Fashion on the Ration – Julie Summers

Judging a Book by its Cover

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Julie Summers

British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 3 The Cover Story

This blog is the story of the jacket of my Vogue biography. The name ‘jacket’ raised quizzical smiles in the archives at Vogue House when I mentioned it. The immediate response of the archivists was to imagine Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent or Dior, while I was thinking about how on earth to sum up the content of this survey of a century in one image. Book covers matter, whatever the old adage might tell you. Some authors are so devoted to their designer that they will countenance no one else to touch their book jackets, or in the case of paperbacks, book covers. It is their brand. For my books, given the range of dates and subjects, it has been a one at a time process. I could not, for example, have the same sort of cover for this book as I did for a book about the Bridge on the River Kwai or Mount Everest.

Book production, like everything else, has its own language and is incomprehensible to most outside the industry. Books have cases, covers and jackets. The first thing one sees after printing is the uncased version, which is simply the book’s pages. It is a white block and looks wholly uninteresting (except to the author). It is then put in a case, which is a hard cardboard sheet that is creased in the middle to provide what will become the spine. It usually has the name of the book and the author on that spine. In my case, the black case was embossed with the title in silver. And then there is the jacket, which is the shiny, thick paper that wraps around the book and makes it stand out on the bookshelves of shops, supermarkets, airport stores and anywhere else the publisher plans to make it available for sale.

Books ready to be cased and showing a sneak preview of the endpapers

My book in its cover but without its glorious jacket

Me clutching a jacket, unfolded, at Clays on 2 September

The hunt for an image started in July 2023 when Maddy Price, my editor at Orion, sent through a couple of suggestions. Neither worked. It seemed to us that any image we might pick from the remarkable collection of fashion shoots over the last 108 years would date the book to a decade, and for some eagle-eyed aficionados, to a year or month. We had a conversation about it and decided that the only thing to do was to plump for a single, bold, plain colour with the title in gold or silver. It was not a wholly satisfactory solution, so we parked it for the while. Maddy got on with editing my manuscript and I went to France for a holiday.

I had met the photographer, Willie Christie, in December 2022 when he came to Oxford, and I interviewed about his time at Vogue in the 1970s. He had a brief but productive spell as a Vogue photographer, working with Grace Coddington who was then the fashion editor. He showed me a selection of photographs that were to be included in his book, due out the following year. ‘You should come to the launch’, he suggested. On 20 September 2023 that is exactly where I was to be found: at Iconic Images Gallery in London, admiring a small selection of his beautiful photographs with my friend Deb. I was very taken by a black and white image of model singing into a microphone with a pianist in the background. It felt so Hollywood and timeless.

Marie Helvin channels old Hollywood glamour,
British Vogue 1974. Styled by Grace Coddington
photograph by Willie Christie

Deb bought me a copy of Willie Christie’s book which I read on the train on the way back to Oxford that evening. Turning page after page of stunning images my eye was caught by the shot of a model wearing a John Bates dress against a slatted background lit from behind. The more I stared at it, the more I realised I had found exactly what I was looking for: an image that was timeless, beautiful, spoke of luxury and desire but also of movement and life. Had I not spotted this when I was reading Vogue of the 1970s? As soon as I got home, I looked up the 15 March 1977 issue and there it was, on page 100. But a muddy version of this crisp and lovely image in Willie Christie’s book. I remember reading a memo by editor Beatrix Miller from around that time complaining about the quality of black and white reproduction in Vogue.

‘Hit Looks’ fashion shoot by Willie Christie, styled by Grace Coddington, *Vogue* 15 March 1977

I sent a snap of the picture to Maddy Price the next morning and received an enthusiastic thumbs up. She passed it onto designer, Chevonne Elbourne, who mocked up a version of the jacket. The thing she realised was that she had to interpret Willie Christie’s image as a portrait shot, whereas his original was a square format, shot on a Hasselblad. With bated breath I forwarded her suggestion to Willie. Would he mind us messing around with his photograph? I knew he did not like his images to be cropped, but we had gone further and removed the slats. To my inexpressible delight he gave permission for us to use Chevonne’s design, and she was able to work on what has become the final version of the book’s jacket.

I now have most beautiful book jacket in my collection of cracking good jackets – Dressed for War, Fashion on the Ration and so forth. It is an image that conjures everything this book is about: luxury, beauty and style but also movement, life, energy and humour. If you chance to look beyond the cover, you will see Chevonne’s brilliant endpapers, which bring a blast of colour in the display of Vogue covers over the last 108 years. It is a very clever juxtaposition and I am in awe of her eye.

I would like to invite you to judge this book by its cover but beyond that, it is up to you whether you like my take on Vogue’s eye view of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Willie Christie for allowing us to interpret his glorious image from 1977 and to Chevonne Elbourne for working her magic on this and the other images from Condé Nast Publications that are included in the book.

My three favourite jackets to date in reverse order. Fashion on the Ration was published in 2015, Dressed for War in 2020 and British Vogue, the Biography of an Icon, in October 2024.

Audrey’s Miniature Wardrobe for Today’s World

Posted on February 13, 2020March 14, 2021 by Julie Summers

Now that Audrey is launched in Dressed for War she is public property. People have begun to contact me to tell me things about her which of course I wished I had known when I was writing the book. That always happens, though, so I have given up getting paranoid about missing out on every last gem. However, people have also been talking to me about how relevant they find Audrey’s attitude towards clothes rationing and how it rings a bell for today’s concerns about excess consumption and waste.

Last week I was thrilled to find a copy of the September 1943 edition of British Vogue with its stand-out beautiful cover and fascinating articles by Cecil Beaton, Lesley Blanch and Lee Miller. Audrey’s editorial for that edition was entitled Miniature Wardrobe. ‘Wardrobes are shrinking fast,’ she wrote, ‘and the smaller they get the more perfect they have to be.’ That autumn she would tell the New York editor of Vogue that she had in her personal wardrobe three suits, which she varied with blouses and accessories, one cashmere dress for dining out and two pairs of ‘slacks’ which she wore with baggy jumpers at weekends. She concluded her editorial: ‘In a miniature wardrobe – as in a small circle of friends – versatility is to be prized and bores not admitted.’ Coming a year after the introduction of Utility clothing and Austerity design it is clear to me that Audrey and her fashion editors were trying to encourage an upbeat message in straitened circumstances.

For Audrey Withers and her generation, recycling, making-do and mending, refashioning clothes and eking out the last few months of an old suit was part of their every day after clothes rationing was introduced in June 1941. In fact, before that date there had been a ban on the sale of silk stockings and all sorts of clothing was in short supply as a result of the bombing of factories. In comparison to a human life, clothing must have seemed unimportant. Yet it was not dispensable. At the most basic level, people had to keep warm. Children needed clothes and shoes to go to school. Men and women had to be dressed to go to work, whether in factories, in secretarial offices or indeed in the editor’s office of the most prestigious fashion magazine. The government understood that clothing was also important for morale. That is one of the reasons why they allowed the women’s magazines to continue to publish, albeit with a reduced quantity of paper.

Today, in Britain at least, we are not in the position of having to limit our wardrobes because of clothes rationing. We live in an altogether different time. A time of plenty which is running into an era of excess. Perhaps we can learn lessons from Audrey Withers. Barbara Guarducci and Saskia Terzani certainly seemed to think so when I met them via Skype in the autumn of 2019. They founded Mending for Good ‘to provide ethical solutions for fashion waste.’ When I met Barbara in London in November, she and I quickly found that we had the same anxiety about the vast excess that fashion creates. My concern came from having spent six years writing about wartime clothing, hers from a lifetime’s experience of the fashion industry but we met at the same point: we have to declare war on overproduction and waste. We are living beyond our means in terms of our impact on the environment and we have to change the culture that permits over-consumption.

Barbara, Saskia and I decided to team up to help launch Mending for Good at the same time as we launched Audrey in Dressed for War. The themes seemed to align so well. Then came the suggestion to produce a series of embroideries of Audrey’s phrases that she used in Vogue to exhort readers to think about their clothes. Taken on their face value they seem to have as much relevance today as they did eighty years ago: Wage War Against Waste, Quality Rather than Quantity, but also the more reassuring: You Cannot Ration Style or Relax and Mend.

Mending for Good works with the London College of Fashion’s vocational training and ethical manufacturing initiative. That sounds a bit of a mouthful but it is a wonderful undertaking that gives employment opportunities women in socially frail and challenging circumstances. We commissioned a group of women in HMP/YOI Downview Prison to create 100 embroideries with eight different messages. We gave them away to guests at the book launch and they proved so popular that I have only the original eight examples left.

Four of the embroideries created by women from HMP/YOI Downview 2020

I know Audrey would have approved of this initiative on so many levels. After the war she strove hard to make people – young women in particular – think about the fashion industry as a career that could help to make a difference. She ran a competition in Vogue from 1945 to get this message across. Today the London College of Fashion’s Making for Change initiative and my friends at Mending for Good are both trying to help change the way people think about fashion production. That is a wonderful thing.
I believe Audrey’s wartime campaign to encourage women to think responsibly but creatively about fashion can find echoes in today’s world.

Home Fires Season 2 Episode 5 Fur and Friction

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Julie Summers

ITV STUDIOS PRESENTS HOME FIRES SERIES 2 Pictured: FRANCESCA ANNIS as Joyce, CLARE CALBRAITH as Steph,RUTH GEMMELL as Sarah,FENELLA WOOLGAR as Alison, CLAIRE PRICE as Miriam, LEANNE BEST as Teresa.SAMANTHA BOND as Frances,FRANCES GREY as Erica and CLAIRE RUSBROOK as Pat. This image is the copyright of ITV and must only be used in relation to HOME FIRES SERIES 2. — HOME FIRES SERIES 2
© ITV

When I am asked what it is about the Second World War that fascinates me so much I reply that it is not war but people who excite my interest: how individuals cope in a time of emergency and how such events impact upon their later lives. One of the practical aspects that had to be considered was clothing and it is something I am regularly asked about in regard to Home Fires. Just to be clear, I am not involved in the production of the drama – my involvement stops with the scripts – but I did have the great good fortune to talk to the series costume designer, Lucinda Wright, in the lead up to filming series 1 and she took me round the fabulous collections of clothes at Angels Costumes in London. Their website claims they have over one million items and eight miles of hanging costume. Well, I didn’t see them all but Lucinda and I did discuss colour and fabrics in some detail.

HOME FIRES EPISODE 4 Pictured:CLARE CALBRAITH as Steph Farrow. This image is the copyright of ITV and must only be used in relation the HOME FIRES on ITV. — CLARE CALBRAITH as Steph Farrow.
© ITV

One major change in Britain during 1940 was the proportion of people wearing uniform. You might not have noticed the change between series 1 and series 2 but it is striking and absolutely reflects what was happening in the country. About a third of the population of Britain were entitled to wear uniform during the Second World War. This would give a figure of somewhere in the region of 15 million people, a large number of whom were women. So we have in Great Paxford a mixture of RAF, Army and women’s service uniforms – that much is obvious. But then there are the women working in the Barden’s factory who all wear pinafores over their own clothes to protect them. Clare wears a uniform when she is working for Frances Barden as a maid, though not on her days off with Spencer. House coats, such as those worn by Pat, were popular and a sensible way to keep the wear and tear of ordinary clothes to a minimum.

ITV STUDIOS PRESENTS HOME FIRES EPISODE 1 Pictured : FRANCES GREY as Erica Campbell, CLAIRE RUSHBROOK as Pat Simms and SAMANTHA BOND as Frances Barden. Photographer: STUART WOOD This image is the copyright of ITV and must be credited. The images are for one use only and to be used in relation to Home Firs, any further charge could incur a fee. — House coats galore! © ITV

With so many people wearing them, it is unsurprising that the general public knew how to ‘read’ uniforms across a street or at the scene of an incident, and could identify at a glance a man or woman’s job, rank and status. And it was very important to know and trust the person who was issuing an instruction, especially during the Blitz, when people needed to know who to listen to or appeal to in a crisis. Aside from emergencies, uniforms had a hierarchy with implications on many levels, some of them more personal than official.

WW2 Christmas card, Escort! A Chelsea Pensioner looks in admiration at an RAF airman with an elegant woman on each arm. 1941 — WW2 Christmas card, Escort! A Chelsea Pensioner looks in admiration at an RAF airman with an elegant woman on each arm.
1941

Some uniforms, such as the Royal Air Force blue, gave men real status in women’s eyes. This was partly because it comprised a smaller body of men than the army, and their jobs, especially the pilots, were considered heroic and extremely dangerous. They were known as ‘Our Glamour Boys’. The PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) suffered in their khaki uniforms from being the least admired of the three services by the general public. Members of the women’s services (just over 100,000 in June 1941) were said to grade potential boyfriends in an order of eligibility in which ‘RAF officers rated tops, being classified in turn by rank and number of decorations; naval officers came second and brown jobs a long way behind’.

So as you are watching Episode 5 of Home Fires, it is worth looking out for the distinctions of dress and the way different people react to it. That is, if you have time to notice that level of detail when there is so much drama going on around you. This is another breathtaking hour where I lurched from near tears of enchantment to gasps of horror. Enjoy Sunday evening!

HOME FIRES Series 2 Episode 5 Fur, Fashion and Friction

Posted on April 27, 2016March 7, 2023 by Julie Summers

When I am asked what it is about the Second World War that fascinates me so much I reply that it is not war but people who excite my interest: how individuals cope in a time of emergency and how such events impact upon their later lives. One of the practical aspects that had to be considered was clothing and it is something I am regularly asked about in regard to Home Fires. Just to be clear, I am not involved in the production of the drama – my involvement stops with the scripts – but I did have the great good fortune to talk to the series costume designer, Lucinda Wright, in the lead up to filming series 1 and she took me round the fabulous collections of clothes at Angels Costumes. Their website claims they have over one million items and eight miles of hanging costume. Well, I didn’t see them all but Lucinda and I did discuss colour and fabrics in some detail.

I have been involved in researching the Second World War for the best part of fifteen years and fashion and clothing are a fascinating aspect of the social history of that era. It was a time of uniformity on the one hand and individual expression on the other. What people wore and how they felt about it – whether smart in battle dress or tatty in patched and darned clothes – said much about the spirit of the time. What people wore in the countryside was no less expressive than outfits seen in the towns and cities.

ITV STUDIOS PRESENTS HOME FIRES SERIES 2 Pictured: CLARE CALBRAITH as Steph Farrow This image is the copyright of ITV and must only be used in relation to HOME FIRES SERIES 2. — Steph Farrow, changed out of her farm clothes to meet Stanley from the bus © ITV

Everyone in Home Fires is dressed to their status. Steph Farrow wears dungarees in the fields but once she arrives at a WI meeting she is scrubbed clean and wearing a patterned dress, as would have been the case in the 1940s. Edith Jones, the wonderful diarist whose jottings form the golden thread through Jambusters, would always change into a frock in the evening for supper, even if it was just her and Jack eating supper together. She is similar to Steph in many ways. At the other end of the spectrum is Joyce Cameron. Always meticulously turned out and often wearing fur. Until the 1970s when there was a huge animal rights’ movement against fur coats, women of a certain standing would have one, two or even three fur coats in their wardrobe: a mink for the evening, a pine-marten for day use and a fox stole to wear over a tweed coat. The Board of Trade slapped a 100% purchase tax on luxuries such as fur coats during the war but they were still popular and widely worn. Hats were de rigeur for church, shopping and most social outings, though as the war progressed a certain degree of informality crept in and some women went bare-headed. Although they were never rationed, hats were not always easy to find in the shops after 1941 but for the summer of 1940 there would still have been plenty in evidence.

ITV STUDIOS PRESENTS HOME FIRES EPISODE 1 Pictured : FRANCESCA ANNIS as Joyce Cameron. Photographer: STUART WOOD This image is the copyright of ITV and must be credited. The images are for one use only and to be used in relation to Home Firs, any further charge could incur a fee. — Immaculately dressed Joyce Cameron © ITV

ITV STUDIOS PRESENT HOME FIRES EPISODE 5 Pictured: LEANNE BEST as Teresa. This image is the copyright of ITV and must only be used in relation the HOME FIRES on ITV. — Teresa Fenchurch in her city dress and coat © ITV

Teresa Fenchurch comes from Liverpool and stands out from the rest of the women in the village on account of her wonderful Liverpudlian accent and her city wardrobe. She wears wool, not tweed, and her clothes are often bright and single coloured rather than patterned. As a teacher she is an outsider in that she has a profession and a secret. It is apt that she lives with the other outsider in the village, Alison Scotlock, who also has a profession and a secret. Women teachers made up a large proportion of the profession in the war as many young men left their posts to fight. Pre-war when a teacher married she would have to give up work but this changed in the early years of the war as the government could not afford to lose qualified teachers, especially in villages where there was often only one teacher for the whole school.

Unit stills photographyITV STUIDOS PRESENT HOME FIRES EPISODE 5 Pictured: LEANNE BEST as Teresa Fenchurch, MARK UMBERS as Nick Lucas and JODIE HAMBLET as Jenny. This image is the copyright of ITV and must only be used in relation the HOME FIRES on ITV. — Wing Commander Nick and Teresa meet Jenny on Great Paxford High Street © ITV

In the autumn of 2014, while the first series of Home Fires was being filmed, I was writing a book for the Imperial War Museum about wartime clothing and fashion. It was a lovely project to work on and I greatly enjoyed delving into the Board of Trade’s archive. This department was responsible for the length of men’s socks and the width of the gusset in women’s knickers.

Fashion on the Ration was published by Profile Books in paperback in February 2016 and is the subject of a major exhibition at IWM North starting next month and running until spring 2017. Warning: this book contains Forces bloomers and corsets!

Home Fires Episode 3: Love, War and Housecoats

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Julie Summers

By the end of the Second World War the British government had such minute control over every aspect of people’s lives that it governed the length of men’s socks and the amount of metal and rubber in women’s corsets. Even trouser turn-ups were banned and only six designs of underwear for women were permitted. Food was equally carefully monitored and rationed. Everything had been streamlined and controlled to help towards the war effort. The novelist Barbara Cartland was heard to lament that love was about the only thing left unrationed by 1945.

Dame Barbara Cartland in ATS uniform, c. 1942 She spent six months of the war in Canada, evacuated with her young family, but after the death of her two brothers at Dunkirk in 1940 she returned to Britain. © Cartland family

In November 1939, however, most things were still available and all rationing, apart from petrol which had been introduced in September, was in the future. With nearly one third of the population entitled to wear uniform of one type or another, manufacturing had to turn its considerable energies to mass-producing tunics, battle-dress, bib-and-braces or nurses’ uniforms. The government recognised that controls would be necessary and not just for food but also civil industry and trade. Some planning had taken place in the Board of Trade, but this was mainly to control the import/export market. The immediate impact on civilian trade was major price rises. Unsurprisingly, the demand for goods such as sandbags, black-out material and torches or flashlights rose suddenly and the prices followed. Profiteering became a major issue and was addressed in November through the Prices of Goods Act 1939, which ‘limited the profit earned per unit of a commodity to the amount received at the end of August 1939’. The Act had only limited success, which meant that profiteering continued and inflation, much feared by the government, was an ever present concern. Clothes were particularly susceptible to substantial price rises. A woman told a journalist early in the war that she had gone into a shop to buy gloves and said to the assistant that she wanted to get them now because she feared the new stock would be dearer. To which the assistant replied: ‘Bless you! You’re too late. We’ve put up the prices of the old stock already.’

The editors of women’s magazines tried to encourage practical solutions such as the wearing of housecoats to protect skirts and blouses. Pat Simms (Claire Rushbrook), for example, and Erica Campbell (Frances Grey), wear housecoats or aprons over their dresses. We might look at these garments today and smile at the memory of own grandmothers or aunts wearing them, but even the high-end fashion magazine Vogue considered them important enough to include designs for housecoats in the winter pattern book of 1939.

Controls of all sorts were introduced in the early months of the war. Market stalls were carefully monitored and once sugar rationing was introduced in January 1940 the Women’s Institute was no longer able to sell cakes and biscuits at their country markets. The WI found the bureaucracy of the Second World War a severe trial and one of the reasons my book was titled Jambusters in the UK was because the WI expended a great deal of energy busting bureaucratic log-jams in order to keep the countryside going. One irritated member wrote in her diary: ‘We went to Coventry this morning and I spent 20 minutes in the Food Controller’s Office getting a permit for butter and sugar for the Women’s Institute teas.’

The WI was nothing if not resourceful and positive. The government recognised the value of a huge voluntary body of women who could be marshalled with just one telephone call to their General Secretary, Miss Farrer, and it made sure that the WI was involved in the outset on food production. WI members were invited to sit on county agricultural committees and to encourage their villages to put aside as much land as possible to grow fruit and vegetables. In episode 2 of Home Fires some of the drama hinges on the determination of Mrs Barden (Samantha Bond), the WI president, to plough up the cricket pitch for vegetables. As seen, this was not popular with the men. This is something that happened throughout Britain. My own grandfather returned from the war to see that his beloved tennis court had been dug up for growing potatoes.

The autumn of 1939 brought great change and a strange sense of a new normality. As you watch episode three you will sense the heightened state of tension and emotion that the war rendered within the families in Great Paxford. It affected everyone in different ways: fear, anger, love, danger, separation but the Great Paxford WI offers its members a solid backbone as the country finds its way during the so-called Phoney War of 1939-40. One of the most successful schemes run by the WI during the war was the ‘Letter Friendship’ scheme. It was conceived in June 1939 at the meeting in London of the ACWW, Associated Country Women Worldwide, at which representatives from women’s movements from all over the world were present. Over 200 Canadian friendships were established and resulted in an exchange of letters so each could understand the other’s situation better. One correspondent wrote: ‘I listen a great deal to the radio but radio doesn’t tell me what the women do at home.’

Women needed each other as never before. The travel writer Rosita Forbes wrote in the magazine Women’s Own: ‘In these hard times, when the utmost is required of everyone, the most important virtues are courage and kindliness. Women’s courage is the valour of endurance, of standing up to endless small difficulties, of putting up with things and making things do. When you are sick and tired and frightened of the future as well, and you go on working without making a fuss, then you are quite as brave as the first person who flew across the Atlantic.’

Cover Cropped fashion on a ration_Cover

Home Fires by Julie Summers, published by Penguin USA, tells the true story of the wartime WI which inspired the drama series HOME FIRES: Fashion on the Ration by Julie Summers was published in March 2015.