Clothing purchases by the numbers, 1941
March 15, 2010
How many pairs of shoes do you buy a year? Jackets? Pairs of underwear? This once-secret Cabinet Office memorandum from 1941, just before the introduction of wartime clothes rationing, gives figures for the average British man and woman before the war and projected figures for Britain on the ration. The UK was (and is) so stratified by class that I’d like to see median figures in addition to averages, but it’s interesting reading nonetheless. Twelve pairs of stockings!
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I ran across this article and thought you might be interested in it and the books and films it talks about. Enjoying your blog very much
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/intimate-history/7979/
Oh, this looks amazing! I’ve put it on my wish list.
Hah, I follow sewing blogs because I’m so completely useless at buying ready-to-wear – I mean, I’m really bad at it, I mail-order some pants every couple of years and wear them till they’re an embarrassment, and I’m still wearing shirts that were in a giveaway box in my dorm in 2004. I think I easily come in under the average for socks, for instance – I drive to the Thorlo outlet every couple of years and stock up, and Thorlo socks never die. So I think for some items, this might actually be an improvement for me – though my consumption of materials for projects I’m theoretically going to sew eventually is much much higher then this average! It’s the number for blouses that really boggles my mind, since even though I try hard to select good quality, I’m used to women’s tops falling apart completely within a year even if they aren’t completely out of style. I bought some relatively sturdy all-cotton seersucker tops last spring (that went into heavy rotation, as I was walking to work in a hot climate and didn’t have anything suitable) and they are now worn transparent. Maybe the year-round wearing of vests mitigated this, or maybe things started out made of extremely sturdy fabric and then gradually wore softer?
I think women wore more dresses and fewer separates than we do nowadays. That would reduce wear and tear on blouses. How often do I wear a dress? Maybe once every two weeks.
I also imagine that clothes were also not washed every time they were worn, at least by many people. Washing machines weren’t all that common in the States in this era either – I think that the prevalence of patterns from this era for aprons, smocks, housedresses, and other designated methods of keeping dirt off one’s good clothes is probably indicative here. Since I’ve already revealed myself to be less than fastidious, I will say that this is what makes me nuts about dresses – I will often go two or three wearings without washing an otherwise clean skirt or pair of pants, partially to save the wear of washing and tumble drying, but I have a very strong expectation of washing a top every time I wear it – and therefore my dresses wear out so much faster than skirts.
Have you read about how much work laundry used to be? The chapter on laundry in The Victorian House is nightmarishly involved. No wonder women weren’t in a hurry to launder. Instead, we had aprons! Housedresses! Body linen! Dress shields!
I have this blog post about how we mostly wash our clothes too much these days, but I’ll save it for another time.
Doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me, apart from 2.5 pairs of undies per year – eek!
These numbers look way off to me. I wonder how they arrived at them.
I know it was the Depression in the 1930′s, but come on. Five handkerchiefs? Get a head cold and you’re out of hankies before noon. One brassiere OR a garter belt, so make up your mind, ladies, do you want to hold up your boobs or your stockings, because you can’t have both.
I really think the war ministry fudged the numbers. Whatever was bought before the war, it wasn’t going to be available for the duration. Their miserable little clothes allowance looked bad enough on its own, and they just didn’t have the crust to place it next to the real pre-war statistics. Bless their hearts. I wouldn’t have liked being in their shoes, announcing the three-hanky policy to win the war.
However, my viewpoint is possibly skewed by a lifetime of prosperity. I would love to hear an opinion from someone who lived through the thirties and forties.
This is my first time commenting here, but I’ve been enjoying your blog for a while. I love this live-on-the-ration project and check in regularly to see what’s new.
Well, it’s interesting. This was a secret Cabinet memo informing the government’s introduction of clothing rationing, so fudging or spinning the numbers wouldn’t have been particularly useful. But I wonder how meaningful averages like that would have been in pre-minimum wage, pre-welfare state Britain, where inequalities were far more pronounced than today. At one end of the class spectrum, the MP Chips Channon had 40 suits in his wardrobe on the eve of rationing; at the other end, a significant minority of the British population were more or less unaffected by rationing because they were too poor to buy new clothing anyway. The exemption of cheaper secondhand clothes from rationing was a tacit acknowledgement by the government that that was how many among the lower classes clothed themselves.
Also, this was before disposable clothing. Older garments were mostly still kept in rotation, so four new dresses a year didn’t necessarily mean you had only 4 dresses in your wardrobe. Clothing rations weren’t meant to provide for an all-new wardrobe every year, just to supplement what people already had in their wardrobes. Although later in the war, when the ration was axed to just 24 coupons, it’s hard to see how they could do even that.
Thanks for reading!