Great War Fashion

Book excerpt: 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 Yanturni of Paris, or wooden clogs with metal cleats that spark on the cobbles of a factory yard? Would your shoes be heavy with mud from trudging along duckboards between the tents of a front-line hospital or stuck with tufts of turf from a football pitch? Would you be cloaked in green and purple, brandishing a 'Votes for Women' banner, or would you be respectably dressed, restricted by your thigh-length corset? Great War Fashion opens the wardrobe of women in the years before the outbreak of war to explore the real woman behind the stiff, mono-bosomed ideal of Edwardian society, and closes it on a new breed of women who have donned trousers and overalls to feed the nation and work 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 – it is a journey into the lives of the women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. Using material from her own extensive collection, renowned costume expert Lucy Adlington brings an inspiring generation of women to life with rare and stunning images alongside a narrative that is both deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.