Buttons. This is one half hour. Im excited to invite Jackie Morris and Irene Winchester to tell about passion innovation. Becky is one of the Community Service superstars. We are stoked that she brought another teacher from her school. This is a model. Tell your friends to come. Please join me in welcoming up for the presentation. That is why i brought irene this year. This is my third year. I just want you guys to go back to your school and encourage all of your teacher friends to come because this is such a valuable conference. Thank you friends of the world war ii memorial for inviting me back again. For your number three. Irene and i are going to talk about, and we will say this in a video later on, but fashion on the ration. In the United States, we did not ration clothing as much as the british did, but we had some severe restrictions on rationing. One of the things you can see from the powerpoint is that 50 of japans exports are fabric and silk, 32 of that comes to the United States. They were our only source of soap. So, you can imagine how obviously, purple pearl harbor is going to impact silk and other fabrics in the United States. In 1942 the u. S. War production board issues limitation order 85. This is where all of the restrictions, not all, but most of the restrictions come in. We want to reduce by 15 , domestic fabric production. And also, will, by 40 . Obviously, we have got to outfit our shoulders. This is one of the things we talked about with the kids, is that they cant imagine not being able to go to the mall and buy whatever they want and also, when we get to the shoes, the kids lose their minds. I dont know about kids that you teach, but i know even my only teenage son, shoes are a big deal and so that is going to come in a little bit later. I dont think like the manufacturers for food that did the bootleg black market stuff, i dont think there was a lot of that, but there were some heavy fines for manufacturers that did not follow the rules. So, women. In the United States, the dress restrictions. This is kind of funny, because in every war you see different innovations obviously food, but fashion, the hemlines get shorter, ladies. You actually have ankles now. And maybe even knees. Ladies, hemlines came up a little bit. Obviously the fashion, irene will talk more about utility fashion. It is really important for women even during world war ii that they look good. But they are trying to do it, in a way that is limiting the amount of material that they are using, so you can see 72 inches for dresses, 25 inches for skirts. Your pants had to be tapered. Of course, the hymns, and things you cant have at all. Cuffs are a luxury. You have the coat with the double yolk on it, you cant have those. A stash, a scarf, and hoods, they were all luxuries that were banned. In the United States. Now, shoes. Oh my word shoes, starting in 1943, because of leather and rubber shortages, and the supplies going to the war effort, everybody got three coupons for a year for shoes. And so i know that you know, that might sound like a lot, but think about how many pair of shoes you might buy a year or how many shoes your teenager might buy a year and that kind of hits home. If you lost your shoes in a flood or a fire, you can get extra. If you are a mailman, or a police officer, you could get extra coupons. For your shoes. Besides that, youre limited to three. And, your shoes, no twotone shoes. There were four colors of shoes you could get. Black, white, the town brown and army brown which is more like the brownish green. So, not only are we limiting the number of shoes you could we are actually limiting the style, and the color of the shoes that you can get. Ladies, you dont have a pair, a different pair of shoes for every outfit. And opa also banned boots taller than 10 inches, and also too much high heels. You know, the high hill ladies, we cannot have those either. So, this is a drag. So, if you got secondhand shoes, you did not have to ration those. And also, sears and roebuck will offer you shoes that are nonleather though, for other coupons. So i guess you could turn in your sugar coupon to get cork shoes or wedge shoes. We talked about court the other day. Well, this is when cork heels come into fashion because we dont have the leather, and so cork heels came to be a big deal. And you can see on the side, there is a couple of pair of cork. Ladies, we still need to look good, right . And so we still need to have pantyhose. Obviously, silk and nylon, they use those for parachutes, powder bags, so the opa literally sees all of the raw silk in the United States in 1941. If you notice the date, it is august 2, 1941. This is before pearl harbor. Ladies, what to do . I think on the black market, you probably could pirate stockings because it went from a dollar . 25 a pair, to more than 10 a pair. That is an 800 increase in the price of stockings. If you are a black market dealer, that might be the industry to get into. Ladies came up with very innovative ways to make it look like they still were wearing nylons. I dont know if you know in the 30s and 40s, nylons for women lots of times, had a seam up the back. So what you would do, is you would paint your legs with gravy, hopefully there is not dogs around that will come lick your leg. You paint your legs with gravy, they even came up with devices that you could put on your leg and draw like with paint up the back of your legs, so it would stay straight, that seem, to make it look like from far away, that you actually had nylons with a fashionable seam up the back. I dont know about you, they were called glamour hose. I dont know if it gets hot and the gravy melts, i dont know. But, it is just, that does not sound like a good thing to me. They actually set up, the government set up drives to collect damage stockings, they would either fix them or recycle them, for the war effort. Now, men. No more vests. No more doublebreasted suits. Only single breasted suits. The dark black fancy black jacket, they called it the clark gable, you know what i am talking about . That was banned. I still probably think people in hollywood got them. But no threepiece suits, no vests, your lapel size and your cup size and cuffs on pants are restrict did as well. The fashion became very standard and not flashy at all. It was not patriotic to where flashy close. That brings us to the suit, there was a 26 cutback in wool fabric. If you know what is it suit is, i know you guys have all seen them with the chains and the long big lapels, they were seen as unpatriotic. And so also, there was a black market boot, not bootleg liquor but bootleg intends. People that were underground made zoot suits. You guys all know about the rise in 1943, the american sailors thought it was super unpatriotic that these guys around ran around in zoot suits. If you have never studied the zoot suit riots, you should look it up. It is really horrible that these boys were taken, i was reading they even went to a theater where a movie was playing, stripped the Mexican American boys suits off them, and the americans urinated on them and these boys ended up having to run around naked. There were not very Many American sailors arrested for the zoot suit riots but there were a lot of Mexican American boys that were arrested. It is something to research, if you would like. It is very interesting. Funny thing, in los angeles today, it is still illegal to wear a zoot suit. But i dont really think youre going to get in trouble for that. But, it is still a law on the books. Irene is going to talk about the uk, and how they really were rationed with the coupons, like karen talked about the food. Thank you. In the uk, things are very different because of their size and what kind of resources they have available, the uk introduced something called make do and mend, in 1941. What was really interesting was that they did not tell anybody it was coming and they waited for a bank holiday to announce it. Fyi everybody, we are now rationing clothing. It was a huge surprise for civilians. It does last until march 1949. We tend to think of world war ii as obviously the end and 45 but for Great Britain, they still struggled for a while after the fact. Here are a couple of different coupon books that you have for clothing, the colored coupons that you have are going to let you by different items of clothing. We will show a cute video clip about how you can also trade in coupons for other items as well. When they started the rationing, each adult was given 66 coupons that you could use however you saw fit. But, there were some major significant cutbacks in 1945 through 1946, adults were restricted to 24 coupons per year. That really limited what you could purchase. There were some exceptions. If you are a manual worker, you will need far more, so you got more. A civilian uniform where got more. Theatrical performers, they got more, for some of that morale boosting. Diplomats, this is something we spent time researching, we knew the royal family rationed food, but clothing, we are assuming they fit into this diplomat category because there is not a lot of evidence that they were rationed clothing during this time. And new mothers. They each got an extra 50 coupons. That is almost doubling what you had available for you. Active duty personnel, were exempted. They could buy however many clothing they were able to afford. This is a chart of how the coupons could be spent. You can see your most expensive items are going to be obviously the things that you use with more fabric. Macintosh, which is a really big heavy overcoat, raincoats, jackets, blazers, all of those things are going to cost quite a bit. Also, in equal quantity, was the womens dresses. Dresses were very expensive at 11 coupons. That did make much more difficult things for them. They do have different coupon prices for children as well. So, the most common things that people were spending their coupons on, were dresses for women at 11 coupons. Stockings were 2 compounds coupons. These were still consider it a luxury and we did see a lot of women in the uk, painting on their lines as well. Mens shirts and pants, each were about eight coupons and womens shoes, ran around five coupons and mens shoes at seven coupons. We have a really cute video, that i would like to show you. It was an ad for how to plan your rationing, it was an ad that ran in the 1940s. So we are going to play this. A womans dress, what a number of coupons for this and that. This is how it all worked out. Men had to do a bit of fiddling, to. The same number of coupons, this is what he would get. Total, clickety click. A girl, we suppose, could manage with a hat and a blanket or even a hat. But, men would be reduced to running out to battle, driven to drink for lack of close. See how much marjorie war, wasnt she extravagant . Isnt this just marvelous . I can get one for only 14 margarine coupons. British humor, my students love the british humor. It is so bizarre. [ laughter ] nonetheless, it does do a good job of showing how we have come from these really overthe top dresses that wouldve cost 48 coupons and now we are really going to slim down. When it comes to the kids, we did see kids also were given coupons and the children who fit into what they call, the outsize range got 10 extra tickets. That is really a nice way of saying the larger children who might have been overweight, they got a little bit of extra. We dont see schools relaxing on their uniforms. They still required students to come in uniforms, and so mom, youre going to need to plan ahead and you are going to buy big, because the uniform has to fit him for years to come. That does make things very difficult. We will see the women really working on creating different innovative ways of exchanging goods, so the Womens Voluntary Service set up clothing exchanges. It was just kind of like a swap. Everybody bought brought their old stuff and depending on how much or the quality of what you brought, you got points to then spend on other peoples secondhand goods. This was one way that they worked together to try to figure out a way to prevent your poor little boy from wearing his short shorts that they show here. Beyond the rationing of clothing itself they did also have specifications of what kind of restrictions you had on your clothing. Coats and jackets could have no more than three pockets. Dresses could have 2. We do see that we are not going to waste any metal or leather on buttons. We want to make sure we do that. Something that was interesting, the boys cannot wear long pants or long trousers until they turn 13. So if we have all of the little boys in shorts, that is a lot less fabric. It saves here and there. It is still a trend we see, no tail coats, no embroidery, no parade, no lace, all of those extra things are taken away. For the ladies, sorry on the womens underwear, we will no longer have shearing or reaching or any fancy stitching. We are just really getting to the basics. That being said, the way that women looked was incredibly important. Especially in the uk. It was really unfashionable to be overthetop fancy, however you had to look good. So much so, that the slogan became duty beauty was a duty. It was your job to look good. So, makeup is never rationed. It does fall under a luxury tax that you do have to pay more for, but it is never rationed. We encourage all of the ladies to look their best, because it was a morale booster for the women. That was what they viewed it as, that women would never feel comfortable if they could not go out in public. With makeup on. The ministry of supply in the uk, said that makeup was as important to women, as tobacco is to men. So, it was really important for them to keep it that way. This is really significant when we look at what is happening on the access side. Germany, we see a real trend for women to be more matronly or motherly, they are not doing a lot of makeup. They are not doing a lot of glamour. On the uk side, we said we are going to do totally opposite and we are going to have all of the girls looking great, always. We are going to be different. We are going to keep that up. Women took a lot of pride and effort to look good. Even though it is not rationed, makeup is expensive without luxury tax. A lot of homemade cosmetics came into pay play. You see beetroot juice being used as lipstick and boot polish for your mascara. We are really inventive in the kind of things that we are using to make sure we still look good. Becky kind of touched on this, but utility fashion. With all of these new restrictions about what our clothing can look like, how do we make it look good . Great britain was so concerned about making sure that women look good, that they commissioned eight designers to create a whole new line of utility clothing that would be appealing. So some of the fashion, is what we think of as iconic 1940s and even some of the early 50s kind of clothing. It was paid for by the British Government to make sure that we were able to buy in, if you will, to this rationing. Here are some more examples of some really classic utility fashion that we see in Great Britain as well as the United States. Repurchasing is Something Else we see and this is just happening a lot of times at home. I have this piece of fabric, what can i make it into now . These are examples that the International War museum in the uk has on display. I have a blanket that they have turned into a cape for a child. Once the blanket kind of was tattered, they could trim it down and reuse it, remember coats are some of the biggest and most expensive items as far as coupons go. Women skirt suit was made from an old mans used suit. This might be something that you had at home or something you picked up at a swap but a lot of women are working to redesign fabric or things that they already had. Necessary fashion comes into play a lot in the uk with the air raids. We had an air raid fashion. These would be brooches that the women would buy to put on the outside of the clothing that you essentially charge all day long in the sun and then at night or when air raids were going on, when you dont have the lights, you can have the brooch to kind of see where people are. The same thing goes with the glowinthedark buttons. Sometimes they would be sewn into the pajamas that they wore, or robes that they had. So that way you can kind of see where people are without kind of standing out too much. I have not been, but in england, they have a pretty fabulous war museum. They had a great exhibit on fashion on the ration, and they had some really great things that becky and i could not explain to you or better so we have one more quick video for you. I am a historian and london. We are here in the fashion the ration exhibition in an area called functional fashion. In this section we have an example of a gas mask handbag. You can see that this is a very stylish attractive solution for the essential wartime piece of equipment that all civilians were issued for a respirator because of the much feared prospect of chemical warfare. The handbag itself has a compartment at the bottom with a drawer where the respirator fits. In the top, there is space for your daytoday possessions. These are really stylish attractive solutions, to carry around in the gas mask. We also see other examples of how fashion adapted to wartime dangers. We have an example of a silent suit. And allinone zip up garment which people could jump into to run out to the air raid shelter. We have examples of luminous buttons which would be pinned onto your clothing so that you could be seen in the blackouts, because of a rise in collisions between pedestrians and cars. Both at work and at home, the war changed how people dressed. People now had to wear practical clothes, but they still wanted to look stylish. Okay. All of you ladies who feel like you have tons of things in your purse, you probably dont have a gas mask with you. But, what a cool way to show innovation, into your every day kind of items. At this point, i would like to open up to any questions that you might have. [ laughter ] good morning, i was curious to know which museum in england you visited for the exhibit on fashion . Oh no, we did not go. Oh, no, for the research, what is the museum . The International War museum. The Imperial War Museum oh yes, sorry. The Imperial War Museum. [ laughter ] great presentation. I am just thinking in the midwest in the u. S. And especially with gr b, and the mennonites, were there religious exemptions for clothing . I do not think so. We did not find anything like that, that said, the exceptions that we had of the mail carriers and police officers, but we did not find anything on religious exemptions at all. Remember in the us, they are not rationed clothing, it is just new clothing cant have those things, does that make sense . Those kinds of restrictions. Those were dresses or clothing that you buy in the store as made, does that make sense . Not what you are making at home. They might not have access to as much fabric but it is just what you are purchasing. That is why the manufacturers were the ones who were getting in trouble because they are making the clothing. That is a good question. Following up on her question just like we saw a resurgence in victory guarding and canning, did we see a resurgence in the u. S. Or uk with the oldfashioned traditional womens roles, of weaving . And i dont even know what the right terminology is. They do a lot of mending. That was really huge, especially when it came to nylons, that was one thing they tried to repair and fix as much as you could. I didnt find a whole lot of like extra. They talked about how corsets started going by the wayside, that is extra fabric and extra points, and with out one, i can breathe that was one of the things we noticed that kind of fell away, were corsets. [ laughter ] did you look into how much if at all, this led to, the creation of new materials . Stuff like polyesters . The bulk of what was restricted in the u. S. Was wool fabrics. That is why your shoes that had cotton and cork were not on ration. So we did not get into too much about how they explored more new materials. One thing that happened is the hemlines never went back down. So, if you notice that. Yes. Polyester is a little bit later. Great presentation. Two quick questions. Did the u. S. Ever find another source of silk . No. And then the followup on the first presentation about food, did they just assume that everyone knew how to sew, or did you find evidence that womens groups or Community Groups have courses and things to teach women how to repair their clothing . I did not find a lot of propaganda, to imply like this is how you do it, but in the uk specifically, the womens group that works together, they had a lot of meets where they would help each other. I do know from experience, my 96yearold grandmother in law, had a son who was growing at more than three shoes per year rate, and she talked about how they did a lot of swapping with other people at their church that had kids or whatever. They would swap clothes. She was like he is growing so fast i needed more than three pair of shoes for him. I think there was a lot of cooperative among like maybe church groups, or even neighborhoods. This is a little bit more of a comment. But i had previously known that in the late 40s, Christian Dior debuted a lot of luxe with higher hemlines, and cinched waist and i had not made the connection between that and wartime rationing. Likable, charlie [ laughter ] i was curious if like at this time, if people maybe would sell like clothing they were not using . You know how we have secondhand stores. Was that an advent at this time . Or is that a new type of business that people got into . Especially the shoes. They were secondhand shoes. Whole stores of secondhand shoes. And i can imagine that they were probably doing the same thing with clothing as well. Again, this whole week we have talked about the theme of everyone doing their part. So you know, even down to fashion, even workloads, if i am not using this anymore, in my closet, my child has outgrown it, let me give it to somebody who can use it. We do see that. Any exceptions made for people who lived in colder climates for longer periods of time . Not that we have seen, which is i mean especially in the uk. The country is so huge. Everyone will have different things. In the uk there will only exceptions for occupational based. The boys like we said until you are 13, boys in the uk had to wear shorts. Well, it is cold yearround so, sorry kids. We are long socks. [ laughter ] yes. I wonder if after the war, if women just went out and shopped to their hearts content. With the rationing being over, we have gone for long enough. We are going to refill the wardrobes. In the uk, the rationing goes until 1949, so once you get into the 50s, i suppose it does open up quite a bit. Yes. I think that is it. Lets think think thank becky and irene. [ applause ] a preview of what is available every weekend, on c span3. Lectures in history. American artifacts. Real america. The civil war. Oral histories. The presidency. And special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv, now, and every weekend, on cspan3. The cities tour is on the road, exploring the american story, bozeman in many ways has the lens in which way montana is changing. 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