Women in Wartime: Dress Studies from Picture Post 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019
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Howell, Geraldine. "Introducing Picture Post." Women in Wartime: Dress Studies from Picture Post 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 1–24. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350000957.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 09:48 UTC. Copyright © Geraldine Howell 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. INTRODUCING PICTURE POST Dress, fashion and Picture Post Picture Post magazine provides a unique archive of dress, fashion and fashionability covering a wartime period that witnessed unprecedented social upheaval and hardship. This book sets out to explore the many ways in which Picture Post stories reveal the sheer diversity of clothing and beauty culture practised during this extraordinary time and the ways in which the dress and accessories captured on camera narrated their own discrete histories. Women from many different backgrounds and of varying ages, often reflecting widely divergent aspirations and opportunities, can all be found within the pages of Picture Post. Close scrutiny of their clothing and accessories, hair and beauty ideas, and the nature of their association with the fashions and the fashionable of the period, all communicate much about the social fabric of individual lives and the cultural contexts which shaped them. Picture Post remains a still largely untapped resource for the dress historian, and it is the purpose of this book to highlight its contribution to the study of these evocative elements of material and social culture. The chronological parameters have been determined by the dress history story of war being told. Picture Post was launched in October 1938. During its first year it charted much about how fashion and beauty culture were understood within different communities in the period leading up to Britain’s declaration of war on 3 September 1939. Stories thereafter pursued these ideas further by investigating how wartime conditions brought about changing approaches to fashion consciousness, health and well-being. By 1944 news from France made it clear that a couture industry of sorts had survived in Paris and this, together with the tide of war having turned by the autumn and winter of that year, began a re-orientation of fashion thought away from war, the primary focus of this book, and towards peace. Articles reflecting these changing perspectives throughout the winter and spring of 1945 are, therefore, the last to be considered. After victory another set of stories arise based on the aspirations of peace and the economic priorities of the post-war era. Picture Post illustrated both the broad reaches of fashion itself and the lifestyle choices that became fashionable during the wartime years. The different types of work and leisure patterns that arose were often responsible for promoting alternative style priorities that largely added to, rather than displaced, existing dress practice. Picture Post stories charted these continually evolving attitudes towards clothing, accessories and cosmetics alongside of new interests in health and body consciousness. 2 WOMEN IN WARTIME: DRESS STUDIES FROM PICTURE POST 1938–1945 While each of the chapters that follow develops its own dress themes and issues, two areas of investigation are common to the work as a whole: ●● the extent to which dress stories from Picture Post shape our understanding of women’s lives. ●● the distinctive use of the photo-story in facilitating an appreciation of the changing nature of fashion and female identities. Central to the first is the sheer diversity of subject matter covered byPicture Post while the second highlights the unique quality of the historic record created by the many gifted photographers and writers whose work came to define the magazine’s signature style. Direct and indirect stories Working with Picture Post as a dress history archive it becomes clear that the magazine offers information on clothing culture, fashion and beauty in two ways: either directly or indirectly. Stories that took readers into fashion houses or beauty parlours, discussed a Utility wardrobe or a make-do-and-mend project, directly explored aspects of the wartime Figure 1 ‘Boleros for Mother and Daughter: Thick hand-knitted sweaters are becoming a rarity. This pair are grand for the country.’ From ‘Mother-and-Daughter Fashions’, Picture Post, 30 August 1941, p. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images (3249576). INTRODUCING PICTURE POST 3 Figure 2 ‘Sunday Suits: We keep our own style of dress in the village. It’s neat and dignified. It suits us. And you can always tell Sunday by the clothes we wear.’ From ‘Life of a Village’, Picture Post, 1 October 1938, p. 48. Felix Man/Picture Post/Getty Images (3368569). 4 WOMEN IN WARTIME: DRESS STUDIES FROM PICTURE POST 1938–1945 world of fashion as did features on health and well-being – increasingly associated with achieving the fashionable look and figure. These stories often took an approach to the subject that was less predictable or unusual in some way. Readers were shown an insider’s perspective or a behind-the- scenes view that became characteristic of the Picture Post method. Whether witnessing the backstage preparations for a couture show in Paris, the development and marketing of a new range of corsetry, watching beauty consultants being put through their training or observing some of the latest extraordinary treatments and techniques at work in the contemporary beauty salon, Picture Post provided a visual understanding of the modern world of fashion often considerably demystifying the more privileged and closed aspects of it in the process. For every article directly on fashion there were many more that indirectly provided a view of dress and material culture through stories on the living conditions, lifestyles or life experience of a heterogeneous collection of people and communities. The visual narratives of these photo-stories indirectly recorded the way clothing and accessories were worn and used by individuals or social groups so establishing a relationship between appearance and the social context in which people worked or lived. Here are some of the most authentic illustrated records of individual lifestyles in Britain during the immediate pre-war and wartime period that we have and as such an extraordinarily rich set of narratives for the dress historian. While Picture Post might chart the workings and evolution of many and varied elements of the ephemeral world of fashion, it is this unique collection of photo-stories revealing the everyday dress practices of people across the social spectrum that defines its particular significance as a dress history archive. Such a record is one of the less appreciated legacies of Picture Post that this book hopes to now fully recognize. How reliable is Picture Post as a dress history archive? Before beginning this exploration it is essential to establish that the information to be found in Picture Post can be accepted as both reliable and accurate by the dress historian. To what extent can Picture Post provide a genuine and dependable historical narrative? What type of truth does it offer and how is this arrived at? At the heart of these questions lies the fact that the camera can never, of course, offer an entirely objective record because, as with any media communication, it is compromised in varying degrees by the humanity which informs it. The photographer will inevitably colour his or her work through approach, methodology or a combination of both. This clearly has the potential to affect the nature of the truth revealed. As the Time Life editors acceded, writing on photojournalism, ‘Where people and events are concerned, there is no such thing as an objective photograph.’1 The choice of subject, its treatment and the darkroom techniques brought to bear on the final photographs are all reflective of the variables at work in delivering the ‘truth’. INTRODUCING PICTURE POST 5 The picture editor’s selection and composition of photo-material creates the story he or she wants to tell, also opening up further possibilities for bias, emphasis or distortion. If any photographic narrative is to be accepted as truthful and reliable, all these factors have to be confronted.2 Questions about Picture Post’s authenticity can be approached in two ways: ●● by looking at the editorial policy that was established by founding Editor Stefan Lorant and continued assiduously for ten years by his successor Tom Hopkinson; ●● by considering something of the attitude and approach revealed by key photographic contributors to Picture Post whose photo-narratives provide so much of the information to be studied. Early on in his career Stefan Lorant remembered recording how he wanted ‘to print the truth, to enlighten readers of subjects on which they have scant knowledge, not to underestimate them or disregard their intelligence, but share with them a common knowledge, to learn together’.3 In terms of how photography was to be used he believed that ‘the camera should be as the notebook of a trained reporter, recording contemporary events as they happen without trying to stop them to make a picture; people should be photographed as they really are and not as they would like to appear’.4 He also expressed the view that ‘photo reportage should concern itself with men and women of every kind and not simply with a small social clique; everyday life should be portrayed in a realistic, unselfconscious way’.5 Lorant wanted Picture Post to tell real stories about real life in all its diversity. This could not be achieved without the support of photographers who shared this vision. In 1947, in his book Speaking Likeness, long-time photo-reporter for Picture Post Kurt Hutton described the philosophy behind his work: Human life is full of fleeting moments of beauty, fun, joy, humour and, yes, of tragedy.