Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Post-War Britain

The critical impetus of this study is to explore the period between 1944 and 1951 on its own terms, as a critical tipping point in British society embodied in distinctive ‘Austerity’ fashions and shifting style trends. This study is not another generic political history of austerity, nor does it narrowly focus on a discrete category of analysis such as gender or class, nor is it a month-by-month account of the legislative mechanics of wartime and post-war clothing controls and de-controls. Rather, the political dimensions of fashionable desire and its discipline are set against a contemporary climate of post-war idealism. Affordable fashions and popular style trends, and access to leisure and the time and money to enjoy it, combined to function as totemic symbols of change that impelled new strategies of government intervention and consumer agency.