Coupons For Clothes: A Wartime Idea Made New?

Haptic & Hue

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Creativity and invention aren’t words often associated with hardship and suffering, but in the Second World War women in America and Britain faced with clothes rationing rose to the challenge in many different ways.

Those days are long past, but in an era of textile super-abundance, do clothes coupons have something new to teach us about how we buy and use our clothes? Can clothes rationing help cure us of an addiction to fast fashion? In this month’s episode, we hear from a well-known winner of the Great British Sewing Bee who has adopted the wartime system of coupons as a way of limiting her consumption of fabric and clothing.

Eighty years ago, Make Do and Mend became the watch-words of the day as people eked out their garments, repairing and re-making them over and over again. But clothes rationing in both countries also changed what people wore and hastened technological revolutions. In Britain many people had access to quality, well-styled clothing for the first time, and in America with luxury fibres scarce, man-made fibres entered the market much more quickly than they might otherwise have done.

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.

And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

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