Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England

Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England PDF Author: Cheryl Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030946142
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book details a significant and largely untold history of the demand for cheap, fashionable clothing for young working-class women. This is an interdisciplinary fashion and business history analysis that investigates the design, manufacture, retailing and consumption of fashion for and by young working-class women in 1930s Britain. It concentrates on new mass developments in the design and manufacture of lightweight day dresses styled for younger women, and on their retailing in the second-hand trade and seconds dealing, street markets, new multiple stores, department stores, independent dress shops and home dressmaking. The book also discusses the specific impact of this new product within the emerging mass manufactured goods mail order catalogue industry in England. These outlets all offered venues of consumption to the young, employed, modern working-class woman, and are analysed in the context of old and new businesses practices. The actuality of the garments worn by these young women is paramount to this research and will be at the forefront of all findings and outcomes. Dr Cheryl Roberts is Senior Lecturer at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon (CCW), University of Arts London (UAL), UK. She also teaches on the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum MA History of Design Programme and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research is rooted in the material culture of objects-particularly the consumption of dress and textiles-and how they acquire meaning through their relationship with specific acts in historical and cultural contexts.

Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England

Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England PDF Author: Cheryl Roberts
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030946134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This book details a significant and largely untold history of the demand for cheap, fashionable clothing for young working-class women. This is an interdisciplinary fashion and business history analysis that investigates the design, manufacture, retailing and consumption of fashion for and by young working-class women in 1930s Britain. It concentrates on new mass developments in the design and manufacture of lightweight day dresses styled for younger women, and on their retailing in the second-hand trade and seconds dealing, street markets, new multiple stores, department stores, independent dress shops and home dressmaking. The book also discusses the specific impact of this new product within the emerging mass manufactured goods mail order catalogue industry in England. These outlets all offered venues of consumption to the young, employed, modern working-class woman, and are analysed in the context of old and new businesses practices. The actuality of the garments worn by these young women is paramount to this research and will be at the forefront of all findings and outcomes.

Everyday Fashion

Everyday Fashion PDF Author: Bethan Bide
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350232475
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Ordinary clothes have extraordinary stories. In contrast to academic and curatorial focus on the spectacular and the luxurious, Everyday Fashion makes the case that your grandmother's wardrobe is an archive as interesting and important as any museum store. From the moment we wake and get dressed in the morning until we get undressed again in the evening, fashion is a central medium through which we experience the world and negotiate our place within it. Because of this, the ways that supposedly 'ordinary' and 'everyday' fashion objects have been designed, manufactured, worn, cared for, and remembered matters deeply to our historical understanding. Beginning at 1550 – the start of an era during which the word 'fashion' came to mean stylistic change rather than the act of making – each chapter explores the definition of everyday fashion and how this has changed over time, demonstrating innovative methodologies for researching the everyday. The variety and significance of everyday fashion cultures are further highlighted by a series of illustrated object biographies written by Britain's leading fashion curators, showcasing the rich diversity of everyday fashion in British museum collections. Collectively, this volume scratches below the glossy surface of fashion to expose the mechanics of fashion business, the hidden world of the workroom and the diversity and role of makers; and the experiences of consuming, wearing, and caring for ordinary clothes in the United Kingdom from the 16th century to the present day. In doing so it challenges readers to rethink how fashion systems evolve and to reassess the boundaries between fashion and dress scholarship.

Wholesale Couture

Wholesale Couture PDF Author: Liz Tregenza
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350245887
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The first book to consider the subject, Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930-70 seeks to revise the notion that wholesale couturiers were simply copyists and demonstrate the complexities of their design processes and business strategies. This term has fallen out of usage; however, it was used to describe the pinnacle of the British ready-to-wear fashion industry between the 1930s and 1960s. Companies within this sector have typically been recognised as creators of high-quality copies of French haute couture, using ready-to-wear techniques. Liz Tregenza traces wholesale couture garments from concept to usage, considering design, manufacture, branding, promotion, retail and export. She looks beyond the garments produced and investigates the people behind these firms, consequently demonstrating the significant role that largely Jewish immigrants played in the development and success of this industry. The book also considers the wider social and economic factors that affected manufacturers and consumers; the effect of austerity, rationing and the Utility scheme, and the pressing need for wholesale couturiers to export their products internationally. It demonstrates that 1946 was a critical year for re-building and re-imagining the London fashion industry and that wholesale couturiers were at the centre of these developments. Furthermore, it reveals the impact of changing consumer purchasing power, including the burgeoning youth market, for fashion manufacturers. Offering a new perspective on British fashion history, Wholesale Couture demonstrates that these couturiers were vital in cementing London's status as a ready-to-wear fashion centre.

Fashion and Feeling

Fashion and Feeling PDF Author: Roberto Filippello
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031191005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress explores the complex nexus of fashion and the feeling body from a variety of critical perspectives across fashion studies, anthropology, sociology, design practice, and media studies. It asks such questions as: What does fashion look and feel like in an age dominated by amplified anxiety, isolation, depression, and precariousness? How are feelings woven into clothing and mobilized through fashion practices in ways that might sustain living with a sense of ongoing crisis? Does fashion have the potential to help us reimagine new lifeworlds which might be reinvigorating? In other words, how is fashion engaging with the “bad,” the “good,” and the ambivalent feelings associated with our personal and collective histories, with our troubled political present, and with our imagined future? Despite such diverse and scattered contributions, the potentialities of “feeling” for the study of fashion are still largely neglected. This edited volume seeks to tease out possible avenues of investigation of the clothed body and its representations through the lens of feeling.

Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870-1930

Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870-1930 PDF Author: Peter Gurney
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719049507
Category : Consumer cooperatives
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This innovative, research-based book presents a positive critique of the co-operative alternative to emerging capitalist forms of mass consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This alternative was embedded in the culture of the movement and Peter Gurney provides a full analysis of that culture - its strategy and ambition, social and educational forms, internationalism and historical consciousness.

The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s

The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s PDF Author: A. Randall
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230584322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In the early 1930s Soviet authorities launched a campaign to create "socialist" retailing and also endorsed Soviet consumerism. How did the Stalinist regime reconcile retailing and consumption with socialism? This book examines the discourses that the Stalinist regime's new approach to retailing and consumption engendered.

London Couture and the Making of a Fashion Centre

London Couture and the Making of a Fashion Centre PDF Author: Michelle Jones
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
How design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system. Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and political factors that shaped the professional identity of the London couturiers. She focuses on collaborative activity that supported this form of elite, craft-based fashion production—from the prewar efforts of the Fashion Group of Great Britain to the wartime establishment of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, modeled loosely after French fashion’s governing body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. It was these collective efforts by couturiers that established and sustained London’s place as an internationally recognized center for creative fashion.

The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain

The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain PDF Author: Peter Gurney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441120173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
It is commonly accepted that the consumer is now centre stage in modern Britain, rather than the worker or producer. Consumer choice is widely regarded as the major source of self-definition and identity rather than productive activity. Politicians vie with each other to fashion their appeal to 'citizen-consumers'. When and how did these profound changes occur? Which historical alternatives were pushed to the margins in the process? In what ways did the everyday consumer practices and forms of consumer organising adopted by both middle and working-class men and women shape the outcomes? This study of the making of consumer culture in Britain since 1800 explores these questions, introduces students to major debates and cuts a distinctive path through this vibrant field. It suggests that the consumer culture that emerged during this period was shaped as much by political relationships as it was by economic and social factors.

Being boys

Being boys PDF Author: Melanie Tebbutt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526130734
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This original and fresh approach to the emotions of adolescence focuses on the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years. Being Boys challenges many stereotypes about their behaviour. It offers new perspectives on familiar and important themes in interwar social and cultural history, ranging from the cinema and mass consumption to boys’ clubs, personal advice pages, street cultures, dancing, sexuality, mobility and the body. It draws on many autobiographies and personal accounts and is particularly distinctive in offering an unusual insight into working-class adolescence through the teenage diaries of the author’s father, which are interwoven with the book’s broader analysis of contemporary leisure developments. Being Boys will be of interest to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences and is also relevant to those teaching and studying in the fields of child development, education, and youth and community studies.