Findings and Conclusion

Abstract

In 1932, the left-wing social commentator Burke wrote of the commonly troped young, working-class woman as “bright, pretty, shingled, lipsticked and celenaesed” yet, “if you exchanged her cheap frocks for the real thing and put her in the hands of a Bond Street hairdresser, and then set her amongst the Bright Young Things of Mayfair, the only notable difference is that the Bright Young Things would have uglier and noisier manners” (1932, p. 10). At the start of this study, I argued that young, employed working-class women were agents of change in the mass manufacturing of fashion. The impact of their mass consumer choice was so powerful that it affected the organization of design, production, manufacture and retailing of mass fashion in the 1930s. This chapter will prove that the dress demands and habits of young working-class women were a key trigger to mass industrial development of fashionably styled lightweight clothing manufacture and its mass consumption in Britain in the 1930s, just as they were also a reflection of cultural developments in mass modernity.