Localities of Fashion Modernity in the 1930s: Practices of Retailing on the High Street

Abstract

The British high street of the 1930s was of cultural importance as it represented a distinctive form of modernity and commerce progress. Retailing establishments included multiple shops and chain stores, department stores and madam shops. The selling philosophies of each and their relationships with young working-class women will be explored in this chapter, along with the practice of home dressmaking. The variety and multiplicity of shopping venues that lay in the streets of the cities and large towns in Britain provided access to shopping cultures, in which consumer identities were constructed. These new centres of shopping culture were an indicator of the wider modernity of interwar society and defined new developments in a city or town. The growing high street retailers of cheap ready-made garments would have attracted young, modern, working-class women and enticed them to both dream and purchase their desired fashionable lightweight dresses. This chapter considers how shopping practices of these young women were not reflections of their passive consumption, but how they were, in fact, discerning customers who were well informed in their consumption practice and the profitable target of retailers of cheap ready-made, mass manufactured lightweight day dresses.