Garments were entangled with victory in numerous ways, from its celebration to a deflating sense of its elusiveness. The equation of peace with prosperity proved unwarranted. British shops did not quickly refill. Civilian clothing became scarcer just after the war than at any time during it. The number of clothing coupons issued in each rationing cycle fell, frustrating hopes that the material ‘fruits of victory’ would soon be enjoyed. This chapter examines Britons’ symbolic and performative uses of clothing to celebrate victory, as well as Allied military commanders’ sartorial enactment of Axis leaders’ defeat. Surrender ceremonies and victory parades were occasions when garments were required to do particular work, whether ‘dressing up’ or ‘dressing down’. Meanwhile, in the United States, a United National Clothing Collection (launched in April 1945) sought to amass ‘victory clothing’ for distribution by UNRRA. The chapter concludes by considering transnational and imperial recalibrations of power as evidenced in Britain’s official Victory Parade in June 1946, which exposed Britons’ attitudes towards colonial subjects and the ‘colour’ they lent to national pageantry.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

Dartington Hall was built on a strong, companionate relationship between two complex, contradictory people. This chapter explores the paths that led Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst to marry and start Dartington, illuminating a rich early-twentieth-century landscape of philanthropy, humanitarianism, spirituality and international exchange. It shows how affective relationships fuelled far-reaching collaborative reformism. The chapter also gives an overview of Dartington between 1925 and 1945. It dwells on the Elmhirsts’ desire to combine local roots with international horizons (what Kwame Appiah terms ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’); explores the implications of this progressive experiment’s setting in the conservative county of Devon; traces the project’s trajectory from a small, independent-minded venture in the 1920s to one that, by the late 1930s, aimed to contribute to state-led social reform; and situates Dartington amid myriad other unity-seeking reform projects of the interwar period, from the New Deal to Mass Observation.

Chapter 6 analyzes the communal feeding centers opened during World War II that initially targeted the working poor in order to ameliorate their deficient diets and boost morale. They provided well-balanced, inexpensive meals that attempted to meet the nutritional standards devised by the state’s scientific advisors. These British Restaurants eventually came to serve a broad cross section of the civilian home front population, not merely the working poor. But this was not the product of a coherent government policy. Rather, this chapter demonstrates that it was the result of a proactive public who used these not-for-profit services for their own purposes and thus became not merely passive recipients of government food control policies but active agents in the project of mass feeding. This chapter explores these institutions as spaces of cross-class and heterosocial encounters, which were frequented by a range of people who generally enjoyed the food and the atmosphere. It concludes that British Restaurants were politically popular both because they reflected a wartime “fair shares” mentality and because they served a larger project that was bent on transforming the poor from beneficiaries of the state into citizen-consumers and thus full members of an economically healthy postwar society.