| Fascism |  |
 |
Power Reflections: Fashion's Fascist Response in WWII Britain
"To reflect upon history is also, inextricably, to reflect upon power." --Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle The history of fashion is fraught with countless examples of dress as a manifestation of a society's values. The continual fluctuation of fashion trends, especially in equally dynamic political climates, reveals the shifty nature of social definitions that characterize a culture in crisis. British fashion leading up to and during World War II is a useful case study for an understanding of how the British state presented itself as resisting the fascist threat it was fighting in WWII while continuing to maintain its threatening power over the population of Britain. By following the development of wartime fashion and comparing it to contemporary British fashion, this historical study will illuminate the current popular passivity of wartime populations in responding to outside threats by readily surrendering even their right to an individual appearance during times of conflict. These reflections on the history of British fashion ultimately endorse Guy Debord's claim that, "To reflect upon history is also, inextricably, to reflect upon power."
In her historical account of fashion, Valerie Mendes wrote, "In peacetime, fashion expenditure has always been motivated by conspicuous consumption; in wartime, it is largely determined by necessity" (104). During WWII, necessity required that wool be requisitioned for the construction of m millions of uniforms as was silk for the production of parachutes, maps, and gunpowder bags. Ensuring that British clothing resources were carefully utilized, many regulating measures were taken. The Board of Trade tightly controlled raw clothing supplies, tightly restricted demand, and imposed strict design regulations. Other legislative actions included the Cotton, Linen, and Rayon Order of April 1940 and the Limitation of Supplies Order of June 1940. Both of these measures reduced the stocks of retail fabric while the Concentration Schemes of July 1942 eliminated the number of clothing factories and shut newcomers out of the fashion industry (Mendes & De La Haye 108-09).
A nonnegotiable necessity of war is revenue and Britain encouraged its designers to create collections that had the look of luxury with potential export revenue in mind. Elaborate export designs included polonaise-styled gowns constructed from the highest quality silks and ball-gowns garishly adorned with ornamentation. Contrasting starkly with their export lines, designers created a completely different look for their domestic wartime markets. This domestic wartime look, though not completely utilitarian and void of style, revolved around culottes (ankle-length trousers with skirty, flowy legs), tweed suits, and long-sleeved, high-necked evening dresses in sensible wool and jersey fabrics. The contrast in export/domestic designs marked the need for revenue as well as the beginnings of a controlled and restrained domestic style.
Utility essentially referred to garments made from Utility cloth, which was strictly defined in terms of weight and fiber content per square yard and retail price limits. A distinctive double crescent CC41 (which stood for Civilian Clothing 1941) identified these clothes. Detailed style also identified these clothes despite the design team's strict regulations over yardage allowances, hem and seam sizes, and numbers of buttons to be added to each garment. Under the new regulations, a dress in 1941 could have no more than two pockets, four knife pleats, five buttons, six seams in the skirt, and four meters of stitching. Another drastic move was made by the Board when open toed shoes were banned for being "impractical" and applying decoration to garments was forbidden. Men not spending the war years in military uniform dressed under the "abolition of the waistcoat" and the elimination of turned up cuffs on trousers, pocket flaps, and braces (Mendes & De La Haye 112).
The implications of the restrictions and regulations placed on fashion during and immediately following World War II are also tied to the economic times of the period. What upheld the notion that the dourness of wartime style was a necessity was the country's poor economic situation. During WWII, Britain was struggling to stay afloat after the financial hardships lingering from the First World War, thus the far-reaching restraint of wartime policy. After WWII, the situation was much more grim. Some 40 million people had lost their lives, large areas of land and property had been destroyed, and millions upon millions of people were left homeless and destitute. Tough financial times were magnified by the staggering social toll left by the War, and the fashion of the time reflected that in its continued minimalism and sharp, no-nonsense silhouette. After the immediate post-war rebuilding of Britain that lasted into 1952, Britain's economy began to improve. Industrial production and gross domestic product dramatically increased form 193 to 15, boosting employment in the stabilizing nation. The boom years of 1953-1955 saw a striking dramatic increase in consumer spending "on durables and other consumption" (Johnson 316). In light of this growth, clothing rationing was finally ended in 1954 when the shortages affecting textile production and clothing construction were relieved. The look of wartime Britain is easily accounted for in the wartime policies and social austerity of the nation as a whole. Though economic policies and theories of this tumultuous time are still being debated, the legacy this financially devastated era left within the world of fashion is almost unmistakable. With the end of World War II, Britain's financial tensions were clearing almost the same time an active youth culture was emerging in the mid-1950s. This youth population embodied British fashion from 1956 through the swinging 60s, to the mod 70s, and finally made their mark with the punk fashions of the early 80s. The importance of these eras in the overall world of fashion is unfathomable, but the stark differences these fashion ears had with wartime Britain and the fashion of contemporary Britain are striking, The recession that marked Britain in the early 1990s led to, what Rebecca Arnold called a "new, more caring, sobriety" when it came to clothing styles (11). William Langley, a writer for London's Evening Standard, warned that the death of high fashion, or haute couture, was near saying, "'Now the world has sobered up, and ostentation is not simply unaffordable but passé'"(Arnold 11). A specific economic blow to the fashion industry occurred with the halt of important trade connections with the Arab Emirates as a result of the Gulf War which had British citizens clinging to statements like Langely's for peace of mind. If decadence is passé, then British fashion wanted nothing to do with it. Economic tension had once again brought British fashion under the control of minimalism and restraint. Rebecca Arnold explains how this economic tension resulted in a response not unlike the effect of the decadence-decrying mantra of fascist leaders: Many turned away from fashion, seeing it as the ultimate symbol of the uncaring, self-indulgent consumerism that they blamed for the current financial crisis. Designers turned to the bland, unisex ease of the diffusion range as a means to stay afloat. Although few of these ranges were completely unisex, most played down gender difference and focused on simple, fuctional dress that was given a veneer of edgy, streetwise chic through the cachet of the designer's label, and eye-catching advertising campaigns. (120) With the term "designer" acquiring a negative connotation that referred to the overdone hype of the 80s, "authenticity" became the new fashion buzzword (Mendes & De La Haye 252). Britain, taking what it could from the American Grunge craze of homemade or second-hand fashions heavily marked by plaid flannel, merged Grunge with New Age traveler styling. The resulting look was decidedly informal and shaded with gray, blue, and tan with a few splashes of gold to spice life up a bit for those not yet numbed by these modern and mellow fashions (Mendes & De La Haye 254). As the 1990s progressed, Non-Western styled clothing aesthetics readily meshed with the simplistic fashions Britain was adopting. London's Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design alum Alexander McQueen drew extensively on Chinese and Japanese cultures for cut and decoration during this time. Reciprocally, Issay Miyake became a big name in the fashion circles of Britain in the mid-90s when his Japanese roots gained him a stronghold with his reductionist looks that were functional and modern at the same time. Critics of this transcultural shift argue that the marketing of these designs exploited these Non-Western cultures to "little more than the latest style statement" (Mendes & De La Haye 254). Despite criticism, minimalism and reductionism continued its entrenchment in the styles of contemporary British population in the late 1990s. As a whole, the collections presented by British designers for the Autumn and Winter of 1998-99 were as benign as could be in terms of the boldness of the designs. Mendes and De La Haye report that the ready-to-wear shows revealed, "minimal, precision-cut clothing; modernistic, sculptural designs, predomininantly in neutral hues, especially grey" (269). Natural materials were also used in abundance. Cashmere, suede, leather, hand-felted wool, and even fur clothed the people of Britain who were wholly embracing the look of neutrality. Couture still existed during this streamlined time but it seemed to be viewed more as a high, inaccessible art form rather than as wearable clothing. British designer and visionary Vivienne Westwood, for example, "reworks British sartonical traditions and historical styles with a combination of irreverence and sophistication" in her exhibitions of garishly clashing textile designs and seven-inch platform pumps (Mendes & De Lay Haye 262). Westwood's Gold Label, her successful but highly inaccessible (financially) haute couture label, is only shown in Paris now, revealing the label's declining relevance to British people, despite Westwood's British heritage. Couture and high fashion is not extinct in contemporary British fashion, it has just been relegated to the sidelines after attaining the status of a high art and giving up its identity as a marketable social product. This marks an apparent difference in the state of fashion during WWII and today. Though top designers created the Utility line in the 1940s, it was created with the everyday Brit in mind. Today, designers create their runway designs separately from the vision they use for their ready-to-wear lines, instead of forming a unified concept for both. This difference in mind, it is illuminating to examine possible reasons why the look of WWII and the contemporary look of Britain have so much in common. Both eras saw pleats and ornamentation removed for the stated sake of simplicity, and both times embraced the look of neutral colors and simple textile designs. The similarities between the looks of the separate stylistic periods are troubling when the conflicting sources of each time's fashions are explored, though. Wartime Britain's fashions were largely determined by the government's control over the textile industry and rationing. Simple lines and silhouettes were almost demanded if clothes were to be usable, not to mention fashionable, for a long period of time before new ration coupons could be attained by the wearer, allowing new garments to be purchased. Today, there are no overt ration coupons and consumers continue to purchase anonymous clothing from mainstream shops like the Gap and Muji in overflowing shopping bags seasonally. Why, during a time when there are no imposed restrictions, do British consumers limit themselves to harmless and personality-less styles that assert little more than the ability to distinguish between light grey and hazy, periwinkle blue? Rebecca Arnold proposes a possible answer to this question within the "Excess" section of her chapter titled "One: Status, Power and Display." Arnold wrote: Fashion has great resonance, acting as a collective memory; nostalgic styles are traces of the past, mapping individual and group experiences, recalling both reassuringly familiar and yet, as is this case, upsettingly clear evocations of earlier histories. For the younger generations, which did not remember the hardships of the war, the cold glamour of 1940s fashions was appealing . . . bourgeois good taste was there to be challenged, and the 1940s became a favoured reference point. (7) What does this contemporary British affinity for pared-down, colorless styles reveal about the culture as a whole? Fashion, as Arnold proposes it, "is inherently contradictory, revealing both our desires and anxieties" (xiv). This proposition applied to the similarities of wartime and contemporary British fashion produces a complex web of hesitant conclusions about the social implications of the fashion and cultural climate of each era. The desires of wartime citizens of Britain seem to have been aligned with the war effort which involved raising revenue while conserving textile and clothing supplies. Their anxieties were also likely tied to WWII and their overwhelming desire to appear as if they were doing everything they could to further the war effort. They showed this by dressing in the prescribed mode of Utility designs and getting their past season's styles remodeled for future wear. The desires and anxieties that contemporary British fashion reveals are much less simple to determine, though the link between the two eras is unmistakable. The difficulty of identifying contemporary desires and anxieties may be because contemporary times are often more difficult to examine since the examiner is not distanced enough from his or her reality in order to objectify it adequately. A possible truth of contemporary British fashion is that its minimalism is just part of the current postmodern way of life that readily takes bits and pieces from past times as a reflection of its fractured, direction-less identity. Or maybe British desire to be a part of a time where things were simple for a reason--a time when people wore grey and black because those were the only choices given to them by the government. There is the possibility that the British people are anxious about asserting an identity through individuality-promoting fashions when they are not sure what their identity presently is. Or, according to what this study suggests, are the people of Britain spontaneously assuming the state's power over them and readily complying to unannounced prescriptions in order to convince themselves that the state isn't actually manipulating them and stripping them of their rights to even dress in an individual way? As Arnold explains, maybe wartime policies are catching up with the British state and the contemporary British population is bearing the responsibility for the abuses it enabled during WWII: "While fashion may enable the fulfillment, if only momentarily, of a desire for unity and authenticity in a time of uncertainty, it must take responsibility for the abuses it enables, for the brutalities of advanced capitalism it so clearly reflects" (31). Though wearing bland, decorum-less fashions seems to be a small price to pay, it is an indication that members of the population are willing to accept controls over their right to present themselves as they see fit, apart from the state's influence, and that is, indeed, a price too high. Works Cited
|
www.andmas.co.uk/.../dressup/dressingup.htm 
[CASE STUDIES]
|
|
|
|
