London Leads the World: The Reinvention of London Fashion in the Aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract

Bethan Bide is Lecturer in Design and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. Bethan researches the histories of 'everyday' fashions of the 20 th century and the role of fashion in museums. She was awarded her PhD in 2017 by Royal Holloway, University of London and also holds degrees from the London College of Fashion and the University of Cambridge.

Propaganda, patriotism and rivalry: How the interests of the trade press shaped British fashion following the Second World War

“…Some of the more heated of these debates concerned the future of the fashion industry, as total war had impacted everything from procurement to retail, and it was apparent that the scale of change since 1939 meant there could be no return to pre-war business as usual. 1 This chapter explores the role that the fashion trade pressdefined as publications produced for a readership of fashion industry professionalsplayed in disseminating ideas about how the British fashion industry should respond to this new post-war order.…”

Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene

“…Geographers are increasingly applying creative methodologies to apprehend the intersecting scales of fashion, from "getting close to clothes" (Bide 2019) to using Lego to restage and think through difficult conversations and exchanges associated with the catastrophic Rana Plaza garment complex collapse in April 2013 (Cook et al 2018). Most recently geographers have been at the forefront of rethinking the fashion city and fashion's connection to the urban (Bide 2020;Gilbert and Casadei 2020) and are also beginning to think through the ways austerity (Gilbert 2017;Hall and Jayne 2016), the internet (Brydges and Hracs 2018;Luvaas 2018) and Covid-19 (Brydges and Hanlon 2020;Lawreniuk 2020) are transforming the fashion industry and consumers. The overlapping temporalities and terrains-earthly, industrial and atmospheric-evinced through these various geographies à la mode, are testament to the pertinence of a geographic perspective on, and practices with, fashion and style.…”

Fashion City or Museum of Fashion? Exploring the Mutually Beneficial Relationship between London’s Fashion Industry and Fashion Exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum

“…Participants in the city's fashion industry were compelled to adapt their promotional techniques for selling the new types of branded, ready-to-wear clothes that were mass manufactured outside of the city. In response, retailers and manufacturers placed an increased emphasis on the prestige of London as a center for creative design, bolstering London's symbolic capital in order to counter the decline in its reputation as a center of skilled manufacturing (Bide 2020).…”