50 Years of Everyday Fashion

This weekend we were idly looking at the magazines in the local shop, when Paul said, "I can't believe you haven't picked up this!"

"This" turned out to be a magazine by Yours (the best-selling lifestyle magazine for the fifty-plus woman, apparently), called, "50 Years of Everyday Fashion: How the Women of Britain Created Glamour and Style on a Shoestring".

It has a glorious picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover, it costs £4.99, and I heartily recommend it! It covers the period 1948 to 1997, and also has sections on men's clothes, Royalty, and weddings.

The thing which particularly interests me about this magazine is its "everyday fashion" approach. So many fashion magazines and books, whatever period they're discussing, tend to only talk about the prominent designers of that time. Of course this is important, but it often bears very little relation to what was being sold on the high street, what women were making for themselves, and what kinds of clothes people were wearing to go about their everyday lives.

There's a whole chapter on making your own clothes, and it's full of photographs of people wearing the most beautiful outfits. Some of the clothing made during wartime and post-war rationing is particularly noteworthy, because people had to be imaginative in the ways that they used fabrics and re-used old clothes. The magazine suggests that the rise of designer labels during the 1980s was one cause of home dressmaking going into decline, but cites the recent resurgence in the popularity of knitting as a hopeful sign that people might also regain enthusiasm in making their own clothes.

I think that enthusiasm is already here - although I'm naturally somewhat biased on the subject!

The TV show Project Runway, for example, has inspired a range of Simplicity sewing patterns. Books such as Rip It and Generation T are a drop in the ocean of books telling you how to make new clothes out of old ones, and there are dozens of online communities devoted to showing off clothes that you've made yourself.

If I was going to recommend one book to anybody who wanted to learn how to make their own clothes, it would be the Reader's Digest New Complete Guide to Sewing. I have the original 1978 edition, and it's an absolute goldmine. Anything you could possibly want to know about making your own clothes, you'll find it in there.

If you're more interested in reading about clothes than in making them yourself, then you might enjoy The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping. It's little snippets from literature which give an insight into the ways that people used to shop, and it's absolutely wonderful.