Dressing for Austerity

A new look for Austerity...The coldest winter on record rationing successive economic crises bombed out towns and cities; with some justification ''Austerity Britain'' in the late 1940s is coloured in the popular imagination in tones of drab. Dressing for Austerity shines a light on alternative visions of post-war optimism and aspiration. It traces how set against the Labour government''s philosophy of ''Austerity by design'' in a climate of post-war idealism the desire for affordable fashionable clothing access to leisure and the health time and money to enjoy them became totemic symbols of post-war ambition that impelled new strategies of state control and consumer agency. The book examines the immediate post-war period - its politics its fashions and its people - in new ways and on its own terms as a critical tipping point in the making of modern Britain.