Keeping Up Appearances
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€25.99
'20s
'30s
A01=Catherine Horwood
accent
aesthetics
america
appearance
Author_Catherine Horwood
braces
breed
breeding
british middle class
british middle classes
Category=AKT
Category=JBCC3
Category=JBSA
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHTB
class
class. 1920s
clothes
clothing
dress
dress code
dressed
economic stringency
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fashion
fashion and class between the wars
garments
gloves
hats
inter-war|interwar
mass production
middle class
middle classes
snobbery
social history
social more
society
ties
women in history
women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9780750939577
- Dimensions: 172 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2005
- Publisher: The History Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The British have always been concerned about accent, appearance and class, but at no time during the twentieth century was the cliche 'keeping up appearances' more to the point than during the 1920s and 1930s. 'It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce ...a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May' commented George Bernard Shaw in 1903. This fascinating book looks at how the middle classes chose to dress themselves during the period, and shows how those choices were coloured just as much by the advent of mass production, methods of shopping, economic stringency, snobbery, and the influence of America, as by personal aesthetics. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including Mass Observation records, this book vividly records the experiences of dress shopping during the interwar years, and reveals the importance of the dress codes to which both men and women adhered, and the social conventions which they demonstrated.
This fascinating, well written and illustrated book explores the social mores which lie behind one of urban man's most popular - and written about - activities, and reveals not only how we dressed, but why.
Catherine Horwood is an honorary research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London/AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior and a visiting lecturer at the University of North London. In addition to articles in History Today and the BBC History Magazine, her publications include 'Dressing like a Champion: Women's Tennis Wear in Interwar England', in C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox (eds), The Englishness of English Dress.
