Seventy years ago, the people of Britain swarmed Buckingham Palace, the Mall and Trafalgar Square carrying British flags and jubilant smiles to celebrate the end of the war.
But hardship was not over as the country started to rebuild after the war.
First introduced at the start of the conflict, rationing affected everyday life, including clothing.
Necessity, the saying goes, is the mother of invention.
Now, the Imperial War Museum in London is looking at how fashion survived and even flourished under the strict rules of rationing in 1940’s Britain, often in new and unexpected ways.
“By 1941, the government takes the decision to introduce clothes rationing to a population which is already used to food rationing, for example. This now means that people cannot buy more than, roughly-speaking, one new outfit a year. It drastically reduces the choice that people have in terms of the new clothing that they can buy,” says curator Laura Clouting.
Government-backed schemes lik
