children. She wore it on the trip when she met him for the first time, many years ago, when she was still Miss Ross.

Yet years later, admiring his wife in another altogether different blue dress, he remembered that first one. Old, altered, faded it may have been at the time, but it clearly made an impression on the man who fell in love with her.

There are dresses that do that.

This quotation comes from Angela Thirkell in her novel August Folly from 1936. Many of her novels are set in the English countryside, and the characters of one novel may show up in another. I am currently reading my way through them. Her books are reprinted by Virago Books which you can find here: https://www.virago.co.uk/?s=thirkell

'I say, when you come to us, you couldn't possibly wear that ripping white trailing dress, could you?' 'The Callot or the Schiaparelli?' asked Mrs. Dean, interested. .... 'Oh, that tea-gown. It was very sweet of you to like it, Richard, but I must dress up a little more when I am having my first dinner with your parents.'

This exchange is a hoot for a few reasons. First, that the young man Richard describes the dress as “ripping” by which he means wonderful; second, that he doesn’t know that a tea-gown which was a casual form of dress reserved to be worn around the house even if in the presence of family friends; and third, that Mrs. Dean is so well-off that she has to think, hmmmm... which white trailing haute couture dress does he mean? Ah, to have such a puzzle to solve. Apparently, she has one by Callot Soeurs, a Parisian house which shut one year after this book, August Folly, was published in 1936. And she has another one by Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer, who also set up shop in Paris.

Poor Richard has a terrible crush on the older, married Mrs. Dean, one of the common sub-plots of Angela Thirkell’s novels. The older woman always thinks the young man is a bit of a goose, and nothing comes of it. Thirkell wrote novels set in the English countryside among people with plenty of money and fashion shows up in numerous ways in their pages.

Virago Books has republished them and you can find them here: https://www.virago.co.uk/contributor/angela-thirkell/

It's about Miss Delia's knickers.... She really hadn't a fit pair to wear, not if she goes away to stay anywhere. I really don't know what she does with them. So I thought if you didn't need those three yards of the double width pink crepe de chine you got in the sales, I could start at once. I'd just run down to the village on my bike before the shops shuts and see if Mrs. Thacher can match me up some pink sewing silk."

This passage from The Brandons by Angela Thirkell tells us a lot about the clothing in the lives of well-off English women. The person speaking is Nurse, the woman who raised the children and still lives in the house looking after their mother, the widowed Mrs. Brandon, and doing sewing. Nurse, who seems to have no other name, is talking about the underwear of Mrs. Brandon’s daughter Delia who probably wears them out playing tennis and running around as young women with plenty of free time will do.

Notice that the underwear is to be made of silk fabric, something not every family could afford, yet even the well-off Mrs. Brandon took advantage of a sale to buy some silk yardage for which she had no immediate plans. And notice Nurse wants to sew them up with silk thread, another luxurious touch.

Delia is supposed to go away for a weekend which is why Nurse is worried about her not have “a fit pair.” Although Delia herself seems completely and happily unconcerned, the choosing of appropriate clothing for the weekend house party is a source of worry for several women.

Thirkell wrote a set of novels with overlapping characters all taking place in a rural region of England starting in the 1930s and running through the 1950s. Their satisfaction lies in watching romances bloom between couples you would like to see get together, and the petering out of romances which are a very bad idea for one or both of the parties.

Virago Press has reprinted them: https://www.virago.co.uk/contributor/angela-thirkell/

Mrs. Brandon with a charming and quite illusory air of fragility wafted herself into the drawing-room in a chiffon cloud of every soft colour of sweet pea.... 'This dress fluffles our very nicely and if I sit on the little green settee, there won't be room for anyone unless I choose to make it.'

I don't know what part of this is the most fun. A silk chiffon evening dress of every color of sweet pea flowers? That fluffles is a verb? Or that Mrs. Brandon could use her dress as a tool during a party to facilitate or prevent intimate conversations?

This is from Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell published in 1940, set in the English countryside, so right on the eve of war. Mrs. Branson was a recurring character in a series of novels with many recurring characters and they grow up and grow old across the books. Although we tend to think of 1940 as a time when stricter, tailored looks for women were both fashionable and required--some of the women don trousers for their war work--evening dresses offered a range of styles. So something in chiffon, a sheer, delicate fabric would have been stylish for a grown woman like Mrs. Brandon who had the sophistication to carry if off.