Fashioning Social Aspiration: lower-middle-class rational recreational leisure participation and the evolution of popular rational recreational leisure clothing c.1880-1950

In the opening chapter of David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, entitled 'Broad Vistas', a vision of post-war Britain is contrasted with the realities of life in the years immediately following the end of the War in Europe in 1945.1 In a long introductory paragraph, Kynaston differentiates the two eras in terms of a huge list of 'haves' -comer shops, mangles, back-to-backs, Woodbines, Fynnon salts and so on -and an equally long list of exemplary 'have not yets' -supermarkets, motorways, teabags, frozen food, legalized abortions, washing machines etc. Towards the end ofthis list he finally reaches clothing, the wartime 'haves' being: 'Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear (my emphasis), no "teenagers". Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being.' For Kynaston, 'leisurewear' like all the other perceived benefits of life beyond austerity is situated as part of a panorama of affiuence realized through leisure and consumption, and as representative of Britain on the threshold of something else -arguably better, as yet unavailable, but by mere association something younger, freer and lighter. What is 'leisurewear'? And why is it conceptualized as a post-austerity phenomenon? Leisure certainly existed before this time, and shifting forms of leisure clothing have shared its long history. Yet, Kynaston's reference to a new, allinclusive nomenclature forged in a pivotal period in British history, implicitly suggests that the term in itself functions as trigger to a whole network of meanings around radical social and sartorial change.

Supervisors: Becky Conekin and Elizabeth Wilson