FASHION ON THE RATION: 1940S STREET STYLE REVIEW – PLUCK, HOPE, HUMOUR AND GRACE. IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM, LONDON

From designer air-raid onesies to homemade mascara, necessity is the marvellous mother of invention in this small but perfectly formed look at how style survived in wartime Britain

Rachel Cooke

 An ambulance worker in Kennington, London prepares for action, 1940. Photograph: © IWM

In the last months of the second world war, the British cosmetics company Yardley ran an advertisement that read: “To work for victory is not to say goodbye to charm. For good looks and good morale are the closest of allies.”

Most women, of course, hardly needed to be told this: even the girls who slaved in the munitions factories took care to make sure their turbans were pretty. But “looking good” was increasingly easier said than done. Clothing had been rationed since 1941, and soap since 1942, while cosmetics were harder and harder to come by, their manufacturers having exchanged the production of lipstick, powder and paint for army foot powder and anti-gas ointments. “Makeup is cherished, a last desperately defended luxury,” said Vogue in 1942, a statement that was undoubtedly true, but also rather glossed over the fact that some of its readers were now in the business of darkening their eyelashes with boot polish.

A set of Countess Mountbatten’s underwear made from a silk map given to her by a boyfriend in the Royal Air Force. Photograph: © IWM

Fashion on the ration: 1940s street-style – in pictures

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The painful gap between what women longed for and what they had to put up with in wartime Britain is deftly explored in Fashion on the Ration, a small but beautifully formed new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum – except that it’s not always painful, or not in the retelling. There is such pluck here, so much hope, humour and grace. The simple fact is that clothes brought women together, whether through the wearing of uniforms or the passing on of such cherished items as wedding veils (the exhibition includes a touching section about weddings, a surprising number of which continued to be white in spite of the privations).

Rationing may not have eased competitiveness in the upper echelons of fashion – customers shopping for clothes at Selfridges were invited to make use of the department store’s “coupon advisory service” – but on the ground it was bonding. “This morning, I put a pair of flannel pants on, a big heavy sweater, and a thick woollen pixie hood,” wrote housewife Nella Last in her diary in 1941. “I had a good laugh at my appearance, but felt ready for anything!”

 ‘Just the thing to pull on in a hurry’: a siren suit. Photograph: © IWM

Most visitors will be familiar with the government’s Make Do and Mend campaigns, and perhaps with the Utility clothing it began producing in 1942 to tackle unfairness in the matter of coupons (the exhibition includes photographs of some of its more chic designs being modelled to great effect by Deborah Kerr in Picture Post). But there are more surprising sights here too: a collection of jewellery made from aircraft parts; a dressing gown stitched from the silk escape maps used by airmen; a gas mask holder cunningly disguised as a leather handbag; a collection of luminous buttons and brooches to be worn during the blackout. Best of all, there is an appearance by what at first glance looks like a onesie, but is in fact a “siren suit” – an outfit marketed as being just the thing to pull on in a hurry should you have to make a sudden dash to your air-raid shelter in the dead of night.

Slowly but surely, fashion began to take its lead from the war. Fortnum’s advertised “clothing for heroines”; the Sumrie slack suit was described by its designers as having a pleasing “military touch”; Helena Rubinstein produced a lipstick in a shade called “regimental red”. It was unfashionable to look too showy, given that austerity regulations allowed for heels that were a maximum of two inches high, and that many women had spent more than one evening melting down the ends of their old lipsticks, the better to repack them in a single case.

It is strange and, in an age of so much ill-considered waste, extremely chastening to consider all the quotidian things that were as precious as gold in these years: shampoo (it had all but vanished), knitting wool (it was rationed), powder compacts (no metal cases were produced at all). And thanks to this, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of joy at the show’s climax, when the war finally ends and Dior’s New Look comes in (though the exhibition omits to mention that some women feared these huge and restrictive skirts were, in the end, just another means of pushing them back into their prewar lives at home). The New Look was about much more than fabric, however luxuriant its folds. It spoke of a future that would, in the fullness of time, reunite women with all that they had most missed.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/08/fashion-on-the-ration-imperial-war-musuem-review-pluck-hope-humour-grace