The demob suit remains an icon of late 1940s fashion, in museums and popular culture. On demobilization, British servicemen received a new wardrobe gratis. It comprised a suit or jacket and trousers, plus a raincoat, shirts, collars, shoes and hat – the ‘full monty’. Why did the British government reward men for their military service in this way? Since the other victorious Allies did not treat their veterans so generously in sartorial terms, British ex-servicemen’s material entitlement requires discussion. This chapter analyses the inter-departmental tussle in Whitehall over veterans’ clothing. Debate centred not only on what, and how much, clothing ex-servicemen would receive, but also on which items of military kit they’d have to ‘surrender’. The chapter explores veterans’ complex feelings about demobilization and the role clothing played in the transition to civvy street. It also scrutinizes the claim that demob suits were a democratizing device. Not only were some garments better than others, but also the decision to reward servicemen with a whole new wardrobe left servicewomen empty-handed, bar coupons and cash. Other women who’d performed vital war work went unrewarded.

Washington’s abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease after World War II accentuated Britain’s chronic indebtedness to the United States. Redressing Britain’s balance of payments deficit required the orientation of much domestic production for export. Textiles lay at the heart of this export drive. But workers in the cotton and woollen industries, as in the garment sector, were lacking. This chapter analyses the campaign to encourage women to enter the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploring why women resisted official entreaties. With tens of thousands of Britons emigrating annually, the government turned to displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany and Austria. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour launched ‘Operation Westward Ho’ to recruit DPs as so-called ‘European Volunteer Workers’. The majority of female recruits were channelled into textile work. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions surrounding these female migrants, including a perception that they received too many perks and anxieties over women’s reproductive agency. Unmarried pregnant ‘volunteers’ risked deportation if they sought terminations, or invasive attempts to compel them to marry.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

Garments were entangled with victory in numerous ways, from its celebration to a deflating sense of its elusiveness. The equation of peace with prosperity proved unwarranted. British shops did not quickly refill. Civilian clothing became scarcer just after the war than at any time during it. The number of clothing coupons issued in each rationing cycle fell, frustrating hopes that the material ‘fruits of victory’ would soon be enjoyed. This chapter examines Britons’ symbolic and performative uses of clothing to celebrate victory, as well as Allied military commanders’ sartorial enactment of Axis leaders’ defeat. Surrender ceremonies and victory parades were occasions when garments were required to do particular work, whether ‘dressing up’ or ‘dressing down’. Meanwhile, in the United States, a United National Clothing Collection (launched in April 1945) sought to amass ‘victory clothing’ for distribution by UNRRA. The chapter concludes by considering transnational and imperial recalibrations of power as evidenced in Britain’s official Victory Parade in June 1946, which exposed Britons’ attitudes towards colonial subjects and the ‘colour’ they lent to national pageantry.

Ostensibly, all British former servicemen received a new wardrobe. In reality, this was reserved for British- and Irish-born veterans and denied to those from Britain’s colonies. This chapter foregrounds a ‘mutiny’ by West Indian RAF personnel in May 1946. British officials, alarmed by a ‘colour problem’ they ascribed to Black men’s excessive sensitivity to racist slurs, worked to repatriate veterans of colour, regardless of their wishes and British status. Repatriated West Indian veterans received just a promissory note. This cash entitlement varied from island to island. Enraged by racialized injustices, West Indian airmen demanded redress, staging a protest as the SS Bergensfjord transported them from Glasgow to Trinidad and Jamaica. This chapter places their demonstration within two larger frames: a wave of transnational veteran militancy in late 1945 and 1946, in which grievances over clothing were interwoven with larger imperial injustices; and a proliferation of ‘double crossings’ after the war, trans-oceanic passages in both directions, as people were removed or elected to move. Many West Indian veterans soon returned to Britain on the Windrush and other vessels.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

This chapter analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

When British troops entered Germany, they found ‘well dressed and well fed’ Germans, showing how much the Nazi state had plundered from occupied nations and camp inmates. Soon, however, prominent British opinion-shapers arrived at a new appreciation of German victimhood. Millions of ethnic German ‘expellees’ created a constituency of displaced persons whose basic needs had to be met. Central to this story is British publisher, humanitarian and activist Victor Gollancz, the force behind ‘Save Europe Now’ (SEN). Gollancz’s polemical interventions used ‘kaput’ shoes as emblems of German immiseration, evoking the footwear stripped from victims of Nazi genocide. While SEN encouraged Britons to send clothing and food parcels to Germans, British occupation authorities revised their understandings of former enemies and allies. The chapter concludes with the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg to try leading Nazi war criminals in 1945–6. Noting the ‘deflation’ of Nazi leaders stripped of uniforms and insignia, British and US observers also remarked on poor Soviet apparel. Western attempts to kindle consumerist aspirations behind the Iron Curtain soon became prominent.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.