Great Expectations: Marks & Spencer women’s wear campaign from Autumn-Winter 1970

Using historian David Cannadine’s (1989) argument that heritage can be applied to things that are worthy of preservation, I examine a Marks & Spencer women’s wear campaign from 1970 to explore how heritage works for a high street retailer, and specifically how the term operates within this temporal context.

Great Expectations sees a fashionably-dressed women wearing a trench coat fabricated using a novel and high-tech fabric – vinyl, a fabric which also connotes the space age, yet the photo-shoot is set in a churchyard and features a Victorian boy. Marks & Spencer recreated a scene from the Dickens’ classic, and the image caption states this was shot in ‘Cooling churchyard, the marsh country between the Thames estuary and the mouth of the Medway. In Great Expectations, this was where Pip first encountered the runaway convict, Magwitch.’

Can this image be read as a cultural clash? The trench coat is widely recognised as an historic fashion archetype, yet this version is produced in a futuristic fabric, described as a ‘wet-look’ finish in the marketing copy. It was a style my fashionable mother was excited about and one she bought from the Leicester branch of Marks & Spencer.

Had the space age images and futuristic fabrics used in the mid-1960s by designers André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne been quietened to suit the British high street?