The journey through Great War Fashion is not just about the changing clothes and fashions of the war years, but much more than that
it is a journey into the lives of the women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. Imagine ‘stepping into someone else’s shoes’. Walking back in time a century ago, which shoes would they be? A pair of silk sensations costing thousands of pounds designed by Yantonnay of Paris or wooden clogs with metal cleats that spark on the cobbles of a factory yard? Will your shoes be heavy with mud from trudging along duckboards between the tents of a frontline hospital… or stuck with tufts of turf from a football pitch? Will you be cloaked in green and purple, brandishing a ‘Votes for Women’ banner or will you be the height of respectability, restricted by your thigh-length corset? Great War Fashion opens the woman’s wardrobe in the years before the outbreak of war to explore the real woman behind the stiff, mono-bosomed ideal of the Edwardian Society lady draped in gossamer gowns, and closes it on a new breed of women who have donned trousers and overalls to feed the nation’s guns in munitions factories and who, clad in mourning, have loved and lost a whole generation of men. The journey through Great War Fashion is not just about the changing clothes and fashions of the war years, but much more than that
it is a journey into the lives of the women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. At times, laugh-out-loud funny and at others, bringing you to tears, Lucy Adlington paints a unique portrait of an inspiring generation of women, brought to life in rare and stunning images.
AUTHOR: Lucy Adlington runs the delightful History Wardrobe series of costume-in-context presentations which span 200 years of women’s history through fashion. She is a keen collector of antique and vintage costume, with original items from the eighteenth century onwards. She travels the length and breadth of Britain to bring history to life at venues around the country. She is also published as a children’s author and has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
100 colour, 100 b/w illustrations