And we are so stoked that she brought a colleague. Please join me in welcoming them for our presentation. Becky she stole my line because i was going to say this is probably the best teacher conference you can go to. That is why i brought irene this year. This is my third year. I want you 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 third. Irene and i are going to talk about, and we will see it in the video, fashion on the ration. Nothe united states, we did 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. And that they were our only source of silk. So you can imagine how, obviously, 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, let five. This is where all of your restrictions, not all but most of your restrictions come in. 15 ant to reduce by domestic fabric production and also wool by 40 . Obviously, we have it we have to outfit our soldiers. This is one of the things we talk about with the kids, is that they cannot imagine not being able to go to the mall and buy whatever they want. And also, when we get to shoes, the kids lose their minds. Because i do not know about kids that you teach, but i know even my own teenage son, shoes are a big deal. And so that is going to come in a low bit later. I do not think the manufacturers for food that did the bootleg blackmarket stuff, i do not think there was a lot of that. But there were some heavy fines for manufacturers that did not follow the rules. Statesn in the united your address instructions. This is funny because in every wire to see different fashion,ns, food, hemlines get shorter. You have ankles now and maybe even at knees. Ladies hemlines came up. The fashion, and a remote talk more about utility fashion, it is really important for women even during World War Two that they look good. But they are trying to do in a way that is limiting the amount of material they use. So you can see 72 inches for dresses, 25 inches for skirts. Pants had to be tapered. And hems, and things you cant have at all. Costs are luxury. The double yolk, you know you have a coat with a double yolk, you cannot have those. A sash, a scarf, and hoods, they were all luxuries that were banned in the united states. Now shoes. Starting in 1943, because of leather and rubber shortages and those supplies going to the war effort, everybody got three coupons for a year for shoes. So i know that might sound like a lot, but think about how many pairs of shoes you might buy a year or from any pairs of shoes your teenager might buy in a year and that hits home. If you lost your shoes in a flood or fire, you can get extra. If you are a mailman or a police officer, you could get extra coupons for your shoes. Besides that, you are limited to three. No two toned shoes. There were four colors of shoes you could get, black white, brown and army brown which is more like brownish green. Not only are we limiting the number of shoes but limiting the style and color of shoes you can get. So ladies, you dont have a different pair of shoes for every outfit. And opa also banned boots taller than 10 inches and also too much high heels. So we cant have the high heels either. This is a drag. If you had secondhand shoes, you didnt have to ration those and also sears and roebuck will offer you shoes that are nonleather for other coupons. So you can turn in your sugar coupon into sears and robotic and get cork shoes or wedge shoes. We talked about cork the other day. This is when cork heels come into fashion because we dont have the leather. Cork heels became a big deal and you can see on the flyer there are a couple of cork shoes. Ladies, we still need to look good and so we still need to have pantyhose. Silk and nylon, they were used for parachutes, powder bags. They seized the raw silk in 1941 in the united states. It was august 2, 1941, before pearl harbor. Ladies, what to do . On the blackmarket you probably could pirate stockings because they went from 1. 25 to more than 10 a pair. That is an 800 increase in the price of a stockings. If you are a blackmarket 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 1930s and 1940s, nylons for women lots of times had a seam up the back. You would paint your legs with gravy. [laughter] they even came up with devices that you could put on your leg and draw with paint up the back of your legs so it would stay straight to make it look like from far away that you actually had nylons with a fashionable seam up the back. They were called glamour hose. I dont know if it gets hot and the gravy melts i dont know. [laughter] it doesnt sound good. So they set up the government set up drives to collect damaged stockings and they would 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, that was banned. I still think people in hollywood got them. But no threepiece suits. No vests. Your lapel size and cuff size and cuffs on pants are restricted as well. The fashion became very standard and not flashy at all. It was not patriotic to wear flashy clothing. That brings us to the zoot suit. A 26 cutback in wool fabric. So if you know what a zoot suit is with a chain and long coats and big lapels they were seen as unpatriotic. So also, there was blackmarket suit, not bootleg liquor but bootleg zoot suit. There were actually people underground that made zoot suits you know about zoot suit riots in 1943 and the american sailors thought it was unpatriotic that these guys ran around in zoot suits. If you never studied the zoot suit riots, you should look it up. It is really horrible that these boys were taken and i was reading that they even went to a theater where a movie was playing and they stripped the Mexican American boys zoot suits. And the sailors 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 that there there were a lot of Mexican American boys that were arrested. It is something to research if you like. It is very interesting. Funny thing in los angeles today, it is still illegal to her zoot suits. Irene is going to talk about the u. K. I dont think youre going to get in trouble for that, but it is still a lot law on the books. Irene is going to talk about the u. K. And how they really were rationed with the coupons like karen talked about. Irene winchester in the u. K. , things are very different because of the size and what kind of something called make do and mend in 1941. Irene they didnt tell anyone it was coming and waited for a bank holiday to announce it. It was a huge surprise for civilians. It does last until march 1949. We tend to think of world war ii 1945, but Great Britain still struggled for a while after the fact. Here are some coupon books you have for clothing. The color coupons you have will let you by different items of clothing. We will show a cute video clip about how you can trade in color coupons for other items as well. So, when they started the rationing, each adult was given 66 coupons to use however you saw fit. There were significant cutbacks there were significant cutbacks in 1945 through 1946, adults restricted to 24 coupons per year. That really limited what you could purchase. There were some exceptions. If you are a manual worker, you would need far more, so you got far more. A civilian uniform where got more. . Got performers got more. So did diplomats. We researched and we knew the royal family rationed food, but clothing, we are assuming they fit into the diplomat category because there is not a lot of evidence they were rationing clothing during this time. New mothers got almost double. Active duty personnel were exempted. They could buy have a mini clothing they were able to afford this is a chart of how the coupons could be spent. You can see the most expensive items are going to be the things that use more fabric. Macintosh, which is a heavy overcoat, raincoats, jackets, blazers all of those things are going to cost quite a bit. But also in equal quantity were womens dresses. They were very expensive at 11 coupons and that made things much more difficult for them. You can see they do have different coupon prices for children as well. The most common things that people were spending coupons on were dresses for women at 11. Stockings were two coupons. They see quite the increase that did not see quite the increase that we saw in the u. S. Prices going up 800 , but they were still considered a luxury and we saw a lot of women in the u. K. Painting on the lines as well. Mens shirt and pants each were eight and womens shoes ran around five coupons and mens shoes at seven. We have a cute video i would like to show you. It was an ad for how to plan your rationing. It ran in the 1940s. [video clip] the rationing of clothes, mens trousers were cut down but for womens dresses, the numbers of coupon became a problem. Narrator this is how it all worked out. Total 66. Men had to do a bit of fiddling. For the same number of coupons this is what he would get. ,total clickety click. A girl could manage with a hat and a blanket or even a vast. But men would be driven to drink for lack of clothes. See how much great grandma were. Wasnt she extravagant . This marvelous. To cost 500t use guineas. Now you can get for 14 margarine one coupons. Narrator and now irene my students love the british humor because it is bizarre. [laughter] it doesnt good job of showing how we came from the overthetop dresses that wouldve cost 48 coupons and now we are going to slim down. When it comes to the kids, kids were also given coupons and the children who fit into what they call the outsize range got 10 extra tickets. That is a nice way of saying the larger children who might have been overweight they got a little extra. We dont see schools relaxing on uniforms. They still required students to come in uniforms. So mom needs to plan ahead. So the uniform can fit for years to come. We see the women working on creating innovative ways of exchanging goods. The Womens Voluntary Service set up clothing exchanges. It was like a swap. Everyone brought their old stuff and depending on how much or what you brought, and the quality of what you brought, you brought got points to spend on other people secondhand goods. This was one way they worked together to try to figure out a way to prevent your poor little boy from having his short shorts as they showed here. Beyond the rationing of clothing itself, they had specifications of what kind of restrictions you had on your clothing. Coats and jackets could have no more than three pockets. Dresses could have two. We see that we are not going to waste metal on buttons. And something that was interesting the boys cannot wear long pants or trousers until they turn 13. So we have all the little boys in shorts and that is a lot less fabric, it saves here and there. And it is still a trend we see. Coats, embroidery, braiding, lace, all of the extra things are taken away. And for the ladies, on the underwear, no roosting rouching or fancy stitching. We are just getting to the basics. That being said, the way that women looked was incredibly important, especially in the u. K. It was unfashionable to be showy or overthetop fancy, you had to look good. The slogan became beauty was a duty. It was your job to look good. Makeup is never rationed, we we see it does fall under a luxury tax so you have to pay more for it. But it is never rationed. We encouraged 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 couldnt go out in public with makeup on. The ministry of supply and the u. K. Said 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 significant what we look at what is also happening. On the axis side. In germany, we see a trend for women to be more matronly or motherly. They are not doing a lot of makeup or glamour. On the u. K. Side, we said we are going to do totally opposite and have the girls looking great always and we are going to be different and keep that up. Women took a lot of pride and effort to look good, even though it is not rationed, makeup is expensive with the luxury tax. A lot of homemade cosmetics come into play. We see beetroot juice being used as lipstick. And i do not recommend it, but boot polish for mascara. We are really inventive in the kind of things we are using to make sure we still look good. Becky touched on this utility fashion. With all the new restrictions about what clothing can look like, how do we make it look good . Great britain was so concerned about making sure women looked good they commissioned eight designers to create a whole new line of utility clothing that would be appealing. Some of the fashion is what we think of as iconic 1940s and even some of the early 1950s 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 classic utility fashion that we see in Great Britain as well as the united states. Repurposing is something that we see and this is happening 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 u. K. Has on display. They have a blanket that they have turned into a cape for a child. Once a blanket has gotten tattered, they can trim it down and reuse it. Remember, coats are some of the most expensive items as far as coupons go. A women skirt suit was made from an old male used suit. This might be something you had at home or picked up at a swap but a lot of women are working to redesign fabric or things they already had. Necessary fashion comes into play a lot in the u. K. With the air raids. We have air raid fashion. Women would buy brooches to put on the outside of the clothing that you essentially charge all day in the sun and then at night or when air raids were going on when you dont have lights, and have the brooch to see where people are. Same thing goes with glow in the dark buttons sometimes they would be sewn into pajamas but they wore them so that you could see where people are without standing out too much. I have not been, but in england, they have a fabulous war museum and they had some great things that becky and i couldnt explain so we have another video. Of fashion on the ration. [video clip] i am a historian in london. We are in the fashion ration exhibition in an area called functional fashion. In this section we have an , example of a gas mask handbag. This is stylish and attractive you can see thatthis is stylish and 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 has a compartment at the bottom where the respirator fits. In the top, there was space for your ordinary daytoday possessions. These were stylish, Attractive Solutions of how we arrive for gas masks. We also see other examples of in this section how fashion , adapted to wartime dangers. We have an example of an a siren is suit. An allinone zip up garment which people could jump into to run to the air raid shelter in. We have examples of luminous buttons which you pinned onto 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 had it to our practical clothes but they still wanted to in many cases to look stylish. Irene so all of you feel like you have tons of things in your purse, you probably dont have a gas mask. What a good way to show but innovation. Into your everyday items. At this point, i would like to open up to any questions that you might have. [laughter] i was curious to know which museum in england one could visit the exhibit on fashion. From the research. Irene it was the International War museum. Imperial . To irene imperial war museum. Thank you. Great presentation. In the midwest in the u. S. Especially with grp and the mennonites, where there religious exemptions for clothing . Becky i do not think so. We didnt find anything like that. The exception is the mail carriers and police officers. We did not find anything on religious exemptions. Irene but in the u. S. , they are not rationed clothing, it is just new clothing cant have those things. Does that make sense . [indiscernible] those were dresses or clothing you buy in the store as made. They were not made his home. Becky they might not have access to as much fabric. That is why the manufacturers were getting in trouble because they were making the clothing. That is a good question. Question,ng up on her just like we saw a resurgence in Victory Gardens in canning, did we see a resurgence in the u. S. Or u. K. Of the traditional womens roles of weaving . Irene they do a lot of mending. That was huge. Especially with nylons they tried to repair as much as you could. I didnt find a whole lot of. Becky they talk about corsets going by the wayside peered it because it is extra fabric. That is extra points. And without one, i can breathe. That was one of the things that we noticed that fell away were corsets. Which, yeah. [laughter] did you look into how much at all this led to the creation of new materials like polyesters . Or a plastics innovation . Irene the bulk of what they were restricting in the u. S. Was wool. That is why your shoes that had cotton and cork were not rationed. We did not get into too much they supported new materials. Becky one thing that happened was that the hemlines never went back down. That is one thing you would notice. Irene polyesters little bit later. Great presentation. Did the u. S. Ever find another source of silk . No. And to followup on the presentation on food, did they just assume everyone knew how to sew or do you find everett dense that evidence that womens groups taught people how to repair clothing . I did not find propaganda to imply this is how you do it. In the u. K. , the womens group that worked together they had meats where they would help each other. If you can speak to the u. S. My 96yearold grandmother in law had a son who was growing at them more than three shoes per year rate. She talks about how they do a lot of swapping with other people at their church that had kids, or whatever, they would swap close. I know she was like, his feet are growing so fast in martin three pair of shoes for him i needed